Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Two Republican leaders know where the fugitive foreign agent goll Looft is? Does Senator Ron Johnson demanding immunity for Looft so that this multinational con man can testify to the House of Representatives? Does he know where gall Looft is? Does Chairman James Comber still insistingof must testify despite the damning revelation that he has been under indictment in this country for twenty months for allegedly bribing a Trump advisor on behalf of Chinese interest. Does Chairman Comber know where gall Looft is? Does Congresswoman Nancy Mace still on board this sinking Loofed ship and calling him quote our witness and promising we are going to work as hard as we can and deliver as much evidence as we can to the American people so that they can decide whether or not Joe Biden should be in prison? Does Representative Mace know where gall Loofed is? Because if the answer to any of these questions is yes, or if the answer to the question do any of them know how to reach him through intermediaries is yes? Then why have they not communicated to the proper authorities, the whereabouts of this fugitive from the American justice system. Who is a foreign spy? And why has the Department of Justice not interviewed them about what they know about Galllooft and how long they have known it? Drag Johnson, Comer and Mace in for questioning and do it now. The Republican hunter Biden's scandal fairytale has now escalated to the point where it is no lawnger possible to trust Chairman Comer, Representative Mace, Senator Johnson and others in their confounded party with access to any sensitive or secure information about the United States of America. Moreover, their continuing presence in the House and the Senate today may endanger the safety and security of this country. They are figuratively in bed with a foreign spy. Those three and others are not just publicly following down an endless trail of deceit, defamation, and international espionage. The discredited quote missing Biden witness unquote now under indictment on one charge of bribing a Trump transition team official on behalf of Chinese interests, on another charge of breaking the Iran embargo, on four charges of brokering illegal arms deals and of being a fugitive from justice from this country. That would be bad enough if they were just doing that, but Johnson wants immunity for fugitive to testify to Congress. Mace calls a fugitive hour witness Comer continues to push the lie that a foreign agent was indicted because he had quote information on the Bidens. Gall Loof was in fact indicted first and then made his false claim of Biden information later. It turns out Looft was indicted under seal on November one, twenty twenty two. I was mistaken here yesterday when I said he was indicted in February. February was when he was finally apprehended and arrested, and it was April when he became a fugitive by skipping bail. Apart from the stark reality, gall faces one hundred years in prison for crimes against the United States of America, about which he left a trail a mile wide at one thousand miles long. He is charged with bribing an advisor to then President elect Trump on behalf of Chinese interest. He is an Israeli agent. He is an accused gun runner It's so bad that even the Wall Street Journal has described Looft as on the lamb and said he had absconded. Apart from all that, James Comer, Ron Johnson, Nancy Mace, and the others have jumped fully and irredeemably into this bottomless pit of con man guilt with him. Besides all that, there is something subtler and far more dangerous. Comer still wants him to testify. Mace still wants him to testify. Johnson wants to give him immunity for his crimes to testify. Do they know where he is? How would Comer and Johnson arrange for gall Luft's testimony when his whereabouts are unknown and he is considered a fugitive from justice in two countries. Do they know where he is? If so, why are they not fulfilling their obligations to the Constitution, their obligations as Americans, their obligations under the law. If any of them knows where Galllooft is or how the process to bring him to Washington to testify to Congress would even begin, and they have not turned this information over to the authorities, shouldn't the Department of Justice be examining their conduct, and whether they are in fact shielding directly or indirectly a fugitive. The Department of Justice and the FBI must open investigations into Comer Johnson and Mace today. Their remarks about gall Looft were not made as protected speech on the House floor or the Senate floor. They were made as each preened and pranced and pretended in the lights of television studios. If they have no knowledge of the whereabouts and are merely being grand standing Republican amateurs, they can quickly clear themselves and their party from what is otherwise going to take the shape of a conspiracy with this alleged criminal gall Loofed and yes, grand standing Republican amateurs. I appreciate how redundant two of those three terms are. Also, Jack Smith is back at work. We have basically no other details. An NBC reporter staked out the Preddiman Courthouse yesterday in the Washington Jet exhaust heat and saw Thomas Wyndham enter and Thomas Wyndham is perhaps Jack Smith's MVP most Valuable prosecutor. The implication is that since the Smith grand jury hearing testimony about the Trump led efforts to stop the transfer of power that would be fake elector schemes and January sixth coup. Since that grand jury meets there and Wyndham is working with that grand jury, the implication is that grand jury met yesterday, but no recognizable witnesses were seen entering or exiting the buildings of That is literally all we have. We do know. The Fannie Willis Grand Jury has been impaneled, two of them actually under the guidance of the fill in judge Robert McBurnie, and Robert McBurney oversaw the special Fulton County grand Jury for eight months. Is he the only judge in Atlanta. Two sets of twenty three grand jury members were chosen yesterday. One will hear the Trump Georgia Find Me Votes case and the other won't. McBurnie revealed that whichever one is the real grand jury and whichever one is the placebo group, we'll meet secretly two days a week for two months, and we'll decide what to do with the evidence produced by the special grand Jury. The Atlanta Journal Constitution provides this spectaculor aside. Among the one hundred or so citizens in the pre selection pool yesterday was quote someone who described himself as an explosion prevention dispatcher and boom goes the dynamite. By the way, Anna Bower of Lawfare Media has provided the best explanation yet of why there was a special Georgia Trump grand jury, and now there is a I guess not so special Georgia Crump grand jury. And I'll just read what she threaded quote long story short. Special grand juries are used to investigate complex issues of inquiry, like organized crime or a multi state plot to overturn a presidential election. Under Georgia laws, special grand juries can't return indictments. They can only recommend indictments unquote. And we know that this one did, and we know that it believed it witnessed perjury, and we just don't know any details. And while justice takes two small steps forward, the Department of Justice, as always, continues to frequently pull society backwards towards the gaping maw of another round of Trump fascism, one that would not be so easy to escape from as last time. Incredibly, DOJ lawyers are asking a federal appeals court to block the order from Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Trump must be deposed. In the Peters struck Lisa Page lawsuit. It is the DOJ's position that a president can abuse his power, meddle with the management structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, slander its employees, defame and try to get irs audits of anybody who works for him as long as he's president, and you can't sue him and depose him. It's stupid. It's goddamned stupid. When you step back from the the last eight years of American pre fascism and you ask how the hell could we have possibly gotten here, the answer is nonsense. Like this quote from the DOJ motion in defense of Trump, that this case involves the deposition of a former president rather than a sitting president does not diminish the separation of powers concerns. It is exactly the same logic and loyalty to the written word instead of the meaning of the written word that led the Weimar Republic to let Hitler out of prison nine months into his five year sentence. Trump lives and dies and those around him live and die by manipulating the law. I'm sorry, we must manipulate it back at him. He is himself elf, a personal, one man cold civil war, and he must be treated as such at every opportunity, and this is one of those opportunities, as is this one the obvious play. Trump waiting until literally thirty minutes before the deadline to file it Tuesday night to make his demand that the judge he appointed grant him a postponement of his Miami Classified Documents trial, probably until after the twenty twenty four election, because he lives and dies by manipulating the law. And if he is not elected president again, he will be in the penitentiary. If he is elected president, he will manipulate the law. He will free himself, or he will get the charges dropped, or both. And before you recoil at the idea of making the law just this elastic, you know, rule against the clear and present danger to all of our futures. Now and again, go anti domestic terrorists, just occasionally before you worry that, well, that will stretch the law out of shape. And what happens when the other side gets the duj Just remember what President Lincoln did during the actual Civil War, the only other threat in our history as great as Trump. President Lincoln decided that to keep the country in one piece, he needed emergency powers, so he granted them to himself. Then he used them to do a lot of things, including the suspension of habeas corpus. He used them to free the slaves, He used them to ignore the Supreme Court. What the hell are we asking here? We're not suspending anything, freeing anyone, ignoring any court. Just don't let a judge with a record of actually presiding over cases like gun possession and assaulting a prosecutor who has been in charge of a courtroom for a total of fourteen days in her life, and who was appointed by Trump rule in Trump's favor in order to let him get away with crimes that threaten and continue to threaten representative government in our country. Also of interest here, if you did not watch the Baseball All Star Game last night, you got a lot of company. Forty three years ago, when the population was one third smaller than it is now, five times as many people watched the Baseball All Star Game on TV as did last night. Well, if you did not watch, that means you missed the worst uniforms in baseball history. But you also missed a very fast, very subtle game highlight that was made not by any player, not by any manager, not by any announcer, but by the fans in the stands in Seattle chanting something. What did they chant? They chanted? That's next. This is an all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman. This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman in Sports Okay, fans, what do these ten players comprise? Shane Bieber, Alex Bregman, Milkie Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Elias Diaz, Vladimir gar Zero, Junior, Eric Hosmer, Marianna Rivera, gen Carlos Stanton, Mike Trout. After the Colorado Rockies catcher Diaz Pinch hit a two run homer off Felix Bautista in the eighth inning at Seattle to lead the National League to a three to two win over the American League in the All Star Game last night. Those are the Baseball All Star Game most valuable players since twenty twelve. Two Hall of Famers, a maybe, and a lot of nos. No knock on Elias Diaz. Unsung heroes are great, and he told his friends yesterday he was going to be the All Star MVP, which is either clairvoyance or annoying over confidence. But this is his ninth season, he has fifty one career homers, and he's a two forty eight career hitter. From nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy, the All Star MVPs were Johnny Callison and Juan Mareschal, Willie Mays, Willie Mays again, Willie McCovey, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and carl Yastremsky. Eight Hall of Famers out of nine guys, one of them twice. The National League ends the American League's nine game winning streak, and the AL is still twenty one four and one since nineteen ninety seven. And it really wasn't much of a game. In a moment, I'll tell you why it will never be much of a game again, and why the TV audience is about a fifth of what it was in nineteen eighty. In fact, the highlight was supplied not by the players, nor camaraderie, nor Elias Diaz, nor anything else, but by something that usually has no factor whatsoever in the All Star Games, everything that is usually too quiet to believe. The crowd in the stands at Seattle provided the highlight when the impending free agent and by definition most valuable player. He's two players. He's a hitter and a pitcher, So how valuable is he He's worth any other two players combined? Show Hey Otani soon to be free agent. When he came to the play, the Seattle crowd, which made a home for Eachiro Suzuki for fourteen years, started to chant at Otani, come to Seattle, Come to Seattle. They were my MVPs. I'll drop this because you already know more about this game than you need to, But I have to mention the uniforms. The tradition is over and the players are not wearing their regular season, regular team uniforms. They were wearing special generic American League and National League jobs. Players wore genuinely ugly sick green caps that were the worst in baseball history, at least since the awful brief rage for those white topped Baker's caps of the nineteen nineties Mets and Royals and Orioles. The National Leaguer's pants apparently never showed up to Seattle for the game, so they seemed to be wearing black chinos, and the American League shirts seem to have been cut from discarded creased shark skin suits. More importantly, even if the uniforms had been great, even if they'd been the best of all time, what please, is the point of making sure there is an All Star player from every team if you can't see what team every player is from. Thank you, Nancy Faust. If you are less than fifty years old, I would like to offer my condolences to you on the fact that you did not get to see the Baseball All Star Game when it was at worst the third biggest sporting event of the year behind the Super Bowl and the World Series in the time before televised ubiquity and interleague play. It really was that it was breathtaking to know that you were watching a field full of Hall of famers, and that a National League Hall of Fame pitcher like Fergie Jenkins would be facing an American League Hall of Fame batter like Mickey Mantle for the only time in their lives, and that year after year you would see literally dozens of matchups that would never happen again, and teammates who would never be teammates again and had never been teammates before, and players who wouldn't be on national TV again until sometime next year, to say nothing of a game the outcome of which actually mattered to every player on the field. Technology killed off a lot of that. Thirty six million people watched the nineteen eighty All Star Game. If the twenty twenty two ratings held, seven and a half million people watched the One last night. That's largely because today you can see every player every night everywhere. You are now your own sports center. But the rest of it, the rest of it, Baseball threw away out of greed alone among the All Star Games, just as among the major sports championships, there was no artifice, no conceit in the Baseball All Star Game. Just as there were no regular season games between the American and National League teams until nineteen ninety seven, there was also no love lost between the American and National leagues. There were American League fans and there were National League fans, and although this was lessening with time, part of being an American League fan was hating the National League and vice versa. And this was not the result of some brilliant marketing strategy. This was organic. My grandfather lived until nineteen eighty six, and he died hating the American League, in large part because when he was just a boy, the National League was all there was in baseball, and then in nineteen oh one, the American League came along and stole nearly all the National League stars one hundred and eighty five guys on opening day American League rosters in the year nineteen oh one, one hundred and eighty five. One hundred and eleven of them had played in the National League the year before, total chaos. National League lineups that had been intact for a decade were destroyed by the American League, and though the leagues ended their player war in nineteen oh three, nobody, nobody forgave or forgot, I mean the next year, my grandpa's team, the New York Giants, won the National League pennant, but refused to play in the World Series against the American League champions because their manager, John McGraw, hated the president of the American League and John McGraw still did not believe the American League was a major league. When the All Star Game began in nineteen thirty three, John McGraw was brought out of retirement to manage the National League All Stars, and the rumors began of off the record bonuses offered to players if the National League won, or if a National League pitcher knocked in an American League, battered down with a pitch during the game, or injured an American League player on the field. It wasn't just his own demons that drove Pete Rose to knock over American League catcher Ray Fosse and fracture Fosse's shoulder in order to score the winning run in the nineteen seventy All Star Game. That's the way they played the All Star Game. I mentioned before that this organic affection for one league and hatred for the other gave almost every baseball fan a rooting interest not just in the All Star Game, but in the World Series, a rooting interest that no longer exists. The American Leagues and National League don't exist anymore. They have been reduced to bookkeeping formalities adjusting for growth in population. The TV audience for the World Series is now about a quarter of what it was in nineteen eighty, largely because if your team is not playing, why should you care. In nineteen eighty he rooted for the Philadelphia Affillies because you were a National League fan, or maybe you rooted against the Phillies and for the Kansas City Roads, because yeah, you were a National League fan, but you were a Pittsburgh fan or a Mets fan, and you hated the Phillies and you were watching to watch them lose. When was the last time you met a National League fan? One more point and then I'll stop the Hey you kids, get off my lawning. Here, I could list one thousand things on the field that could illustrate the history of a wonderful, vivid, punch throwing enmity between the two baseball leagues that animated the World Series in the All Star Game until Baseball killed it off because Baseball could make an extra thousand dollars selling Subway Series caps or Freeway Series windshield a visors that came with interleague play. But actually it's two off the field battles that really emphasized just how wonderful and wonderfully petty the hatred of American League for National League used to be. In the winter of nineteen nineteen, a dispute over a player trade in the American League that previous season got so heated that the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and the Chicago White Sox actually resigned from the American League and joined the National League. They left the American League, which only then had five teams, and created a super league in the National League. Obviously, this was resolved before the season started and they never took the field this way, but it happened. Try that bit of trivia on a Red Sox or Yankee fan, remember when you guys were in the National League. The second event was forty years later, and it was far more subtle, but maybe more telling. In nineteen fifty nine, nineteen fifty nine, fifty six years after the supposed peace agreement between the two leagues, a joint committee met and voted to end a rule about trading players between American League teams and National League teams. The rule was you couldn't trade players between American League teams and National League teams. Until nineteen fifty nine, it was literally illegal within baseball for say, the New York Yankees, to exchange players with the Los Angeles Dodgers or any other National League team without first offering to sell those players that they wanted to trade to every other American League team for the waiver price ten twenty thousand, fifty thousand dollars, depending on the year before you could be traded from one league to the other, every other team in your league had to say, nah, we don't want them. So star players were never traded from one league to the other until nineteen fifty nine. This went on for fifty six years, and when they finally voted to eliminate that rule, there were only sixteen teams than eight in each league, and four of sixteen teams still voted against the rule. And when they finally approved this interleague trading, they only made it legal for a limited interleague trading period around Thanksgiving, and the length of the period that they all agreed to was twenty six days. Twenty six days, the other three hundred and thirty nine days no trade between the leagues. So when did they get rid of that limitation? Not until nineteen eighty six, And that's why the Baseball All Star Game is not a big deal anymore. Still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. Baseball. In fact, used to matter so much that local TV sportscasters used to make stories, I mean big stories, make them up to try to get ratings and attention. I mean, I saw one guy in LA when I was there go on a TV newscast and claim that a home run that kept the Dodgers out of the World Series one year, that home run didn't count, and the Dodgers should show up at the World Series anyway and demand to play. He said this on live television. The story next in Things I promised not to tell first time for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons in the world. The runner up, Senator Tommy I'm just gonna keep digging here. Tubberville of Alabama, the former Auburn football coach. Tubberville is a flat out racist slime who last week wondered if teachers in inner city schools can read and write, and he keeps defending white nationalists, and then yesterday suddenly blurted quote, white nationalists are racists, and somebody quipped on law, was there a football joke in there somewhere? And I said, Tubberville's only football jokes were his teams. This is so bad now that Senator Tuberville's brother, Charles, who is a rock guitarist, felt compelled to issue this statement about his own brother quote due to recent statements by him promoting racial stereotypes, white nationalism, and other various controversial topics. I feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants. Unquote the Tubberville Brothers, everybody the runner up Congressman Jim, what do you mean my witness is a Chinese spy? Jordan? Jim has had another brainstorm. The Wall Street Journal reports Jordan will try to gut funding for the FBI unless the bureau agrees to build its new headquarters not in the suburbs of Washington, DC, but in Huntsville. Abavamma, so it can be closer to Tommy Tuberville. Why not was so Alaska? Jim, remember with Scilla, Alaska? But our winner Doug Burgham. Doug is the pair of eyebrows currently serving as governor of North Dakota, and he is running for the Republican nomination. A with mine, I'm allowed to mock eyebrows and b you gotta give him credit. He at least recognizes that his odds of getting the nomination are kind of small, small enough that Doug Burgham is willing to buy the nomination and not just buy it, mind you, but pay you to donate to his campaign. How does that work? Volume volume volume. The GOP will give a spot on its first debate stage to anybody who gets at least fifty thousand donations of at least one dollar each. So Doug Burgham says he will give his first fifty thousand donors a Visa or MasterCard gift card of twenty dollars. You give him one dollar, he gives you twenty dollars. Volume, volume, volume, talk about buying votes, Governor Doug Bergham, Hey, Doug, I'll give you twenty bucks. You got a pro to go, trim your eyebrows, Today's worst eyebrows and the world here the number one story on the Countdown now, and things I promised not to tell. And a personal saga of how important baseball used to be. I had only been the local sportscaster on Channel five in Los Angeles for about six weeks when I saw one of my rivals do something I could not believe. Nearly thirty eight years have since passed, and it's even harder for me to believe it now. In Game five of the nineteen eighty five National League Championship Series between the LA Dodgers and the Saint Louis Cardinals winner goes to the World Series. Ozzy Smith, the famous shortstop of the Cardinals, hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat the Dodgers three to two. Smith was a switch hitter. He could bat left handed or right handed, but he had never hit a home run right handed until then. The ball hit some brick or concrete behind the foul pole and Saint Louis bounded back onto the field, and the Dodger right fielder Mike Marshall picked it up and threw it back to the infield just cause, like why not. Two days later, back in Los Angeles, in an infamous sequence that older Dodger fans still grumble about nightly, the Dodgers lost that series on another home run by Jack Clark of Saint Louis. And the night after that, I was sitting with my new colleagues at Channel five and we had the rival newscast from Channel nine KHJTV on one of our TV nitors in the sports office, and for some reason their sportscaster was on at the start of their newscast at ten o'clock. I have important breaking news, he yelled. His name was Scott Saint James and he was always yelling, but this was different. Careful forensic analysis of the videotape by the Channel nine Sports department proves that Ozzy Smith's so called home run against the Dodgers in Game five was actually not a home run but a double. Look Saint James shouted, then played the same videotape every station in America had, showing the same angle of the same Smith home run, landing fair and beating the Dodgers and then bouncing back off the wall onto the field and the Dodger right field are kind of a half hearted we throwing the ball back into the infield just cuz that Saint James bellowed was just a double. Mike Marshall's throw proves it beyond the shadow of a legal doubt. Channel nine Sports urges the Dodgers to file lawsuits against Major League Baseball to obtain a restraining order against this travesty, then urged the Dodgers to report to Kansas City in order to play in tomorrow night's first game of the nineteen eighty five World Series as the rightful representatives of the National League. I don't have a tape of this, so my version of what this buffoon, Saint James said, is recreated from memory as faithfully as possible. It is burned into my memory. And if it's not one hundred percent accurate word for word, trust me, I just improved it. Over at Channel five, we laughed. The phone rang. It was one of the sports producers at Channel two, friend of all of ours. He was laughing. On Channel nine, they were not laughing. They did I think this quote story unquote twice in their newscast that night, and they continued to ride this idea that the home run did not count and the Dodgers should sue right up until the nineteen eighty five World Series, which the Dodgers did not play in, ended a week later. But that's not where the story ended, as if the Saint James thing had cursed the nineteen eighty five World Series, and nobody ever really knew if he really believed the story, he was just trying to get eyeballs on a sportscast. Nobody watched the guys who managed the World Series teams get to manage their league's team in the All Star Game the next year, so Dick Houser, manager of the World champion Kansas City Royals, of nineteen eighty five was the manager of the nineteen eighty six All Star Game, played on July fifteenth at the Astrodome in Houston. That year, the California Angels, whose games were carried on my station Channel five, had one of their players produced one of the great rookie seasons of all time. His name was Wally Joyner. He was this kind of goofy first baseman. He was a friend of mine, and even though he was not on the fans All Star ballots, he was voted in written in as the starting American League All Star first baseman. He won with write in votes didn't happen too often. So at the nineteen eighty six All Star Game, Joyinner is the starting first baseman, and he comes up in the second inning and he pops up. But per All Star etiquette, he'll get at least one more at bat, probably two. All the starters get two at bats except in the fourth inning, when it's Joiner's turn to hit again. All Star manager Dick Hauser pinch hits for Joiner, sends up Don Mattingly of the Yankees to bat instead of Joiner. Well, this did not go over well in Southern California. Some of us were wondering if Wally Joyner was hurt or if there was something else going on. But over at another of our rival sports departments at KABC Channel seven, that's not where their sportscaster, Ted Dawson took it. He went on that night blistering Dick Hauser for insulting Joiner and insulting the Angels and Los Angeles and Anaheim and God and the flag. And he told his viewers to call the hotel in Houston that Dick House was staying at and ask for his room and yell at him. I think they put up a graphic with the hotel phone number. Mind you, by the time Ted Dawson did this, it would have been one fifteen in the morning in the Houston hotel. Whatever Hauser had done, what Dawson did was far worse. We could not have imagined at the time how far worse. The next day, the Kansas City Royals announced that Dick Hauser had been admitted to the hospital after several weeks of neck pain, and the day after that, through tears, a spokesman announced that dick Hauser was taking a leave of absence as manager of the team immediately because he had a brain tumor. In fact, Dick Hauser would die about eleven months later at the age of just fifty one. The nineteen eighty six All Star Game was the last game Howser ever participated in, and Ted Dawson had told his viewers to call Hauser up late at night in a hotel and yet at him over an insult to a player. I've done a lot of stupid stuff on TV in my life, a lot of stuff I should have just left alone. In most cases, I've been able to apologize or at least make fun of myself or make it up to the people involved with these two guys. Saint James was fired the next year, I think, and then Dawson. And then Dawson got hired in Dallas, and the next thing we heard in LA was he was living with some rich older woman who had bought him a helicopter. Last thing I saw about him was in twenty seventeen, he retired after several years as the sports director of station KBZK in Bozeman, Montana. Sometimes life punishes you first, then you screw up, rather than the other way around. It dawned on me after Dick Hauser died that years earlier. In nineteen eighty, the ABC station in my hometown here in New York needed a new sportscaster, and they tried out literally every sportscaster on every big ABC station in the country. One week they had the guy in from Detroit, the week after that it was their guy from their station in Syracuse, and one week it had been Ted Dawson from KABC in Los Angeles, the guy who would tell his viewers to call up and use the manager in the middle of the night. Ted Dawson's on air style was breathless, and I mean that literally. He shouted at the top of his lungs. Had he read his script as fast as he could. I mean, I can't even recreate it without causing myself a coughing fit. While I happened to be watching the night of his first audition show on the New York station, Ted Dawson screamed for about three minutes, finished and panting, threw it back to the veteran deadpan WABC Channel seven news anchorman Roger Grimsby. Roger back to you, and they cut to Grimsby. He was staring to his right towards where Dawson was sitting wordlessly, turned back to face the camera, and with no hint of emotion, Roger Grimsmy simply said, we shall now resume the news. Wow, we shall now resume the news. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillips Shanel, who are the Countdown musical directors. Guitar is bassed and drums by Brian Ray, all orchestration and keyboards by John Phillips Shanel, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports Music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else is pretty much my fault. Don't forget. Countdown now also available on YouTube with the cute little animated me. Subscribe there as well, give yourself options. That's countdown for this The nine hundred and eighteenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him again while we still can. The next schedule countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. Two Republican leaders know where the fugitive foreign agent goll Looft is? Does Senator Ron Johnson demanding immunity for Looft so that this multinational con man can testify to the House of Representatives? Does he know where gall Looft is? Does Chairman James Comber still insistingof must testify despite the damning revelation that he has been under indictment in this country for twenty months for allegedly bribing a Trump advisor on behalf of Chinese interest. Does Chairman Comber know where gall Looft is? Does Congresswoman Nancy Mace still on board this sinking Loofed ship and calling him quote our witness and promising we are going to work as hard as we can and deliver as much evidence as we can to the American people so that they can decide whether or not Joe Biden should be in prison? Does Representative Mace know where gall Loofed is? Because if the answer to any of these questions is yes, or if the answer to the question do any of them know how to reach him through intermediaries is yes? Then why have they not communicated to the proper authorities, the whereabouts of this fugitive from the American justice system. Who is a foreign spy? And why has the Department of Justice not interviewed them about what they know about Galllooft and how long they have known it? Drag Johnson, Comer and Mace in for questioning and do it now. The Republican hunter Biden's scandal fairytale has now escalated to the point where it is no lawnger possible to trust Chairman Comer, Representative Mace, Senator Johnson and others in their confounded party with access to any sensitive or secure information about the United States of America. Moreover, their continuing presence in the House and the Senate today may endanger the safety and security of this country. They are figuratively in bed with a foreign spy. Those three and others are not just publicly following down an endless trail of deceit, defamation, and international espionage. The discredited quote missing Biden witness unquote now under indictment on one charge of bribing a Trump transition team official on behalf of Chinese interests, on another charge of breaking the Iran embargo, on four charges of brokering illegal arms deals and of being a fugitive from justice from this country. That would be bad enough if they were just doing that, but Johnson wants immunity for fugitive to testify to Congress. Mace calls a fugitive hour witness Comer continues to push the lie that a foreign agent was indicted because he had quote information on the Bidens. Gall Loof was in fact indicted first and then made his false claim of Biden information later. It turns out Looft was indicted under seal on November one, twenty twenty two. I was mistaken here yesterday when I said he was indicted in February. February was when he was finally apprehended and arrested, and it was April when he became a fugitive by skipping bail. Apart from the stark reality, gall faces one hundred years in prison for crimes against the United States of America, about which he left a trail a mile wide at one thousand miles long. He is charged with bribing an advisor to then President elect Trump on behalf of Chinese interest. He is an Israeli agent. He is an accused gun runner It's so bad that even the Wall Street Journal has described Looft as on the lamb and said he had absconded. Apart from all that, James Comer, Ron Johnson, Nancy Mace, and the others have jumped fully and irredeemably into this bottomless pit of con man guilt with him. Besides all that, there is something subtler and far more dangerous. Comer still wants him to testify. Mace still wants him to testify. Johnson wants to give him immunity for his crimes to testify. Do they know where he is? How would Comer and Johnson arrange for gall Luft's testimony when his whereabouts are unknown and he is considered a fugitive from justice in two countries. Do they know where he is? If so, why are they not fulfilling their obligations to the Constitution, their obligations as Americans, their obligations under the law. If any of them knows where Galllooft is or how the process to bring him to Washington to testify to Congress would even begin, and they have not turned this information over to the authorities, shouldn't the Department of Justice be examining their conduct, and whether they are in fact shielding directly or indirectly a fugitive. The Department of Justice and the FBI must open investigations into Comer Johnson and Mace today. Their remarks about gall Looft were not made as protected speech on the House floor or the Senate floor. They were made as each preened and pranced and pretended in the lights of television studios. If they have no knowledge of the whereabouts and are merely being grand standing Republican amateurs, they can quickly clear themselves and their party from what is otherwise going to take the shape of a conspiracy with this alleged criminal gall Loofed and yes, grand standing Republican amateurs. I appreciate how redundant two of those three terms are. Also, Jack Smith is back at work. We have basically no other details. An NBC reporter staked out the Preddiman Courthouse yesterday in the Washington Jet exhaust heat and saw Thomas Wyndham enter and Thomas Wyndham is perhaps Jack Smith's MVP most Valuable prosecutor. The implication is that since the Smith grand jury hearing testimony about the Trump led efforts to stop the transfer of power that would be fake elector schemes and January sixth coup. Since that grand jury meets there and Wyndham is working with that grand jury, the implication is that grand jury met yesterday, but no recognizable witnesses were seen entering or exiting the buildings of That is literally all we have. We do know. The Fannie Willis Grand Jury has been impaneled, two of them actually under the guidance of the fill in judge Robert McBurnie, and Robert McBurney oversaw the special Fulton County grand Jury for eight months. Is he the only judge in Atlanta. Two sets of twenty three grand jury members were chosen yesterday. One will hear the Trump Georgia Find Me Votes case and the other won't. McBurnie revealed that whichever one is the real grand jury and whichever one is the placebo group, we'll meet secretly two days a week for two months, and we'll decide what to do with the evidence produced by the special grand Jury. The Atlanta Journal Constitution provides this spectaculor aside. Among the one hundred or so citizens in the pre selection pool yesterday was quote someone who described himself as an explosion prevention dispatcher and boom goes the dynamite. By the way, Anna Bower of Lawfare Media has provided the best explanation yet of why there was a special Georgia Trump grand jury, and now there is a I guess not so special Georgia Crump grand jury. And I'll just read what she threaded quote long story short. Special grand juries are used to investigate complex issues of inquiry, like organized crime or a multi state plot to overturn a presidential election. Under Georgia laws, special grand juries can't return indictments. They can only recommend indictments unquote. And we know that this one did, and we know that it believed it witnessed perjury, and we just don't know any details. And while justice takes two small steps forward, the Department of Justice, as always, continues to frequently pull society backwards towards the gaping maw of another round of Trump fascism, one that would not be so easy to escape from as last time. Incredibly, DOJ lawyers are asking a federal appeals court to block the order from Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Trump must be deposed. In the Peters struck Lisa Page lawsuit. It is the DOJ's position that a president can abuse his power, meddle with the management structure of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, slander its employees, defame and try to get irs audits of anybody who works for him as long as he's president, and you can't sue him and depose him. It's stupid. It's goddamned stupid. When you step back from the the last eight years of American pre fascism and you ask how the hell could we have possibly gotten here, the answer is nonsense. Like this quote from the DOJ motion in defense of Trump, that this case involves the deposition of a former president rather than a sitting president does not diminish the separation of powers concerns. It is exactly the same logic and loyalty to the written word instead of the meaning of the written word that led the Weimar Republic to let Hitler out of prison nine months into his five year sentence. Trump lives and dies and those around him live and die by manipulating the law. I'm sorry, we must manipulate it back at him. He is himself elf, a personal, one man cold civil war, and he must be treated as such at every opportunity, and this is one of those opportunities, as is this one the obvious play. Trump waiting until literally thirty minutes before the deadline to file it Tuesday night to make his demand that the judge he appointed grant him a postponement of his Miami Classified Documents trial, probably until after the twenty twenty four election, because he lives and dies by manipulating the law. And if he is not elected president again, he will be in the penitentiary. If he is elected president, he will manipulate the law. He will free himself, or he will get the charges dropped, or both. And before you recoil at the idea of making the law just this elastic, you know, rule against the clear and present danger to all of our futures. Now and again, go anti domestic terrorists, just occasionally before you worry that, well, that will stretch the law out of shape. And what happens when the other side gets the duj Just remember what President Lincoln did during the actual Civil War, the only other threat in our history as great as Trump. President Lincoln decided that to keep the country in one piece, he needed emergency powers, so he granted them to himself. Then he used them to do a lot of things, including the suspension of habeas corpus. He used them to free the slaves, He used them to ignore the Supreme Court. What the hell are we asking here? We're not suspending anything, freeing anyone, ignoring any court. Just don't let a judge with a record of actually presiding over cases like gun possession and assaulting a prosecutor who has been in charge of a courtroom for a total of fourteen days in her life, and who was appointed by Trump rule in Trump's favor in order to let him get away with crimes that threaten and continue to threaten representative government in our country. Also of interest here, if you did not watch the Baseball All Star Game last night, you got a lot of company. Forty three years ago, when the population was one third smaller than it is now, five times as many people watched the Baseball All Star Game on TV as did last night. Well, if you did not watch, that means you missed the worst uniforms in baseball history. But you also missed a very fast, very subtle game highlight that was made not by any player, not by any manager, not by any announcer, but by the fans in the stands in Seattle chanting something. What did they chant? They chanted? That's next. This is an all new edition of Countdown. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman. This is Sports Center. Wait, check that not anymore. This is Countdown with Keith Alberman in Sports Okay, fans, what do these ten players comprise? Shane Bieber, Alex Bregman, Milkie Cabrera, Robinson Cano, Elias Diaz, Vladimir gar Zero, Junior, Eric Hosmer, Marianna Rivera, gen Carlos Stanton, Mike Trout. After the Colorado Rockies catcher Diaz Pinch hit a two run homer off Felix Bautista in the eighth inning at Seattle to lead the National League to a three to two win over the American League in the All Star Game last night. Those are the Baseball All Star Game most valuable players since twenty twelve. Two Hall of Famers, a maybe, and a lot of nos. No knock on Elias Diaz. Unsung heroes are great, and he told his friends yesterday he was going to be the All Star MVP, which is either clairvoyance or annoying over confidence. But this is his ninth season, he has fifty one career homers, and he's a two forty eight career hitter. From nineteen sixty three to nineteen seventy, the All Star MVPs were Johnny Callison and Juan Mareschal, Willie Mays, Willie Mays again, Willie McCovey, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, and carl Yastremsky. Eight Hall of Famers out of nine guys, one of them twice. The National League ends the American League's nine game winning streak, and the AL is still twenty one four and one since nineteen ninety seven. And it really wasn't much of a game. In a moment, I'll tell you why it will never be much of a game again, and why the TV audience is about a fifth of what it was in nineteen eighty. In fact, the highlight was supplied not by the players, nor camaraderie, nor Elias Diaz, nor anything else, but by something that usually has no factor whatsoever in the All Star Games, everything that is usually too quiet to believe. The crowd in the stands at Seattle provided the highlight when the impending free agent and by definition most valuable player. He's two players. He's a hitter and a pitcher, So how valuable is he He's worth any other two players combined? Show Hey Otani soon to be free agent. When he came to the play, the Seattle crowd, which made a home for Eachiro Suzuki for fourteen years, started to chant at Otani, come to Seattle, Come to Seattle. They were my MVPs. I'll drop this because you already know more about this game than you need to, But I have to mention the uniforms. The tradition is over and the players are not wearing their regular season, regular team uniforms. They were wearing special generic American League and National League jobs. Players wore genuinely ugly sick green caps that were the worst in baseball history, at least since the awful brief rage for those white topped Baker's caps of the nineteen nineties Mets and Royals and Orioles. The National Leaguer's pants apparently never showed up to Seattle for the game, so they seemed to be wearing black chinos, and the American League shirts seem to have been cut from discarded creased shark skin suits. More importantly, even if the uniforms had been great, even if they'd been the best of all time, what please, is the point of making sure there is an All Star player from every team if you can't see what team every player is from. Thank you, Nancy Faust. If you are less than fifty years old, I would like to offer my condolences to you on the fact that you did not get to see the Baseball All Star Game when it was at worst the third biggest sporting event of the year behind the Super Bowl and the World Series in the time before televised ubiquity and interleague play. It really was that it was breathtaking to know that you were watching a field full of Hall of famers, and that a National League Hall of Fame pitcher like Fergie Jenkins would be facing an American League Hall of Fame batter like Mickey Mantle for the only time in their lives, and that year after year you would see literally dozens of matchups that would never happen again, and teammates who would never be teammates again and had never been teammates before, and players who wouldn't be on national TV again until sometime next year, to say nothing of a game the outcome of which actually mattered to every player on the field. Technology killed off a lot of that. Thirty six million people watched the nineteen eighty All Star Game. If the twenty twenty two ratings held, seven and a half million people watched the One last night. That's largely because today you can see every player every night everywhere. You are now your own sports center. But the rest of it, the rest of it, Baseball threw away out of greed alone among the All Star Games, just as among the major sports championships, there was no artifice, no conceit in the Baseball All Star Game. Just as there were no regular season games between the American and National League teams until nineteen ninety seven, there was also no love lost between the American and National leagues. There were American League fans and there were National League fans, and although this was lessening with time, part of being an American League fan was hating the National League and vice versa. And this was not the result of some brilliant marketing strategy. This was organic. My grandfather lived until nineteen eighty six, and he died hating the American League, in large part because when he was just a boy, the National League was all there was in baseball, and then in nineteen oh one, the American League came along and stole nearly all the National League stars one hundred and eighty five guys on opening day American League rosters in the year nineteen oh one, one hundred and eighty five. One hundred and eleven of them had played in the National League the year before, total chaos. National League lineups that had been intact for a decade were destroyed by the American League, and though the leagues ended their player war in nineteen oh three, nobody, nobody forgave or forgot, I mean the next year, my grandpa's team, the New York Giants, won the National League pennant, but refused to play in the World Series against the American League champions because their manager, John McGraw, hated the president of the American League and John McGraw still did not believe the American League was a major league. When the All Star Game began in nineteen thirty three, John McGraw was brought out of retirement to manage the National League All Stars, and the rumors began of off the record bonuses offered to players if the National League won, or if a National League pitcher knocked in an American League, battered down with a pitch during the game, or injured an American League player on the field. It wasn't just his own demons that drove Pete Rose to knock over American League catcher Ray Fosse and fracture Fosse's shoulder in order to score the winning run in the nineteen seventy All Star Game. That's the way they played the All Star Game. I mentioned before that this organic affection for one league and hatred for the other gave almost every baseball fan a rooting interest not just in the All Star Game, but in the World Series, a rooting interest that no longer exists. The American Leagues and National League don't exist anymore. They have been reduced to bookkeeping formalities adjusting for growth in population. The TV audience for the World Series is now about a quarter of what it was in nineteen eighty, largely because if your team is not playing, why should you care. In nineteen eighty he rooted for the Philadelphia Affillies because you were a National League fan, or maybe you rooted against the Phillies and for the Kansas City Roads, because yeah, you were a National League fan, but you were a Pittsburgh fan or a Mets fan, and you hated the Phillies and you were watching to watch them lose. When was the last time you met a National League fan? One more point and then I'll stop the Hey you kids, get off my lawning. Here, I could list one thousand things on the field that could illustrate the history of a wonderful, vivid, punch throwing enmity between the two baseball leagues that animated the World Series in the All Star Game until Baseball killed it off because Baseball could make an extra thousand dollars selling Subway Series caps or Freeway Series windshield a visors that came with interleague play. But actually it's two off the field battles that really emphasized just how wonderful and wonderfully petty the hatred of American League for National League used to be. In the winter of nineteen nineteen, a dispute over a player trade in the American League that previous season got so heated that the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, and the Chicago White Sox actually resigned from the American League and joined the National League. They left the American League, which only then had five teams, and created a super league in the National League. Obviously, this was resolved before the season started and they never took the field this way, but it happened. Try that bit of trivia on a Red Sox or Yankee fan, remember when you guys were in the National League. The second event was forty years later, and it was far more subtle, but maybe more telling. In nineteen fifty nine, nineteen fifty nine, fifty six years after the supposed peace agreement between the two leagues, a joint committee met and voted to end a rule about trading players between American League teams and National League teams. The rule was you couldn't trade players between American League teams and National League teams. Until nineteen fifty nine, it was literally illegal within baseball for say, the New York Yankees, to exchange players with the Los Angeles Dodgers or any other National League team without first offering to sell those players that they wanted to trade to every other American League team for the waiver price ten twenty thousand, fifty thousand dollars, depending on the year before you could be traded from one league to the other, every other team in your league had to say, nah, we don't want them. So star players were never traded from one league to the other until nineteen fifty nine. This went on for fifty six years, and when they finally voted to eliminate that rule, there were only sixteen teams than eight in each league, and four of sixteen teams still voted against the rule. And when they finally approved this interleague trading, they only made it legal for a limited interleague trading period around Thanksgiving, and the length of the period that they all agreed to was twenty six days. Twenty six days, the other three hundred and thirty nine days no trade between the leagues. So when did they get rid of that limitation? Not until nineteen eighty six, And that's why the Baseball All Star Game is not a big deal anymore. Still ahead on this all new edition of Countdown. Baseball. In fact, used to matter so much that local TV sportscasters used to make stories, I mean big stories, make them up to try to get ratings and attention. I mean, I saw one guy in LA when I was there go on a TV newscast and claim that a home run that kept the Dodgers out of the World Series one year, that home run didn't count, and the Dodgers should show up at the World Series anyway and demand to play. He said this on live television. The story next in Things I promised not to tell first time for the daily roundup of the miss Grants, morons and Dunning Krueger effects specimens who constitute today's worse persons in the world. The runner up, Senator Tommy I'm just gonna keep digging here. Tubberville of Alabama, the former Auburn football coach. Tubberville is a flat out racist slime who last week wondered if teachers in inner city schools can read and write, and he keeps defending white nationalists, and then yesterday suddenly blurted quote, white nationalists are racists, and somebody quipped on law, was there a football joke in there somewhere? And I said, Tubberville's only football jokes were his teams. This is so bad now that Senator Tuberville's brother, Charles, who is a rock guitarist, felt compelled to issue this statement about his own brother quote due to recent statements by him promoting racial stereotypes, white nationalism, and other various controversial topics. I feel compelled to distance myself from his ignorant, hateful rants. Unquote the Tubberville Brothers, everybody the runner up Congressman Jim, what do you mean my witness is a Chinese spy? Jordan? Jim has had another brainstorm. The Wall Street Journal reports Jordan will try to gut funding for the FBI unless the bureau agrees to build its new headquarters not in the suburbs of Washington, DC, but in Huntsville. Abavamma, so it can be closer to Tommy Tuberville. Why not was so Alaska? Jim, remember with Scilla, Alaska? But our winner Doug Burgham. Doug is the pair of eyebrows currently serving as governor of North Dakota, and he is running for the Republican nomination. A with mine, I'm allowed to mock eyebrows and b you gotta give him credit. He at least recognizes that his odds of getting the nomination are kind of small, small enough that Doug Burgham is willing to buy the nomination and not just buy it, mind you, but pay you to donate to his campaign. How does that work? Volume volume volume. The GOP will give a spot on its first debate stage to anybody who gets at least fifty thousand donations of at least one dollar each. So Doug Burgham says he will give his first fifty thousand donors a Visa or MasterCard gift card of twenty dollars. You give him one dollar, he gives you twenty dollars. Volume, volume, volume, talk about buying votes, Governor Doug Bergham, Hey, Doug, I'll give you twenty bucks. You got a pro to go, trim your eyebrows, Today's worst eyebrows and the world here the number one story on the Countdown now, and things I promised not to tell. And a personal saga of how important baseball used to be. I had only been the local sportscaster on Channel five in Los Angeles for about six weeks when I saw one of my rivals do something I could not believe. Nearly thirty eight years have since passed, and it's even harder for me to believe it now. In Game five of the nineteen eighty five National League Championship Series between the LA Dodgers and the Saint Louis Cardinals winner goes to the World Series. Ozzy Smith, the famous shortstop of the Cardinals, hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat the Dodgers three to two. Smith was a switch hitter. He could bat left handed or right handed, but he had never hit a home run right handed until then. The ball hit some brick or concrete behind the foul pole and Saint Louis bounded back onto the field, and the Dodger right fielder Mike Marshall picked it up and threw it back to the infield just cause, like why not. Two days later, back in Los Angeles, in an infamous sequence that older Dodger fans still grumble about nightly, the Dodgers lost that series on another home run by Jack Clark of Saint Louis. And the night after that, I was sitting with my new colleagues at Channel five and we had the rival newscast from Channel nine KHJTV on one of our TV nitors in the sports office, and for some reason their sportscaster was on at the start of their newscast at ten o'clock. I have important breaking news, he yelled. His name was Scott Saint James and he was always yelling, but this was different. Careful forensic analysis of the videotape by the Channel nine Sports department proves that Ozzy Smith's so called home run against the Dodgers in Game five was actually not a home run but a double. Look Saint James shouted, then played the same videotape every station in America had, showing the same angle of the same Smith home run, landing fair and beating the Dodgers and then bouncing back off the wall onto the field and the Dodger right field are kind of a half hearted we throwing the ball back into the infield just cuz that Saint James bellowed was just a double. Mike Marshall's throw proves it beyond the shadow of a legal doubt. Channel nine Sports urges the Dodgers to file lawsuits against Major League Baseball to obtain a restraining order against this travesty, then urged the Dodgers to report to Kansas City in order to play in tomorrow night's first game of the nineteen eighty five World Series as the rightful representatives of the National League. I don't have a tape of this, so my version of what this buffoon, Saint James said, is recreated from memory as faithfully as possible. It is burned into my memory. And if it's not one hundred percent accurate word for word, trust me, I just improved it. Over at Channel five, we laughed. The phone rang. It was one of the sports producers at Channel two, friend of all of ours. He was laughing. On Channel nine, they were not laughing. They did I think this quote story unquote twice in their newscast that night, and they continued to ride this idea that the home run did not count and the Dodgers should sue right up until the nineteen eighty five World Series, which the Dodgers did not play in, ended a week later. But that's not where the story ended, as if the Saint James thing had cursed the nineteen eighty five World Series, and nobody ever really knew if he really believed the story, he was just trying to get eyeballs on a sportscast. Nobody watched the guys who managed the World Series teams get to manage their league's team in the All Star Game the next year, so Dick Houser, manager of the World champion Kansas City Royals, of nineteen eighty five was the manager of the nineteen eighty six All Star Game, played on July fifteenth at the Astrodome in Houston. That year, the California Angels, whose games were carried on my station Channel five, had one of their players produced one of the great rookie seasons of all time. His name was Wally Joyner. He was this kind of goofy first baseman. He was a friend of mine, and even though he was not on the fans All Star ballots, he was voted in written in as the starting American League All Star first baseman. He won with write in votes didn't happen too often. So at the nineteen eighty six All Star Game, Joyinner is the starting first baseman, and he comes up in the second inning and he pops up. But per All Star etiquette, he'll get at least one more at bat, probably two. All the starters get two at bats except in the fourth inning, when it's Joiner's turn to hit again. All Star manager Dick Hauser pinch hits for Joiner, sends up Don Mattingly of the Yankees to bat instead of Joiner. Well, this did not go over well in Southern California. Some of us were wondering if Wally Joyner was hurt or if there was something else going on. But over at another of our rival sports departments at KABC Channel seven, that's not where their sportscaster, Ted Dawson took it. He went on that night blistering Dick Hauser for insulting Joiner and insulting the Angels and Los Angeles and Anaheim and God and the flag. And he told his viewers to call the hotel in Houston that Dick House was staying at and ask for his room and yell at him. I think they put up a graphic with the hotel phone number. Mind you, by the time Ted Dawson did this, it would have been one fifteen in the morning in the Houston hotel. Whatever Hauser had done, what Dawson did was far worse. We could not have imagined at the time how far worse. The next day, the Kansas City Royals announced that Dick Hauser had been admitted to the hospital after several weeks of neck pain, and the day after that, through tears, a spokesman announced that dick Hauser was taking a leave of absence as manager of the team immediately because he had a brain tumor. In fact, Dick Hauser would die about eleven months later at the age of just fifty one. The nineteen eighty six All Star Game was the last game Howser ever participated in, and Ted Dawson had told his viewers to call Hauser up late at night in a hotel and yet at him over an insult to a player. I've done a lot of stupid stuff on TV in my life, a lot of stuff I should have just left alone. In most cases, I've been able to apologize or at least make fun of myself or make it up to the people involved with these two guys. Saint James was fired the next year, I think, and then Dawson. And then Dawson got hired in Dallas, and the next thing we heard in LA was he was living with some rich older woman who had bought him a helicopter. Last thing I saw about him was in twenty seventeen, he retired after several years as the sports director of station KBZK in Bozeman, Montana. Sometimes life punishes you first, then you screw up, rather than the other way around. It dawned on me after Dick Hauser died that years earlier. In nineteen eighty, the ABC station in my hometown here in New York needed a new sportscaster, and they tried out literally every sportscaster on every big ABC station in the country. One week they had the guy in from Detroit, the week after that it was their guy from their station in Syracuse, and one week it had been Ted Dawson from KABC in Los Angeles, the guy who would tell his viewers to call up and use the manager in the middle of the night. Ted Dawson's on air style was breathless, and I mean that literally. He shouted at the top of his lungs. Had he read his script as fast as he could. I mean, I can't even recreate it without causing myself a coughing fit. While I happened to be watching the night of his first audition show on the New York station, Ted Dawson screamed for about three minutes, finished and panting, threw it back to the veteran deadpan WABC Channel seven news anchorman Roger Grimsby. Roger back to you, and they cut to Grimsby. He was staring to his right towards where Dawson was sitting wordlessly, turned back to face the camera, and with no hint of emotion, Roger Grimsmy simply said, we shall now resume the news. Wow, we shall now resume the news. I've done all the damage I can do here. Thank you for listening. Here are the credits. Most of the music was arranged, produced and performed by Brian Ray and John Phillips Shanel, who are the Countdown musical directors. Guitar is bassed and drums by Brian Ray, all orchestration and keyboards by John Phillips Shanel, produced by Tko Brothers. Other Beethoven selections have been arranged and performed by the group No Horns Allowed. Sports Music is the Olderman theme from ESPN two and it was written by Mitch Warren Davis courtesy of ESPN Inc. Musical comments by Nancy Fauss. The best baseball stadium organist ever. Our announcer today was my friend Kenny Maine. Everything else is pretty much my fault. Don't forget. Countdown now also available on YouTube with the cute little animated me. Subscribe there as well, give yourself options. That's countdown for this The nine hundred and eighteenth day since Donald Trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the United States. Arrest him again while we still can. The next schedule countdown is tomorrow bulletins as the news warrants till then, I'm Keith Olberman. Good morning, good afternoon, goodnight, and good luck. Countdown with Keith Olderman is a production of iHeartRadio. 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