Vaping Vote & Scaramucci Is Out: VICE News Tonight Full Episode (HBO)

Tonight:
Down goes the Mooch.
Constitutional crisis in Venezuela.
And…
The vaping vote.
Chris Msando, a senior Kenyan election official,
has been found dead three days after he went missing.
His death heightens fears of potential disruptions in next week’s national election,
when Kenyans will choose a new president and new legislators.
The chair of the country’s election commission said Msando was tortured before he was murdered.
Police did not say who killed Msando,
or an unidentified woman who was found with him.
Msando was supposed to oversee a public testing of the voting system today.
Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been found guilty of criminal contempt
for willfully violating a federal judge’s order to stop racial profiling.
Arpaio, known for taking a tough stance on immigration,
said he will appeal the verdict.
He argued that the judge’s order wasn’t clear and that he didn’t mean to violate it.
Prosecutors said he refused to end traffic patrols that targeted immigrants
in order to help his 2012 campaign.
The city of Los Angeles has agreed to host the summer Olympics in 2028,
paving the way for Paris to hold the 2024 games.
The two cities and the International Olympic Committee had been negotiating for weeks.
As part of the agreement,
the IOC will advance LA at least $1.8 billion for youth sports programs.
As the conflict in Crimea intensifies,
the Pentagon and State Department are proposing supplying Ukraine with lethal defensive weapons,
including anti-tank missiles,
to fight against Russian-backed separatists.
The shift comes just as tensions are rising between Washington and the Kremlin
over sanctions against Russia.
The U.S. has offered only limited support for Kiev’s military
since Russia invaded and took control of the Crimean peninsula in 2014.
The White House would need to approve the plan before it goes into effect.
— What happened, Sarah?
What happened?
— This is kinda fun.
How long will you yell?
— After six months of chaos,
it’s easy to mistake the firing of White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci—
who hadn’t even been sworn-in yet as an official White House employee—
as just one more example of the Trump administration’s chronic dysfunction.
The President has now cycled through more high-profile firings and resignations
than many full administrations.
But what if, instead of chaos,
today’s firing was the first meaningful sign of order?
That’s what Sarah Sanders was selling at today’s White House press briefing:
— Uh, General Kelly, I think,
will bring new structure to the White House,
and discipline and strength.
— For the record,
there’s not one person who believes that Scaramucci left voluntarily.
This is the work of new Chief of Staff, General John Kelly,
and at least in the short-term,
it signals that maybe, finally,
the President has settled on at least one advisor
who he’s willing to trust and empower above all the others.
One of the things the Press Secretary was clear about today
was that the full White House chain of command
now goes directly through the General.
— General Kelly has the full authority to operate within the White House,
and all staff will report to him.
— Various sources say Kelly insisted upon firing Scaramucci as one of his first acts,
and made his acceptance of the Chief of Staff job contingent on it.
Kelly was sworn-in this morning;
Scaramucci was gone this afternoon.
Given that Scaramucci was hired at the urging of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump,
it’s a strong signal that, on the ever-spinning carousel of influence,
it’s Kelly who currently has Trump’s trust.
On Thursday, when Scaramucci’s quotes savaging Reince Priebus came out,
Sarah Sanders was asked whether the President still had confidence in Priebus.
Sanders tried to spin the White House turmoil as a positive—
she said, “This isn’t groupthink,”
and, quote, “We have a lot of healthy competition.”
Four days later, Priebus is out, Scaramucci is out,
and the new Chief of Staff made his view clear:
healthy competition is out.
It looks like the only person he wants challenging him is the President.
— Early this afternoon,
the U.S. Treasury Department announced sanctions against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro,
freezing his offshore assets and marking him as a full-blown international pariah.
The designation came in response to an election last night
that installed a new National Assembly with the power to rewrite Venezuela’s constitution.
Most, if not all, of the 545 assembly members voted-in are loyal to Maduro,
and the cohort includes the president’s wife and son.
The vote, which American officials called a “sham,”
also brought about the bloodiest day since protests against Maduro’s government began in April.
At least 16 people were killed yesterday.
Maduro’s camp announced the results at a rally last night in Caracas.
Ben Anderson was there.
— President Nicolás Maduro arrived at Caracas’s historic Bolívar Plaza around midnight.
— Maduro’s government claims 8 million people voted,
while the opposition says only 2.1 million ballots were cast.
— With an approval rate of just 20 percent,
the President will now control all branches of the country’s government.
President Trump’s stern warnings against the move were ignored,
and an emboldened Maduro had a message for him during last night’s victory speech:
— Yesterday, while the government celebrated its victory,
I met with opposition leader and Vice President of the National Assembly, Freddy Guevara:
— How are you?
— You’re in more trouble?
— The government clearly believes it can crush the opposition and the protest movement.
Following yesterday’s events,
Venezuela will now face further isolation,
its economic collapse looks set to accelerate,
and life for the long suffering people here will get worse.
— Today, a White House commission on opioid use,
headed by Governor Chris Christie,
urged the President to declare a national emergency
to combat a rising death toll from drug overdoses—
a toll that commissioners said was, quote, “equal to September 11th every three weeks.”
Across the country,
cities and towns are figuring out new ways to confront the epidemic.
Those on the front lines in Buffalo, New York are trying to solve the problem in the courtroom,
where about 80 opioid users facing drug charges
are enrolled in a treatment program that could have some of them facing a judge every day.
— Buffalo police!
Police department.
These vacants, um,
a lot of these users like to come here and they crash,
they shoot up.
— A place to put their empties.
Someone was here and they’re gonna come back.
— These days Buffalo officers Charlie Miller and Andrew Whiteford
spend a lot more time searching abandoned buildings
for drugs and overdose victims.
— When we first got on,
we had one overdose call.
That was in 2012.
And it was a young girl that had swallowed some pills.
That was the only overdose that we saw.
2014, it just…
completely blew up.
— The officers describe the city’s drug landscape
a lot like a game of whack-a-mole,
where for every person helped,
another drug dealing house is found,
another person overdoses.
In a single week last year,
three people fatally overdosed while awaiting court appearances.
— Very sad.
It is very, very sad.
We’ve talked to some of these people in cellblock,
like, “If you keep doing this, you’re going to die.”
And their response usually is, “I know.”
— Buffalo’s answer to its opiate crisis is the country’s first opiate intervention court.
— This court is again in session,
the Honorable Craig D. Hannah, judge presiding.
— Thank you, please be seated.
— After a person is arrested,
they’re interviewed, given a medical screening and sent to the courtroom of Judge Craig Hannah.
— All right, we’re going to start our opioid court calendar at this time.
— Jessica Seiler…
— 22-year-old Jessica Seiler has had multiple drug arrests
and is one of the court’s first participants.
— How are you?
— I’m good.
— Everything’s going well, they say.
That you’re coming up to your 30 days.
— But here, there is no mention of crimes committed,
and Hannah acts more as a life coach than a judge.
— Find someone you feel comfortable with and always have a discussion about it.
Because you don’t want to keep it bottled in.
— Hannah meets with dozens of people daily.
— The fact that you’re here and you know we’re going to talk to you
is gonna help you grow from the experience.
— Right.
And like last week,
I think it kept me motivated to stay clean.
— Unlike standard drug courts,
participants are put into treatment within days of their arrest.
They get their charges put on-hold for at least 30 days.
And when they complete the program, they get a certificate.
— Congratulations.
Why don’t we give him a round of applause?
You have successfully completed our intervention program.
Now I would like to give you this certificate of appreciation.
Keep up the good work.
— They all still face charges,
but the charges may be reduced or even dropped.
— A lot of addicts, they’ve burned all their bridges.
So they don’t have their family pulling for them.
They don’t have their girlfriend, or their boyfriend.
Now we’re that constant contact with them,
showing there’s actually someone that loves and cares for them
and wants them to do well, because that’s half of the battle.
— What made your light bulb go off?
What brought you to your personal philosophy
on the balance between treatment and incarceration?
— Well, it’s easy for me, I’m in recovery.
My drug of choice years ago was marijuana.
And sometimes we used to put cocaine in it.
And when I tell some of our participants that I’m an addict,
they look at me like I’m crazy.
I was like, “The only difference between me and you is that I’ve been clean for 20 years.”
But…
the addiction is still there.
— How successful do you feel you’ve been?
— Our goal is keeping our participants alive,
so we have a 100 percent success rate right now.
— No deaths?
— No deaths.
Our goal is to make sure they’re here the next day,
tomorrow, next week, next year.
We wanna make sure that they change their life
and get the help that they need.
— For Jessica Seiler,
help came in the form of court-mandated rehab and nightly curfew calls with court staff.
— Hi Meagan, it’s Jessica.
— She says she never would have sought treatment on her own.
— I remember, like, waking up in the morning
and being like…
literally, like my thought process was,
the only way I’m going to get clean is if I go to jail.
Like, because I just know myself.
— So you were almost hoping that you’d get arrested.
— I mean, nobody really hopes to get arrested.
But like, I just knew that nothing was ever going to change unless I did get arrested.
— Jessica started using heroin at 17.
She thinks more than 40 of her friends have died because of the drug,
and it’s cost her custody of her daughter.
— I used to shoot up in front of my daughter and take her on drug deals with me.
And at this point,
we were both living here at my grandparents house, and…
I disappeared for a couple weeks, and I just came back one day.
And they were just like, “Oh, your daughter doesn’t live here anymore.”
I was like, “What the fuck do you mean she doesn’t live here?”
Like, what?
Like, I just came home one day and she just wasn’t here anymore.
All of my guilt and shame are, like…
from, like…
sorry.
Like, all the guilt and shame I have is,
like, from the things I did as an addict to that little girl,
because she never asked for any of this.
— Why is there a different kind of urgency
with the opioid crisis and its related criminal justice proceedings
than there has been in previous drug courts and with different drug-related addiction issues?
— I think we learned a lot from the ‘70s and ‘80s,
when they just locked everyone up instead of trying to get them to treatment,
because if you lock people up,
they still have their drug problem when they get out.
— The opiate court is funded in part
by a Department of Justice grant approved during the Obama administration.
But the program launched under President Trump,
who campaigned on old fashioned law and order,
and whose Attorney General has profoundly conservative views on drug treatment.
— We need to say, as Nancy Reagan said, “Just say no!”
Don’t do it!
— You know you have colleagues who think that what you’re doing is crazy.
Do you worry then that it might mean that the model that you’ve started
isn’t able to spread elsewhere?
— People don’t look for alternatives to incarceration until it hits home.
And this is something that’s hitting a wide section of society.
— The success of Hannah’s court will be judged by how its graduates do.
Since I met her, Jessica Seiler has completed the opiate court program
and will face her criminal drug charges in early August.
— There is the drug world and then there’s the real world.
And I dunno, sometimes it gets to me
because I’m, like, so good at living in the drug world…
that I don’t know how to live in the real world.
— Are you confident you’ll be able to keep up?
— Somebody told me once,
like, never say that you’ve got this,
because as soon as you think you got this,
that’s the exact moment that you don’t got this.
You know?
So, like, am I confident?
I think so.
I hope so.
— It suddenly occurred to me
that I was, maybe, avoiding a territory that I needed to investigate,
which is the family.
And I avoided it for quite a while because it, to me, it was a danger and…
I was a little afraid of it.
Particularly around my old man, and all of that emotional territory.
I didn’t really wanna tip-toe in there.
And then I thought, well, maybe I’d better.
On Friday,
the FDA announced that they’ll begin forcing tobacco companies
to lower nicotine levels in cigarettes—
but declined to put any regulations whatsoever on the vaping industry.
It’s being billed as a push towards safer nicotine products.
But it’s also a huge boon to the e-cigarette manufacturers and legions of vapers
who feared the bureaucracy was going to clamp down.
And, according to America’s most prominent small government advocate,
that grateful constituency could form a powerful new voting bloc.
— God bless all of you.
God bless Wisconsin.
God bless America.
Thank you!
— Did you hear the one about how vapers won a Senate race in 2016?
— Thank you, vapers.
You made tonight possible.
I truly appreciate it—
I will be on your side.
— That’s Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin,
thanking vapors at his election night party.
He wasn’t supposed to win the election,
but he did.
On the campaign trail,
Johnson actively looked for support from vapers.
Grover Norquist, the president of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform,
thinks vaping didn’t just help win Johnson’s race.
He thinks vaping could help remake the Republican Party into the party of young people.
— So why do you care so much about vaping?
— Because vapers care so much about it and the government’s screwing with it.
I work with groups and individuals that are being picked on by the government,
with the government messing with them,
whether they’re raising their taxes, or pushing around in their business,
in their professional life.
— Grover thinks that being strongly pro-vape
can make conservatism the ideology of choice for freedom-loving young voters.
— And so you see a chance to sort-of grab some liberals maybe,
by talking about the fact that Democrats are trying to ban vaping?
— Oh, I have met with lifelong Democrats who said,
“Until this vaping is freed up from government threat,”
“I’m voting with the Republicans because the D’s just don’t get it on this issue.”
— So do you go into a lot of vaping shops in your life?
— Yes, yes.
— Okay, well, we’re gonna go in one now. — Not this one.
— This is like the Apple Store of vaping, it looks like.
— Vaping politics are outside the mainstream conversation in Washington.
— There’s a Captain Kangaroo flavor,
there’s a Scooby Doo flavor…
— But Democrats have, for the most part,
stood with anti-smoking groups that say vaping is a gateway to young people getting hooked on nicotine
and eventually becoming smokers.
The vaping industry, not surprisingly, disagrees.
And its chief lobbyist in Washington, Mike Hogan,
used to work for a Democratic senator.
I asked him what he thought of Grover’s theory.
— I’m terrified that he’s right.
When you find something that saves your life,
like vaping did mine,
you really are loyal to it, right?
So if you see the government threatening to shut down
the thing that you think gave you a new lease on life,
you’re gonna vote a single issue like that.
Democrats have been the leaders on harm reduction in condom use,
to prevent unwanted pregnancies and AIDS,
needle distribution,
but with tobacco, they’re an “abstinence only” party.
— No one is arguing vaping is safe.
The best you can get out of people like Mike Hogan
is that vaping is safer than cigarettes.
— Well, it definitely smells good inside a vape shop, I will say that.
— The big test for the industry comes in November 2018,
when a new FDA rule goes into effect.
It’ll require all vape manufacturers to submit scientific data
showing the potential impact of their products on both vapers and non-vapers.
That takes a lot of time and a lot of money.
And vaping companies say it will cripple their industry.
Grover doesn’t care if people vape or not.
What he cares about is whether vapers vote
and if giving them what they want will help conservatism appeal to young voters.
The CDC did a big report on vaping in America in 2014.
They found around 9 million vapers.
The average paper was between 18- and 44-years-old, white, and male.
So these are the majority of the electorate Grover and his supporters are talking about,
and no one can really be sure how much impact vaping really had on that election in Wisconsin.
A few Wisconsin Democrats told us that, despite Johnson’s victory night video,
they didn’t hear any buzz about vaping until after the election.
— I don’t believe the vaping community in Wisconsin
had any real impact of any kind on the U.S. Senate race.
Ron Johnson was probably just checking a box to take care of some pet issue of Grover Norquist’s.
— But Grover is convinced,
and he’s a pretty influential guy in Republican circles.
— Can we do a Belgian waffle?
All right, we’re gonna do Belgian waffle for Grover.
“Totally toffee.”
— So whether or not Johnson owes his job to being Senator Vape,
it’s likely we’ll see more Republicans picking up the mantle.
— That taste like freedom to you?
— Freedom.
Heavily taxed freedom, but freedom.

Vaping Vote & Scaramucci Is Out: VICE News Tonight Full Episode (HBO)

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