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Wisconsin wakes up here.
Back to Daybreak with Brian and Jamie.
Good morning.
It is time for headlines.
Let's look at the war, which is in its eighth week.
First headline at 20, at least 21 people have been executed in Iran and 4,000 arrested since the start of its war with the U.S.
and Israel, according to the United Nations Human Rights Office.
The executions were carried out amid Iran's crackdown on dissent, in particular through national security-related charges, the UN Human Rights Chief said this morning.
He's so classy.
The United Arab Emirates will withdraw from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
You may know it as OPEC on May 1st.
The UAE's state news agency WAM reported the decision aligns with the United Arab Emirates long-term strategic and economic vision and the development of its energy sector including accelerating investment in domestic energy production according to this statement from the UAE.
spring's eternal oh well that's stuff we needed to know from Iran but what about us we need to know right here
It's a wake-up call in more ways than one.
Time for some sh** you need to know.
All right, well, in the ballroom that will not die news, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally asked a federal judge to overturn the judge's own ruling that blocked construction of the White House ballroom.
In a nine page filing late Monday, Blanche argued that the shooting at the White House Correspondents Association dinner is proof that the ballroom is necessary for the president's safety and construction must be allowed to proceed.
Okay.
federal just do the news Brian okay federal judge Richard Leon imposed all I have a conversation excuse me while I talk to myself federal judge Richard Leon imposed a preliminary injunction earlier this month you know this that paused above ground construction until the administration obtains congressional approval well construction of a presidential bunker beneath the east wing was not subject to the injunction because
They want to bury them down there too.
A federal appellate court now reviewing the case then allowed all construction to continue temporarily and will hear further arguments in early June.
The lawsuit against construction was initially filed late last year by the Trust for Historic Preservation.
It said Monday that it had no intention of dropping its lawsuit, which quote, endangers no one and which respectfully asked the administration to follow the law.
That is a crazy request.
Can't do
Blanche is filing as Judge Leon for an indicative ruling, essentially a request for Leon to consider the impact of the dinner shooting and state whether he would lift the injunction or throw out the case if it were sent back to him.
We can't I can't do this anymore.
Republican Rand Paul, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee said Monday he would introduce legislation to permit ballroom construction.
How have we kept our president safe?
for 250 years without a ballroom?
I'm assuming probably, you probably don't want that many people down there.
I'm assuming if you have your tunnels full, it's probably not a good day in Ukraine.
And I'm not trying to be facetious.
I'm just saying that if the tunnels are full, it's probably a bad day in that ongoing war.
Another war perpetuated by a country, mind you.
But this is obviously, this is not about security.
at this point.
I don't care what this administration wants to tell
The amount of outlandish decoration that has been put in the Oval Office and all over the White House.
And the fact that he does, as you mentioned earlier in the show, Jamie, he idolizes kings and dictators, and he wants this for himself.
He wants his own palace of Versailles in America.
We don't need it.
We don't want it.
And he's trying to break the law by getting it, but it will not go away.
I mean, if you're looking at, if you're taking out the security issue and you're looking at simply the ego part of it, you're also looking at bypassing all of our constitutional checks and norms.
And I don't care who you are.
If you are somebody who is a more conservative voter, that should be very important to you because in this case, even though this ballroom is being described as privately funded and it's coming from.
but you're right, it's absolutely not.
Because taxpayers are gonna have to be part of the conversation because there is still security infrastructure, there's still federal land, there's still gonna be long-term maintenance on this.
So to even get the thing up and going, it's going to take millions and millions of dollars, which they have not completely accounted for, no matter what they tell you, it has not all been completely raised.
So it is going to have to come from taxpayer money.
So essentially, we're buying the ballroom and not to mention the fact,
that the White House is already owned by the American people.
That's why there's checks and balances.
Yes, it's not his house.
Right.
It's not his house.
It's not Mar-a-Lago.
Constitution specifically states, the law states, that there must be open bidding on all government contracts to find the best deal.
They got a no bid contract on something else, and then they got this thing too.
So there's a lot more coming out about this, but it is ego driven, and it is ridiculous.
Yeah.
But there's more stuff we
There is more stuff you need to know.
We're going to bring it right back here to the state of Wisconsin because this is a fascinating story.
I do love gerrymandering.
I do.
A second three panel judge yesterday dismissed a challenge to Wisconsin's congressional maps, ruling it has no authority to act on the claims without further input from the state supreme court.
Now, in this particular ruling, it was stated, until the state supreme court says other
non-justiciable and non-con-isable, I knew that was going to be a hard one for me, under
Wisconsin
Now, the law firm that brought this suit said it would immediately appeal the ruling to the state supreme court that that lawsuit was brought by law forward.
The decision is one of two cases that have been under consideration by separate panels composed of three judges from different counties,
appointed by the Liberal-led state Supreme Court.
The lawsuits, which were filed in July of last year, followed multiple failed attempts to redraw the maps, which are currently represented by six Republicans and two Democrats.
Now, Law Forward is representing a group called Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy.
And the case essentially contends that the current maps amount to an anti-competitive gerrymander.
Republican members, of course, of the state's congressional
delegation and others want to dismiss this lawsuit.
I wonder why.
The state's high court issued orders November 25th, concluding that the two legal challenges constituted a quote, an action to challenge the apportionment of any congressional or state legislative district under a 2011 state law that requires these challenges to be heard by a panel appointed by the Supreme Court.
This was actually the first time that the 2011 law had been invoked in any sort of redistricting case though.
So we're just making history all over.
the place with this gerrymandering argument.
Here's the thing, you have a solution here, right?
The governor has laid out a solution.
There was a special session that was called two weeks ago now,
Governor Evers would like to have permanent maps put into place.
So you have...
an option here.
You have the option to negotiate with the Democrats to make sure that maps are fair to represent all of the constituents.
Now, if there's a reason you don't want to do that, that might say more about where you think your politics are and who supports you than anything.
But there's an option.
Don't just use the, it's unfair.
Right.
That's a second grader's defense.
Right.
Tell us what your reasoning is for not wanting these maps
permanent.
Yeah, and you can say, Well, what about population shifts and data?
Well, the population shifts are mostly going to come from your major cities, Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, bigger, bigger towns.
The population shifts in rural areas, probably are not going to increase.
They may decrease a little.
But what's what's the real reason?
And the real reason is we all know
Holding on to power
yes absolutely and to be completely fair because I know we have one other story this three panel This this panel of three judges did not say that the maps are fair.
They also didn't say they're unfair It's they simply said we aren't aren't going to decide this yet Which puts everything back in the hands of the state Supreme Court Which by the way will be a 5-2 majority once Chris Chris Taylor is sworn in
He's in the crosshairs of the president We talked about this a little bit yesterday, but now the FCC which is led by a Republican ally of Donald Trump
is trying to go after the licenses of the parent company, which is Disney, which you know has a new CEO.
So Disney's ABC is hereby directed to file license renewals for all of their licensed TV stations within 30 days.
In other words, by May 28, 2026, the FCC said in an order published yesterday afternoon, the order is not going to affect local stations right away.
It's just the start of a protracted legal process.
But nevertheless, the FCC order is an extraordinary escalation.
We know the Trump administration is very thin-skinned and cannot take a joke.
We know that they sued CBS and CBS acquiesced.
They sued them over the editing of not a Trump interview, which was edited heavily the other day, but of an old Kamala Harris interview they gave in.
That led to, if you want to connect the dots, that led to Colbert being gone.
Donald Trump has gone after Jimmy Kimmel before.
He was suspended last year for a little bit and came back.
So far, Disney is standing firm and saying, no, we are not canceling Jimmy Kimmel's show.
That was a joke.
It was a joke in the context of a fake roast.
You don't have to like the joke.
But that is it is definitely not but the weaponization of the FCC is just another attempt And we're gonna talk about we're gonna put talking again about the weaponization of the justice system in just a few minutes
for
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All facts, no fiction.
It's Daybreak with Brian and Jamie.
Well, that case completely fell apart because there was nothing there.
Well now they have decided they're going to try to indict him again and in fact have indicted him and have issued an arrest warrant for James Comey.
You go, that name sounds familiar, Brian.
Sure, he was the director of the FBI.
Did he cost Hillary Clinton the election?
We can argue that another day.
But he was also a guy who would not completely pledge allegiance to Donald Trump, which made Donald Trump very angry.
And Donald Trump does not forget.
So
A year ago, like Jamie said, he posted a picture on Twitter when he was walking on the beach.
Now, it wasn't clear if he just saw this picture.
I don't think he made the shells.
It seemed as if he just came across this.
Someone had arranged seashells in four numbers, eight, six, little space,
four,
Listen, I understand your confusion, but yes, we must clear it up.
That's all they have to do.
This is pressing, a pressing matter.
They're saying this is constituted a threat against Donald Trump's life, that 86 can be interpreted into kill.
Now, James Comey said, well, I took it down because I didn't know that.
And if you've ever worked in a restaurant, you know, 86 just means we're out of it, dump it, ditch it.
So, I would, when I first saw this picture back when it first came out, I thought it meant dump Trump.
You have independent thought.
Okay.
You're not always looking to carry out a grudge.
You're not a whiny little baby.
You're a grown woman who can think for herself.
So this is a three-page indictment.
Comey faces one charge of threats against the president and successors, one charge of transmitting a threat in interstate commerce.
This could not be more transparent.
Now, I saw Caitlin Collins, who you know is a great friend of the president from CNN.
He despises Caitlin Collins.
Every single one of them, which is what this administration said Pam Bondi was essentially getting fired for because she was so weak on being able to prosecute these types of cases.
You can't prosecute cases in front of a judge that have no merit.
Juris are not going to be able to find any evidence that there was any...
Wrongdoing in these particular cases this one is not going to be any different I mean, it's just not and all this is is basically Trying to get some sort of rep retribution.
That's what this is this again going back to a conversation We were just having a few minutes ago about Jimmy Kimmel and ABC This is another form of censorship, but this one is going to play out in the courts and that's it's never gonna
put out video statements saying listen I I took this down right when somebody said that it could possibly be interpreted that way I took it down this is not this is not my intent there's no chance this goes anywhere and so you know we've got our new acting attorney general trying his best taking his big swing and it's
Then
No, it's supposed to be completely independent.
It's absolutely 100% independent.
And I had a friend ask me yesterday because Janine Pirro keeps getting these cases thrown at her.
And I had a good friend ask me the other day, if she keeps losing, will she end up going back to Fox pretty soon?
I
Roger makes a good point, and I saw this image yesterday as a reminder.
A few years ago Donald Trump posted a photo of a truck flying a bunch of Trump flags with a bounding gag Joe Biden in the back with the header 8646.
As Joe Biden was president at the time using the same logic that the DOJ is using, couldn't Trump be arrested or indicted for the same kind of crime?
Very good.
Very good.
And then Don says he's listening on WMDX, electing a really old Republicans is dumb.
Perhaps we are going to talk about guns
and bullets and small-time law.
I'm Brian Noonan.
All right, listen to this.
A California-based gun dealer, a small-town police chief, and a scam to import illegal armor-piercing ammunition.
Now, that does sound like all the ingredients for a low-budget movie.
All those components, though, came together in Wadsworth County.
Now, the gun dealer has agreed to plead guilty to federal charges.
John Dietrich is an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, whose work has revealed injustices and wrongdoing.
Recently, he published a fascinating project behind the gun, which is ongoing.
That reframe the issue of firearm injuries and deaths focusing on gun owners.
He's been covering this story and he joins us now.
John, good to have you and always a pleasure to
talk to you.
I don't know where to start.
So I'm going to let you just give us the background on this story because it is wild.
It is a wild story.
So yeah, thanks for the intro.
Good to be with you, Brian, Jamie.
So yeah, this is so the backstory here is this criminal and cover federal court from time to time get in there.
I used to cover it more and it's been drawing me back lately for cases just like this.
So yeah, the basic
scenario is laid out by federal prosecutors is that these two brothers
Darren and Jacob Dowd who are from California from the Sacramento area are gun dealers, you know, they have a federal firearms licensee and they were working with somebody basically a scam to work with a local police chief in the in the town of Lynn, which is a small town in Walworth County and it's It's not a big town and but what they did is law enforcement can request
certain armaments, certain ammunition, things like that.
And the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms will give exceptions for local law enforcement.
And so what these brothers were doing was working with this police chief to say, hey, can you put in and say your town needs like a lot of armor piercing rounds, which, you know, it's a small, it's a small department and just a few cops.
And I mean, like a half a million rounds
and,
you know,
It was absurd.
ATF sniffed it out, you know, and I mean, it was sort of captain obvious, but I mean, credit on them that they didn't just sort of rubber stamp it.
It went through.
So the deal didn't go through.
Um, but, uh, but yeah, there was, there was like a middleman.
I think, you know, the police chief's, uh, college roommate was kind of the go between to the gun.
It says stuff of movies, really.
I mean, for our listeners, right, you mentioned the hundreds of thousands, even millions of rounds of armor-piercing ammunition, but for anybody who doesn't understand the inner workings of our local small police departments especially, explain to us just how unusual this actually was that ATF would have sniffed this out immediately.
Yeah, I mean so again when you're looking at you know at how many rounds you know first of all the kind of You know the kind of ammunition it's just not needed that often and when you don't have that many you know Officers you're not gonna need that many rounds.
You know these rounds are really you know, they're they're Expensive because they're hard to get it.
The thing is that what's interesting here is that they're not illegal
you know, to possess, but you have to be able to import them.
And these were coming from Bosnia-Herzegovina.
That's where the importer, the ammunition maker was located.
So in order to bring that in, you need that, you know, the special exception under ATF rules.
And so again, that's carved out for law enforcement.
But I mean, even for a department like, you know, Madison or Milwaukee, I mean, that's a lot of rounds and it's specialty rounds.
So those wouldn't be rounds that regular cops
wouldn't necessarily be using all time.
This would be more like the tactical or SWAT team.
You know, things of that nature that they would need the specialized rounds.
Certainly not a small department, you know, of just a few cops.
He's an investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
You can read all of John's work at jsonline.com.
All right, Lynn is a small town in Warwick County.
We've got two
Arms dealers from California.
How do these how do these groups get together where you know because it seems Seems like there should be other small departments somewhere between Sacramento and Lynn that they could have talked to
Yeah, you know, I think it's easy, you know, you haven't covered Courts and these kind of things for a while It's always like you know who you know and geography might be less important as the connection that you have and so there's an unnamed source who acted as the go-between
Um, and, um, an individual who's not charged and, you know, usually when somebody's just got their initials in there and they might be, you know, cooperating and, and, um, and that's maybe where, you know, when they investigated this, that's what they focused on.
But that individual has a connection between the police chief.
chief bushy and the gun dealers, the Dowds in California.
And so how does that happen?
That's not really spelled out in court documents, exactly how they met each other, other than the police chief, who's no longer the police chief in Lynn, and I should be really clear, is not charged with anything right now.
He does have a lawyer, he's refused comment, but the brothers have both pled guilty and are coming into court just in the Eastern
of Wisconsin and are moving through the process in federal court in Milwaukee, but the chief hasn't been charged, nor has anybody else been charged.
We don't know, ultimately, would they be or not, but that's the connection.
If somebody knew the chief, somebody knew, and again, there's not, suffice to say, I haven't seen this kind of arrangement happen, at least show up in federal court that often.
So it's not just like any department or any chief would do this.
And I think what was interesting though, Chief Bush, in the town of Lynn...
You know meeting, you know, I talked to the chairman of the town of Lynn and he was describing how the police chief, you know came in and you know, he was asking him.
He was like laying out this, you know, arrangement.
They didn't really understand what was going on because the kickback here, right?
The money that was provided by the brothers was ostensibly to be used for police equipment.
So like a new squad car, things of that nature, not.
necessarily, haven't seen in court documents, indications that the chief himself was enriched, but Moore was helping his department.
So for the town of Lynn, it's like, oh, okay, I don't really understand that.
But that sounds like he didn't really lay out what was happening.
But that was the play.
Yeah, well, I mean, it was all in process.
And then the feds came in and put up, you know, they didn't bring in the ammunition in the end, but that was the deal that, you know, he had told the chief that, you know, the board that I'm going to balance my budget and get more things that, you know, that you guys can't afford to give me.
So, but the whole process didn't play out because the ammunition never made it in the country because the ATF shut it down.
Yeah, no.
Yeah, it's a sales thing.
Yeah, they have a gun store in Sacramento, and they were selling these.
And these rounds, depending, it'd be a few bucks, to five bucks a round.
I mean, depending on the scarcity of ammunition, we just went through the pandemic where ammunition was really scarce, and this would even be more scarce.
So the market would do, but no, it looks like financially these guys were looking to make a buck that was their business.
I mean, there's also indications in there about them doing other things like impersonating the ATF, which there's a photo in the criminal complaint of Jacob Dowd in ATF garb.
And they actually would like pretend this according to the search warrants.
Plead to be ATF agents and like go and take people's guns and claim that they were teasing them on behalf of the government.
You know, things of this nature.
No doubt that caught the attention of ATF who was investigating them.
They're not charged with that right now, but you know, kind of putting a thumb in the, you know, in the eye, so to speak.
He's investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Jsonline.com is where you can read everything.
And I want to get into behind the gun a little bit, but before we do that, you kind of mentioned it a little, but is there any indication that anybody else, the sheriff especially, who is not charged now with any crimes, are you hearing any rumblings that this case is not completely over?
Well, I mean, this took, yes, I think it's safe to say this took like six months for Jacob to come into court with a plea.
And Darren, the other brother, fled out a while ago.
And that happens in federal court.
Things move in slow motion.
But it also turns out sometimes that more information is developed, new sources, and so forth.
I don't think the book is closing it that you know the prosecutors are mom and they always you know they just usually are pretty careful about this.
I can't by DOJ rules talk about some of these things.
But I don't know that the chief is totally in the clear yet.
And so I would say that stay tuned on this.
I don't have an indication.
I'm not trying to be cheeky about saying he is.
I know that he's going to be charged or not.
I really don't.
It's just how long this has played out.
I think it bears watching to see what comes next.
Yeah, so I did this through, yeah, I work at Journal Sentinel and then I went and did a fellowship at Marquette University at the O'Brien.
fellowship for public service journalism.
And what we wanted to do was look at gun deaths and gun injuries in a different way.
I've covered this issue for, you know, more than 20 years at the Journal Sentinel, but it just felt like a lot of the lines were sort of like on repeat and distressingly and depressingly.
you know, on replete that, you know, the narratives are well known.
But what I did was I looked at it from, you know, as Brian, as you alluded to at the beginning, from a perspective of the gun owners, tell me something different.
And what I found, first of all, I looked at statistics statewide and looked at gun deaths, including suicides, because it's important to note, and people might not know this, but seven of 10 gun deaths in Wisconsin are suicides.
And, you know, that isn't always talked about.
It isn't included in, you know, when we use that phrase, gun violence or suicide may not be commonly understood to be in there.
But when you include suicide and you adjust for population, the map looks a lot different in Wisconsin.
I mean, Milwaukee is still very high for gun deaths, but there's smaller counties like Wood County and other counties up north that are small that have a different gun deaths look differently there.
And gun owners, as I leaned into this, and have some really interesting solutions, and they care very much about the issue.
I think it turns out that people who are maybe more on the sort of gun control side have not seen gun right side.
They haven't really come together as much.
And we're actually seeing more of that now.
I'm more hopeful about this issue than I was before I started the project.
Well, it's a really enlightening project and I urge people on both sides of the gun issue to go check out John series behind the gun at jsonline.com But you also the you didn't just write these and then hope that people will read them You've been having a lot of live events behind the different sections I remember talking to you about the one with about Suicides and now you just had one in March as well.
Correct.
You have one coming up
That's right.
Well, we had one in Wausau.
Gosh, that's been two years now.
that's been that long, but we called that one at the intersection of mental health and firearms.
Up in that part of the state in Wausau, there's, you know, that is more of a suicide issue.
So we talked about separation of lethal means in times of distress, what that looks like, who you could turn to, the gun shop project where you can bring firearms, no questions asked to a gun store and have them safe, keep them for a while, those kind of things.
And then in March, we had an event, again, a first of its kind called the Milwaukee Gun Owner Safety Summit.
We had it at
Prince Hall at 12th and North and Milwaukee.
We brought people together there to say, Hey, can we have a different dialogue?
You know, often when things happen around firearms and firearms deaths, especially in Milwaukee, the, the line will be, you know, that you often will hear is let's put the guns down.
Can we put the guns down?
Which is a fine job, but as.
Unfortunately, John, we're out of time, but
to talk to you.
Look forward to having you again, John.
Wisconsin Wakes Up Here.
Act to Daybreak with Brian and Jamie.
If I came to you Jamie and Parker and Frank and I said hey, I got a great idea for a show out We're gonna go have a couple drinks you would say oh that sounds good, and I would say and we're gonna kink and draw This is a Jamie pointed this out, so I'm gonna let you tell I
I don't know where you get some of your
It is something.
It is something.
So King can draw is actually a session that's being held at bars across the country.
The event is part of a
practice, especially right now around the DC area, where people shell out a few bucks to draw live naked models at a bar.
No commitment, no experience necessary.
It's just cash.
For
So the founder of King can draw, which I just love the name, says that it's a space for creativity, self expression and appreciation of the human form in a way that's respectful, open and completely judgment free.
Now she is actually at this point led 43 different people situated into three
groups that face each other with different models through these warm-up exercises.
And for about two minutes, you keep your pencil just moving on a page, and then in the very first round, you draw only with your non-dominant hand.
So you draw... Well, you're doing
We don't ask questions at Kink and Draw.
Oh, I do.
So you draw the negative space and what's everything around the model, and then between each instruction...
and the models are moved into a new pose.
So sometimes they'll slink into the split.
Sometimes they'll put their legs up over their heads in time with lo-fi beats to the live DJ.
Parker, do you have any lo-fi beats on tap?
It
will model.
don't livestream the video.
No, there'll just be still photos.
Artistic.
it
Can
imagine walking down Main Street seeing Uncle Bucks and you look in the window just
There's a kink-and-draw
like some low beats?
I
low-fi beats.
I've got some low-fi beats for you.
Would Bob Ross approve of this?
That's my question.
Oh, they're
happy little birds,
Oh, PBS would not approve of this, of the lo-fi beats in Bob Ross.
Newton.
I'm Jamie Martin.
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