Breaking News from Pod Save America - BREAKING: Spy Scandal ROCKS Trump World

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Tommy and Ben react to the shocking meeting between traitor and far-right extremist Jonathan Pollard, a former US Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel, and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ben, it takes a lot for a headline about the Trump administration to shock me these days, but this morning it happened. The New York Times reported that Donald Trump's ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, invited a literal traitor to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem for a meeting. I'm talking about Jonathan Pollard, who in the 1980s served as a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy's anti-terrorist Alert Center and was arrested for selling top secret SCI, U.S. government information to Israel, and to this day, is totally unrepentant about it. it. Here's a clip from a 60-minute segment on Pollard from 1988.

Pollard, a Jewish-American, used his position as a naval intelligence analyst to spy for Israel. For 17 months, he smuggled thousands of top-secret documents from U.S. Naval Intelligence headquarters in Maryland and carried them in a large suitcase weekend after weekend to his Israeli spymasters who paid him handsomely for turning over to them some of this nation's most closely held secrets. In 1987, he was sentenced to life in prison. His wife Anne is serving five years as an accessory after the fact. Love an old school 60 Minutes clip.

So in 1985, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger, testified that Poller had, quote, passed to his Israeli handlers a quantity of documents great enough to occupy a space six feet by six feet by 10 feet. I've seen it described as the equivalent of 30 filing cabinets worth of classified information, and he was paid for his services. What Pollard disclosed or gave to the Israelis is not fully known, is still classified. But various news reports say he gave up information about U.S. collection methods, signals intelligence, satellite photos, and information about the Soviet Union.

I've seen former CIA officials allege that the Israelis then pass some of that information along to the Soviets in some sort of exchange. There's also, some people also believe that Pollard sold information to Pakistan or other countries. But, you know, the sense is this guy is like he portrays himself as a patriot who was doing because of his love for Israel. But there's a sense in the intel world that he was just a scumbag who was trying to get money. Pollard served 30 years to prison before getting parole in 2015. He was barred from leaving the U.S. for five years. But in December of 2020, Pollard flew home to Israel where he was met on the tarmac by Israeli Prime Minister, BB Netanyahu,

and later given a parade and a government pension. Ben, I'll pause there. it's just like it's absolutely outrageous Mike Huckley would take this meeting. How could this possibly happen, do you think? I mean, first of all, one of the very important facts of the Pollard case that we lived through a little bit in the Obama years because that's when his sentence was ending and the Israelis were constantly lobbying to kind of get him released early instead of when parole came, is that he's, nobody disputes the facts of this case, right?

Nobody's like, oh, he didn't do it. You know, he was wrongfully accused. he proudly acknowledges being one of the worst spies in American history for a foreign government, right? Full stop. Even if he only did it out of loyalty to Israel and not some of the other charges that have been made against him. So the scale of this, this treason, essentially, is not in any kind of dispute here, right? So it's not like a Mike Huckabee could be like, I think this guy was wrongfully imprisoned or something. He knows full well who he is. Huckabee also used to lobby for Pollard to be released, right?

So he's got a history here of essentially siding with Pollard over the United States intelligence community. And I think part of what's so deeply fucked up about this beyond just the welcoming of a trader into the U.S. embassy is what U.S. interests is served by this, you know? Exactly. Like, who is Mike Huckabee working for as ambassador? You know, you are there to represent the, you know, because some people might say, well, you know, he's trying to, you know, get along with, you know, everybody in Israel or something. Which is, by the way, not true because, you know, he's not trying to get along with anybody who's to his left, you know. But there's not, like, any U.S. interests advanced by this. This is just like Mike Huckabee's personal interest in embracing a kind of cause-celebra.

a far-right personality in Israel, and it makes it seem like his role as ambassador is not to represent the people of the United States and the interests of the United States. It's like his role as ambassador is to kind of code switch and identify with like the Israeli right-wing politics. And it's everything that people find kind of distasteful about aspects of this relationship that has become so dysfunctional in one-sided where all of the expectation is on the United States to essentially, you know, not only support whatever Israel does, but even if they spy on us and steal our secrets and give it to other governments, like, we welcome that. You know, we, we, we, we embrace that person. It's completely bananas. And it runs, we've been covering the kind of split in

MAGA over Israel. This should go right into that split here where, I mean, let's put aside the anti-Semitic garbage from like the Nick Fuentes of the world. But the true America firsters, you're just like, I don't get this relationship. Why are we shoveling money out the door to these people that ignore us and violate international law, et cetera. Well, yeah, why would we welcome a spy for their government that stole American secrets into the U.S. ambassadors? It just shows you how kind of dysfunctional this whole thing has gotten. I think it could cause some problems for Trump.

I do too. I think hopefully it will cause some problems for Huckabee. I mean, Huckabee is an extremist when it comes to U.S. Israel policy. His extremists working for him. He doesn't believe in a two-state solution. He calls the West Bank, Judea, Samaria, which is what, you know, right-wing is where he he's called it. He's pro-settler to the point where he refuses to help out Americans who have been attacked by violent settlers in the West Bank. We've talked a couple times in the show about this 16-year-old

Palestinian-American kid named Muhammad Ibrahim, who's being held in Israeli detention. He's been charged with throwing rocks on an empty street. It's like bullshit, right? And this kid is potentially dealing with life-threatening health issues, and the embassy has not lifted a finger to help him. It didn't help out our friend Jasper Nathaniel, who was attacked by settlers, one of the reporting trip in the West Bank. And so, you know, Ben, it's notable that this Pollard meeting was apparently kept off Huckabee's schedule. The White House says they were not aware of the meeting before it happened and were alarmed by it. And also, like, Pollard is to the right of Netanyahu, to the right of Trump. He's out there talking shit about Trump. He recently called Trump, quote, a madman who has

literally sold us down the drain for Saudi gold. I'm sure that will go over well. So like Pollard claims he spied for Israel because the U.S. wasn't providing Israel intelligence that they were supposed to under some security agreement, intelligence sharing agreement. It's not, I don't believe it at all. Like there's other reports that Pollard wanted to be an international arms dealer. There's reports that, you know, he's just sort of like a serial fabulous and he would lie all the time and told people he was a spy in college and then like would make up bullshit lies to tell his colleagues all the time. He also pulled his wife in on this, on this espionage and tried to get her to do. destroy the documents or hide them at their home once the FBI was onto them. And she did time.

And then he summarily divorced her after she got out of prison. So she's just a fucking terrible guy. And the Mike Huck could be a piece of this, though, is really important because, like, there's this kind of split that we've seen in MAGA on Israel, where Trump, you know, he kind of does the pro-Israel thing, but he seems to prefer the Gulf Arabs. You know, he seemed far more comfortable with MBS at the White House than he was with Netanyahu. Netanyahu did not get a dinner like the one that MBS just got. So that's what Trump cares about.

Like political interests, sure, I'll support Israel a little bit, but I really care of these Gulf Arabs. Then you have Mike Hockaby, who's from the kind of evangelical Christian wing of the Republican Party that is like to the right of just about anybody on Israel because of their kind of weird belief that we need the Israelis to control all this land so that the rapture can happen. But it pushes him so far to the right that he's out of step with Trump's positions. So when he's calling the West Bank, Judean Samara, that is endorsing a greater Israel view that essentially that is Israel's land. The Palestinians should get out. You have an Israeli government that has voted through the Knesset recently again to annex the West Bank.

And importantly, when they voted in the Knesset to annex the West Bank, J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio were like critical of that and said, look, this is not helpful. Well, what about your ambassador, you know, Secretary Rubio or National Archivist Rubio? like your ambassador is not where you are. He's in a different place than you are. And then meanwhile, you've got like the America Firsters, and then you've got the Tucker Carlson's, and then you've got all the way to Nick Frontas, right? We should be out of bounds, obviously.

But this tension between, like, having, like, Huckabee and this kind of, like, hard, right pro-Israel representation and the actual policy of the Trump administration are now at odds with each other, and this polar thing indicates that because the only rationale for doing this, is one, Mike Huckabee wanting to burnish his bona fides as a kind of hard-ass, you know, pro-Johnathan Pollard guy. But also I saw some like, you know, quotes about like, well, he's just

trying to like make sure that he has a line open to the Israeli right. First of all, he already has that. After Smotrich and Ben-Givir, the two most extreme ministers in the Israeli government were sanctioned by five European countries, Huckabee had them into his office, right, just to stick it to the rest of the world. But he doesn't need to like, you know, play footsie with Jonathan Pollard, to know what's going on in Israel, right? It's ridiculous. It's absurd. We should know, like, Pollard is running for the Knesset, I believe. I'm not sure what party he's in, but again, he's like a far-right guy. We'll get into that in one second. So just like to steal man the pro-Pollard argument for a minute, and this is,

you know, there's not a lot here. I mean, I think his defenders will correctly point out that Pollard is the only spy who spied for an ally of the U.S. that got 30 years, like I think the normal sentence is like eight years. There's an open question, I think then, about what if any role anti-Semitism played in whether there was sort of collective scrutiny or unfairness towards Jews in the intelligence community or in the national security world in the government after the Pollard case. Now, Pollard was asked about this in one of the interviews that I watched today because I binged Pollard content all day until you and I got to talk.

And the question was basically like this guy asked him, a lot of people claim you were the reason Jews deal with this or like anti-Semitic dual loyalty charge. in the United States now. Here's a verbatim answer for Jonathan Pollard then. I don't give a damn because as far as I'm concerned, I'm a Jew first, always. And if those Jews who consider me or considered my actions to be a threat to their perceived loyalty as American citizens,

I'd like to take this opportunity to say, I don't care. I also saw that Mike Wallace in that 60 Minutes interview asked him, like he was responding to Pollard suggesting that he was singled out because he was Jewish. And Wallace was like, well, three of the prosecutors were Jewish, like the judge is Jewish. And Pollard goes, and there were capos also during the concentration camps. Like crazy, crazy shit.

I mean, so anyway, like the Israelis also, we should note, they initially lied and claimed that he was like part of a rogue operation. This was some like off the book spying thing. I think they initially returned only a fraction of the documents that Pollard actually stole. The Israeli government officially admitted Pollard was a spy in 1988. And that began this like series of lobbying. efforts by the Israeli government to get various presidents to return him early.

Apparently, Bill Clinton got pretty close, but I think George Tenet, then his CIA director, threatened to resign and sort of the senior leadership of the CIA. So we dropped the idea. I remember this idea getting shut down early in the Obama year's been. But then I think it was revived in like 2014, right, when John Kerry was trying to revive diplomatic talks. Now, 2014 would have been one year early, so I'm not sure that would have been. I mean, it would have been, I guess, a diplomatic win, but it didn't do much for Jonathan

Pollard. It also didn't happen. Yeah. First of all, this came up twice. Both times Obama made a failed effort. The first term when you're there and then the second term with carried. I always thought this was kind of a strange thing, though, right? Like, why should you have to give a convicted spy up in order to try to get like a Middle East peace deal? It kind of showed that B.B. wasn't in it to get a two-state solution. B.B. was in it to extract as much as he could during a quote-unquote peace process before it all collapsed. So I always thought this was kind of a bullshit linkage that was drawn. Then there's a secondary concern that would come up because I remember where I would ask people that we worked with in the intelligence community. And this gets to the sentence. What they said

is like he got like a huge sentence because of the scale of the shit that he gave away. It wasn't because he was Jewish or he spied for Israel. It's because of the voluminous amount of secrets and sensitivity of those secrets that he gave up. Casper Weinberger wrote like a 47 page damage assessment memo that was classified that the judge was allowed to look at and nobody else was. And that's when he issued the 30-year sentence. So apparently whatever he saw in that memo was like pretty bad. That's exactly right.

And then this dual loyalty stuff is really important. I don't like it for any Americans. It used to drive me fucking nuts, by the way, that it is far less prevalent for Jewish people than it is for like I knew Korean people that were like you know they can't work on issues related to South Korea the Iranian Americans you know like or or Afghan Americans not working like this is this a problem in the intelligence community but it's not really a problem in my experience it has not been as big a problem for Jewish people many of whom have worked in national security and that's

great and that should be the case I will say Jonathan Pollard does no favors to dealing with, I mean, since the origins of American Zionism, which I've weirdly had occasion to read about for my upcoming book, which I'll tease at some point. But all the way back to Louis Brandeis at the beginning of 20th century, this guy, you know, Louis Brannis is a titan of American progressive politics and of the American Zionist movement. You had to give all these speeches about how there's no such thing as dual loyalty. You know, we are Americans and we can support Israel too. Jonathan Pollard essentially saying, no, I have loyalty here, is horrible for American Jews, right?

Let's just name it. It's just like naming the worst kind of conspiracy theory thinking that people use. And so definitely in the category of not helpful here. Like this is not someone who's tried to be helpful to tamping down some of the issues that were like unleashed by this scandal. Yeah. And by the way, Jonathan Pollard is happy to cast aspersions on others or float conspiracy theories when convenient for him politically. Here's what he had to say about Trump aide Steve Whitkoff and Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner. A lot of the stuff that Trump has put out by people like that was generated by people like Steve Whitkoff, who is a basically as far as I'm concerned, this is my opinion, the opinion of many others, just a, a, a,

chill for the Qataris. Jared Kushner, who has been a complete and utter disaster for Israel. He's now he's basically a Saudi agent. So, you know, he's not always wrong, but this gets to the Huckabee point. I mean, what does Huckabee say to Trump and Jared and Whitgoth and the gang about his embassy guest, you know? Yeah, and look, I think there's going to be some real heat on Huckabee from the American First crowd. In fact, I've reached out to some people that I know a little bit over there and they are pissed. Ben, here is another clip of Jonathan Pollard talking about the hostage release deal with Hamas. What I said was that if the leaders of the left wing, the hostage family forum,

and some of the family members themselves, don't shut up because they were undermining our ability to prioritize winning. the war. And they were the worst thing, they were going overseas and mobilizing enemies of ours ostensibly to help the hostage. Their objective was to undermine our ability to prosecute and win this war. Anything change in your heart, let's say, when you watch those hostages come home to their families last week. Because for me, even as somebody who did prioritize the war over the return of the hostages, I have to be honest. I sat there and I cried. And I couldn't help but cry when I saw what was going on. And part of me said to myself,

maybe this really did need to happen for the country to be able to heal and move forward. And even though logically it makes no sense and yes, we have power. No, I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. If anything, later, I felt rage over this hysterical optimism that ensued.

Okay, so yeah, I have a lot of empathy. Deep well of empathy for a man who feels like he was a hostage. and then watched other hostages come home. But Ben, that is like literally the tip of the iceberg. Pollard has said Israel should nuke Gaza. He said, we have the right to use any and all weapons at our disposal. That's a quote.

He said that on October 8th, the Israeli government should have told Hamasi of 24 hours to return the hostages. And if you don't obey, there would be, quote, the total unqualified destruction of Gaza just level the place and be done with it. He said the tallest building in Gaza would then be an ant-hill. He said that one ID of soldier is worth more than every single. single Gazzan. He said, I don't believe in proportionality at all. He's later said that, like, only Jews should be allowed to own property in Israel. He called for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Like, this guy is a lunatic, and he is meeting with Mike Huckabee. This is all public, by the way. He's running for the Knesset. He's running for their equivalent of Congress.

Yeah, I mean, like, let's just, like, take a hard look at that sociopathic statement. And also, let's bear in mind that groups like APEC lobbied for years for John Pollard's release, like for that guy to, you know, so the other thing that is frustrating about this is I want to be clear, like if you look at the polls in Israel,

for instance, over the last year, it was usually like 70 to 80% of Israelis wanted the war to end, wanted a ceasefire for hostage deal to be done. Like that's why there's a euphoric response that he

describes. The reason that's important is that if you were to listen to Mike Huckabee, right, you would think that all Israelis are like in lockstep behind BB Netanyahu or we have to deal with people like Jonathan Pollard because they're somehow representative of views of Israelis. It actually does a grave disservice to Israelis to be like spotlighting this guy, to be having him into the Israeli. He is not indicative of, and look, I think Israeli politics has moved way too far to the right here. But on this question that he just talked about, like that is not the view in Israel, right? And so part of what Huckabee's doing is he's like continually lifting up Pollard, Ben Gavir, Smotrish, and by wrapping his arm around these guys, he's kind of mainstreaming them in ways that I don't even think,

obviously I don't think it's good for Israel because I think that this direction of Israeli politics is terrible for all of the, everybody involved. But, you know, he's also not reflecting what public opinion is in the country. No, he is a totally crazy extremist. Ben, just a few things because I think both of you and I spent way too much time on this today. I have a bucket of things. There were just kind of like interesting tidbits. Pollard was prosecuted by Joe DeGeneva.

Remember that dude? He's like always on Fox News and was later part of the team that Trump tried to have overturned the 2020 election. That's interesting. Full Circle moment there. Alan Dershowitz was one of Pollard's lawyers and he lobbied on his behalf over the many years. In 2020, Pollard was brought back. back to Israel from the United States on Sheldon Adelson's private jet. That was when he was met at the tarmac.

Great tidbit. Great tip bit. He was given a pension from the state equivalent to like ex-Massad and Shinbad agents. So he was paid like a spy. And then after Pollard's arrest, apparently the CIA's National Intelligence Threat Assessment Center did a classified damage assessment. This is 1987. And it was led by an analyst named Aldrich Ames, who later was exposed to be the Soviet mole.

I'm not sure we had our shit together as an intelligence community back then, giving any of these guys security clearances. Also, Pollard was involved in Iran-Contra. He was opening Swiss bank accounts. He was figuring out what air defense weapons the Israelis could sell to Iran. So, like, this guy touched a lot of weird shit. Yeah, you know, it probably knows a lot, too, right? God only knows what's in that guy's head. Yeah, I mean, I just want to, like, the Aedelson thing is so perfect, too, because my all-time

favorite tidbit in this insane and increasingly dysfunctional relationship is Shelton Adelson, one of the largest donors to APEC, donor to Netanyahu, the single largest donor to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, longtime, you know, proponent of the release of Jonathan Pollard, Trump gets elected, and Trump moves the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, making good on a campaign promise, but also like shredding the Oslo Accord consensus that, you know, Jerusalem's status is to be negotiated. And guess, I mean, I know you know the answer, but I just love the fact that in anticipating the kind of corruption of the second Trump term, literally the U.S. ambassadors' residence in Tel Aviv is given to Sheldon Hedelson.

I don't know, he probably paid for it, but like it's nothing to him. I mean, this is crazy stuff. You know, this is, this is, this is, this is, this is an, this one story of Pollard is emblematic of a lot of things that have been getting worse and worse for years in terms of the dysfunctionality in this whole situation. Yeah, that's a really good point. Your point about Netanyahu just leveraging, um, the peace process to get goodies is a good word. Played us. I mean, you know, jokes on us here. Like, he never had any interest in a Palestinian state, but we did these, you know, went through all the.

motions and added all these meetings. And what is he spending time in the meetings? He's trying to get Jonathan Pollard out of prison. Right. Over like getting like F-35, like real like things that would actually make Israel more secure. It's also just like it is very notable again to the imbalance in the relationship that like U.S. officials can't criticize Israel with getting slapped around and our political debates. But like not only does Bibi Netanyahu spend like half his life trying to get Pollard back, he literally like welcomes him on the tarmac, like rubs it in our face. And one other issue on this is that it's always been this question of whether Israel continues to spy in the United States. Yes.

Because there was this idea that like, you know, allies shouldn't spy each other. And they would always say publicly, oh, we don't spy in the United States. Come on. I mean, the treatment of Pollard is this hero for spying in the United States might suggest otherwise. I had, you know, Black Cube ex-Massad agents spying on me when I, you know, when I left the administration. I mean, so like, again, what's going on here? The U.S. and Israel are allied on a lot of issues, for example, Iran, but they are frenemies on a lot of other stuff. And the Israeli government is very good at collecting intelligence.

And they do it on Americans all the time. And we should not pretend otherwise. Okay, well, great job, Mike Huckabee. I hadn't thought about you in weeks. Way to make some good news today. Way to welcome a literal traitor into the White House while refusing to answer phone calls from American citizens who are under attack from violent right-wing settlers. You're doing a bang-up job. And thank you guys for watching this episode of POTSafe the World on YouTube.

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