Tuesday Convo: Nadine Smith & Lisa Graves of "The Five 8 1/2" (video)

In which we discuss bad Floridians, the illicit El Salvador prison system, the dictator tête-à-tête in the Oval Office, John Roberts's role in the Constitutional crisis, and their new live show!

An award-winning journalist turned organizer, Nadine Smith was one of four national co-chairs of the 1993 March on Washington. She was part of the historic meeting between between a sitting President and LGBTQ community leaders. She served on the founding board of the International Gay and Lesbian Youth Organization. Nadine is the Executive Director of Equality Florida, the state’s largest organization dedicated to ending discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Lisa Graves served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Policy Development/Legal Policy at the U.S. Department of Justice under Attorneys General Janet Reno and John Ashcroft, Chief Counsel for Nominations for Senator Patrick Leahy on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Deputy Chief of the Article III Judges Division of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts with oversight of the Financial Disclosure Office and more, and as an adjunct law professor at George Washington University Law School. She also worked as the Senior Legislative Strategist for the ACLU on national security and civil liberties, and held other posts. She is the founder and Executive Director of True North Research, a national investigative watchdog group.

Together, Nadine and Lisa are the co-hosts of The Five 8 1/2, the new show on The Five 8 YouTube channel that premieres Wednesday evening—that is, tomorrow, April 16—at 8pm EST.

I sat down with them yesterday for a short convo:

Here is the transcript of our convo, edited for clarity:

GREG
Good morning. I am here today with Nadine Smith and Lisa Graves, two of my favorite ever guests on The Five 8. And I’ve asked them to come on today because tomorrow, i.e. Wednesday, April 16th at 8 o’clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time, they are co-hosting a new show called The Five 8 1/2 on The Five 8 channel on YouTube. So my first question is, what can we expect from the new show?

NADINE SMITH
Well, you know what? I know that having been a guest on The Five 8, and I’ve heard it described as the Friday night hang, where an adult libation should not be…one should not be shy. And so to the degree that we think of Friday night as the night to vent, to hang out and to, I think you say cuss as much as you want and drink as much as you want.

GREG
Yes.

NADINE
We’re more of the midweek refueling station. We know you have to go to work in the morning. So whether you pour yourself a wine spritzer or a cup of tea, we’re there to tell you what’s going on, the issues that matter, have some fun, and remind you that you’re not alone. As you scroll through the news, you are not alone. And even in the midst of the hardest stuff, some good things are happening.

GREG
I think it’s going to be great. And this is why God invented sick days, by the way. You don’t have to go to the work in the morning. So OK, so it’s The Five 8…and a half. So Lisa, what’s the deal with the half?

LISA GRAVES
The half is halfway through the week, but Nadine and I spoke about this, and we wanted to have the “half” be the Glass Half Full. So we want to end on a positive note, an encouraging note. So notwithstanding the darkness of some of the news that we’re experiencing on a daily, hourly basis in terms of the violation of laws and rules and contracts and norms and common sense, we want to make sure that part of our conversation on Wednesdays is to leave you with some uplifting note.

GREG
I like that because there’s, I don’t know if you’re aware, but there’s a lot of bad stuff going on right now. So since I’ve got both of you, I want to ask each of you a question just about what’s something happening in the news before I release you to go to your jobs and your rest and prepare for the Wednesday night show.

NADINE
I’ve heard the word on the street. Yeah, the word on the street. Things aren’t kosher.

GREG
Today, as we’re recording this, it’s actually Monday, what, six o’clock p.m., the president of El Salvador, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” which is so disgusting that it almost made me…I’ve had a headache all day and I think that’s why. He was at the White House today talking about how they’re gonna build more prisons to send Americans to the prisons and all that.

One of the key architects in all of this, the El Salvador prison, the whole thing, is Marco Rubio, long time Senator and politician from the state of Florida, now the Secretary of State and somebody I think that most people thought of as not a MAGA crazy. So Nadine, you’re in Florida. What do you make of this? Is this surprising to you, the way that he’s gone full Nazi here? Because he seems like he’s gone Nazi.

NADINE
No, you become the thing you hate. He is going to create the same kind of gulags, for not just undocumented, deported immigrants, but for American dissidents. And this is part of what Trump was crowing about.

But these folks, they become part of that circle, and there can be no dissent. So no matter whether you think you can enter that space and hold on to even a sliver of integrity. Marco Rubio did not start with much to begin with, but we are watching him absolutely…not just capitulate, but show himself to be a loyal foot soldier to fascism. And we’re seeing a lot of that. I mean, if you want to start the roster of horrible-behaving Floridians, this has become, you know, the Death Star.

You’ve got Rubio, you’ve got Pam Bondi, who is absolutely a handmaiden to the fascist state. And again, whatever sliver of decency people hoped might awaken within them, I don’t think that’s the place to put your hope. You’ve got to put it in the people in the streets and people pushing back.

I did spend today looking up what products are manufactured in El Salvador and which companies rely on textiles and other things from El Salvador, because I think as Americans and as consumers all over the world, we should be paying close attention to what businesses are propping up El Salvador as a state where, know, kidnapped American residents and I have no doubt American citizens will be targeted for internment.

GREG
In the best case scenario, internment, God knows what’s going to happen. I mean, it’s sort of this extrajudicial thing, because once they’re sent there, Trump’s like, “I can’t do anything. Who are we to tell a sovereign nation what to do?” Trump says, preposterously.

NADINE
Well, I think this is a place where we’re going to find out whether Roberts will push back against Trump flouting the Supreme Court’s directive to return him to the United States. And I think Roberts, that’s a pal of yours, right, Lisa? Chief Justice Roberts, one of your besties.

LISA
Ha!

GREG
You’re already doing the show, because you’ve eliminated the need for me, because that was my question for Lisa—about Roberts and the constitutional crisis that’s happening because Trump right now is actively and brazenly defying court orders. And he’s just going to get worse and worse. So what can we expect, Lisa, from Mr. Roberts there?

LISA
Well, that’s right. John Roberts paved the way for Trump’s return to power in an emboldened way with that lawless anti-constitutional grant of immunity from criminal prosecution that John Roberts orchestrated. And now Trump is defying a nine-zero Supreme Court, a unanimous Supreme Court decision, to facilitate the return of this resident of America—someone married to an American citizen, who has US citizen children, who was kidnapped and taken, rendered in essence, to El Salvador, to this horrific prison, this sort of gulag or torture chamber—where 150 people exist in each cell, 150 men, with two sinks, two toilets, nine square feet per person, four piers of so-called beds or metal scaffolding basically, with no pillows, no mattresses, no sheets, 24-hour light, artificial light, and hardly any access to an attorney or anyone else. If that’s not torture, I’m not sure what is, those sorts of circumstances. And at our expense, so being paid for by us. So you have a situation where right now, because John Roberts and the court intervened in stopping the lower court’s order, and in essence saying that Trump has some power under this Enemy Aliens Act, even though we’re not at war with Venezuela, and even though that gang that they are talking about is not a country.

Now we face a situation in which Trump is saying not only can he supposedly not ask for the return of this American resident, but he’s refusing to do so and asserting that only the so-called sovereign of El Salvador can can return him. And that dictator has said that he won’t.

And so this is utter defiance of the Constitution, of the order of the Supreme Court. This constitutional crisis is escalating now, but it began really last summer when John Roberts orchestrated the decision to stop the criminal prosecution of Trump for the crimes that he was indicted for.

And I do want to say one last thing, though, because Marco Rubio— About 13 years ago, I worked with a reporter, an investigative reporter, to write a story about Marco Rubio’s close ties to GeoGroup, to one of the big private prison companies in America. It’s on the site, prwatch.org. We wrote about those close ties. And so while it is completely outrageous and startling that Rubio as Secretary of State would enter into a contract to render people in United States to this hellhole without due process, in the sense of, if you knew that Marco Rubio had deep ties to the for-profit private prison industry in the U.S., it might not surprise you as much.

GREG
Wow. I did not know that. I actually spent yesterday going on to a Marco Rubio deep dive about certain things that I had forgotten and stuff like that.

So thank you for answering these questions and providing everybody a taste of what to expect on Wednesday night at eight o’clock Eastern time. So to watch the show, The Five 8 1/2, you just have to go to the YouTube channel and click subscribe. Make sure your notifications are on.

And again, Wednesday, April 16th, 8 o’clock PM Eastern time, 5 o’clock PM Pacific time. Nadine and Lisa, thanks so much for coming on. This is great. Good luck tomorrow.

NADINE
Thank you.

LISA
Thanks, Greg. Yeah, we’re excited and thank you for inviting us to do this and so excited to be with you in this new program, Nadine.

NADINE
Yes, likewise. Come join us.

GREG
I can’t wait. I can’t wait. I can’t wait.

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ALSO…

On “Liberation Day,” April 2, I was a guest on Dustin du Cane’s Fallout show. Thanks to Dustin for having me on. You can watch that here:

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