Name: Rachel Maddow: Government Bad Guys Can Face Consequences Even Decades After Their Crimes
Uploaded: 2025-12-03T16:58:30.000Z
Duration: 6 min 57 s
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You're not gonna believe how much more talking there is.

We're back with the host of the podcast Burn Order, Rachel Maddow.

Speaking of wars, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are presently in Russia for peace talks for the Ukraine.

Russia peace talks, which I don't think Ukraine was invited to.

And recently, a leaked phone call made by Witkoff really sounds like he's chumming with the Kremlin.

Am I accurate in characterizing it as Witkoff is advising the Kremlin on how to handle Trump?

And they've decided that the way that we're going to solve all the intractable problems of the world is by letting him hang out at the Kremlin a lot.

And so this is, I mean, maybe probably nice in there.

I mean, they probably keep it at just the right temperature, just the right amount of gold.

And every time he goes to the Kremlin, he has, like these three hour, four hour meetings with Vladimir Putin, who is a KGB officer who's really good at, like, flipping people.

But Steve Witkoff plays golf, so I bet he knows his way around a negotiating table with the KGB guy.

In any case, what we've ended up with is the White House plan, the peace plan for Russia and Ukraine, which was, appears quite literally to have been written in the Kremlin and then given to Steve Witkoff, who then advised the Kremlin on how best to sell it to Trump.

I mean, it really just feels like the whole Putin and Trump thing, that was so weird for all those years, which a lot of us reported on a lot at the time, got a lot of hassle for it.

I'm just saying, it kind of seems like that's now paid off with the Kremlin actually running US Foreign policy through the President's doofus Gulf friend.

And it's hilarious, except for the fact that we're now years into this deadly war in Ukraine, where they used to think we were their ally and we were helping them stand up against this tyranny, and

now we apparently have been captured by the Kremlin and work for Vladimir Putin.

Some European Allies have stopped giving us Ukraine intelligence as well, because they're afraid that we're going to give it to Russia.

I mean, literally, they wrote the plan for what they want Ukraine to do, and

the White House put it on its letterhead and said, here it is.

And, you know, Russia is a Podunk country.

Largest, largest physical country in the world.

They've got an economy like the size of Italy.

They've got a kleptocratic, sclerotic government run by a guy who's never going to leave until he dies.

The idea that we work for him, that we work for them is so humiliating and is such an abject failure on the part of Trump in terms of his weakness.

I don't know what Putin has on him, but he works for Putin, and

It's about the Japanese internment in the US in the 1940s.

You've said that history is here to help in times of crisis.

What is the story of Burn Order, and how does that history help us now?

So when we went to war with Japan In World War II, there were zero Japanese Americans who worked as spies for Japan.

There were zero Japanese Americans who participated in any sabotage or helped Japan in the war against us in any way.

There were some people in this country who were spying for Japan, but

they were generally white, homegrown American fascists who liked Japan for the same reason they liked Germany and Italy.

Americans were not implicated in any bad stuff at all.

And military intelligence knew it, and the DOJ knew it, and the FBI knew it.

And nevertheless, we locked up 120,000Americans.

I mean, elderly people, men, women, children.

They went and got babies out of orphanages if they thought those babies might have some Japanese blood.

They went and got kids out of foster homes because they thought they might have some Japanese lineage.

And we had internal domestic prison camps and locked people up for years for no reason.

And it turns out that the people who did it, it wasn't inevitable.

The people who got this done knew it was wrong when they were doing it.

They covered up the reason why they were doing it, and

And that story is kind of a thriller because they ordered all the evidence of what they did literally burned.

They ordered all the evidence incinerated.

And it was these intrepid Japanese Americans when nobody else was standing up for them, they had to do it themselves.

Who uncovered what really happened, exposed, closed it all, made the US Government apologize, overturned all of the court cases that made it possible, and

ultimately got reparations for what they did.

The bad guys is anyone held brought to justice.

The bad guys spent their entire lives denying they'd had anything to do it, lying about it and pretended like pretending like they weren't involved.

And their families have since spent the multiple generations since pretending like those people aren't members of their family.

So history has remembered them in the appropriate way.

But for me, this is really useful because we've had really racist, terrible, awful, pointless policies in the past and fighting it is worthy.

You don't know when you're necessarily going to win.

if you stick with it, ultimately history will reward the people who are righteous in these moments, and

they will chase the bad guys to the ends of their days.

Her podcast, Rachel Maddow Presents Burn Order, is available now wherever you get your podcast.

We'll be right back with a performance by Drive By Truckers, featuring Jason Isbell, Sam.