Jon Tester

Hey, everyone.

Welcome to Grounded with Jon Tester and Marisa Giorgio.

It is Friday, September 11th.

How you doing, Senator?

Hang

on, John Mappin, just to be clear, it sounds like Officer Tatum's perfectly happy for you to reveal whatever it is you're suppressing.

So why don't you just tell him, just say what you're talking about.

Yeah.

perspective.

To

being a sex trafficker, John? Can you explain why she tries to link Erica Kirk to being a sex trafficker if she thinks that Erica Kirk is just, you know, it's just question and concern.

Let me put this in

Like, you need...

Or it's Jon Tester.

You need sometimes people who are more moderate in your party if you're going to be able to win a majority.

You know, how do you explain that Josh Shapiro is so very popular in Pennsylvania?

In Montana, Steve Bullock was giving Republicans heartburn.

John Tester held sway.

Steve Bullock was the popular Democratic populist governor, and Montana had a habit of electing Democratic populists in a Republican state.

Bullock had won statewide as governor.

[laughs] Uh, and realized, yeah, we have actually a lot of taxpayer support to agriculture, but it's not reaching really the agriculture that feeds our communities for the most part, that so much of that on the ag side of the farm bill is really just going to a handful of commodities that go to, you know, ethanol fuel and livestock feed in many cases.

Um, so you know, this organic farmer from my home state, Jon Tester, ran for US Senate, super inspiring campaign.

I mean, you know, from a town of 300 people, he'd been a schoolteacher and then the state legislature, and he unseated a three-term incumbent talking about how organic farming helped save his family farm, and we needed to move to renewable energy, and this is how our state's economy could move from extractive industry to these more renewable ways of living.

Um, so I made this big career shift at 24 from country music to working for US Senator Jon Tester, um, as a legislative correspondent for agriculture and natural resources, 'cause I saw that he had ideas about how to remove these barriers to people, you know, stewarding land and, and growing healthy food for their place.

Um, and that's really when I got to know the group of farmers that I ultimately ended up, um, writing about, working with on Little Underground, and then my second book, Grain by Grain, as well.

Okay, so Lentil, Lentil Underground came first.

Um, and then I got to know Bob Quinn really well while I was out doing my fieldwork.

Um, and it was actually on a, a farm tour [laughs] um, after Lentil Underground came out when he was like, "Hey, Liz, you know, I've been thinking about writing about, you know, the experience I've had converting our family farm to organic and, and working with heritage grains and whole wheat, and would you wanna team up on a book?"

Do you think they just give this money up and then they're like, oh, you know what? I don't expect any favors for it.

Or do you think that this money buys them entry into the senator's office? LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman recently gave the maximum donations of 6,600 each to the campaigns of Senator Jon Tester, Montana, Jackie Rosen, Nevada, and Bob Casey in Pennsylvania, according to Federal Election Commission records.

And I'll be reaching out to Jackie Rosen later on today to see if she's going to return Jeffrey Epstein's buddy's money.

We'll see what she has to say.