Breaking News from Pod Save America - Top Trump Official EXPOSED In Dysfunctional Manhunt For Charlie Kirk Shooter

Episode Date: September 13, 2025

Trump’s FBI completely mishandled the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s shooter — and Kash Patel’s incompetence is on full display. Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes break it all down, plus Trump’s latest takes on Bolsonaro and Russia. CHAPTERS 0:00 - Intro 1:10 - Thoughts on Charlie Kirk's assassination 6:28 - FBI's mishandling of manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s shooter 20:50 - Bolsonaro conviction 35:14 - Poland shoots down Russia drones 43:08 - Prince Harry meets with King Charles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. So, Ben, on Tuesday we said we wanted to do a bonus episode this week because there was just so much happening in the world. And that is still true. Although all the things we thought we would talk about, we are now not going to talk about because... So many other things happened. Because the political world was turned upside down by the assassination of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk. There's some major things happening in Russia.

So we're not going to cover the assassination story itself or like the latest on the shooter because those events are like changing our by. hour, and this would be obsolete by tomorrow when this comes out. But instead, we're going to look at some deep dives into the really scary dysfunction over at the FBI at a time when we're also seeing this rise in political violence. And we're also going to cover a historic ruling at the Supreme Court in Brazil that could land former President Jair Bolsonaro in prison for 27 years. Yes. Showing us how it's done down there. Why Russia fired more than a dozen drones into Polish territory and the test it created for NATO. And then our royal correspondent. is back.

Yes. His name is Ben Rose. I'm ready to go. Do you have a good accent? Buckle up. No, I'm not going to do that. I need one of those accent coaches. Yeah.

I figure I just like log onto YouTube and just work on it sometime. So Ben, like just real quick. I mean, I have had the chance on a number of shows to like talk about what happened to Charlie Kirk and just like make clear that it's sick and evil and unjustifiable. And that like just look, I think we need to condemn political violence because it's wrong and immoral on its,

you know, on these individual acts, but also because I worry that it can spread and feed off itself and like literally eat this country alive. But I wanted to give you a chance just to offer your thoughts before we get into this mess that Cash Patel is made over at the FBI. Yeah, it's been a very, you know, strange, you know, a couple of days. Obviously, you just look at something like that and you're horrified at thinking about the fact that this person had a whole life taken away from them, whatever I thought of his views. He has a family. He has a family. He has, friends he has things he was going to do many of which I wouldn't have agreed with

that were taken away and that that's always wrong and and if you if you can't draw that line and we frankly I'd like us to impose that line we try to do it on our farm policy too like innocent life should be protected and that you know full stop I do think that this broader question is a difficult one because There's political violence, but then there are these different components to it. There's actual political violence where there are people who are motivated by, you know, MAGA adjacent views to attack people on the left, and there may be people who are on the left or offended by people on the right who are doing that.

But there are other factors, too. I wouldn't even dwell on the guns one because it's obvious. But another one is I think we still as a society. I don't understand the degree to which technology and social media is... Because the common thread in these shooters tends to not be a left or right-wing view. Most often, it seems like it's someone who just disappeared online. And I don't claim to know exactly what motivated this person. And that's a different kind of problem, too, because it's not just conventional political violence.

In some ways, that's easier to understand, you know, that people are motivated. on the left or the right to do something, it's more like what is happening to people's brains, you know? And that, that, that, that, that, the combination of political polarization, guns and social media is, is, I think, a more complicated problem set than just grabbing one of those and saying, this is because of guns, or this is because of polarization, or this is because of the people I don't like. No, it's, it's a much deeper, stew than that. Yeah, like when we're talking about people in Indonesia or Nepal, like, ransacking the parliament building because they're furious about the cost of living or corruption or whatever, that makes sense to me. I can understand that. Like, that's what happens when you have a political system that's not responsive to the people. So they decide to go outside of the political system. I, like, I just can't wrap my head around being, like, memed into violence on a Discord server because it's funny to a gamer community or like a weird show. shit we're seeing from some of these people. Yeah. And I think we've lost the thread on what

is happening to some people in those spaces. And of course, mental illness is a part of it. Guns are part of it, like you said. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, frankly, it sets up this FBI conversation we're going to have because there's just something missing, whether it's in the government or in communities to deal with this. I mean, it's interesting, Tommy, like I, in government, you'll remember I had that kind of, in our little wing of the NSC, we had press and you were. the spokesperson, but then I also had what was called global engagement, but it also dealt with radicalization. Right.

And so I actually spent, like, years looking and being able, being lucky enough to talk to experts about radicalization, of course, because it's the U.S. government, we were focused on, you know, kind of Muslims. Muslims, you know. But essentially we were focused on the kind of jihadist flavor of radicalization, you know, people going online and consuming content from al-Qaeda or ISIS. or some terrorist organization, and going through the process of, you know, seeing one video and going on a rabbit hole.

And so what's so interesting is that the U.S. government probably spent, you know, over the course of the last 25 years, untold amounts of money studying this issue of, you know, that did lead to action, right? I mean, the San Bernardino shooter, but not nearly on the scale. it gets uncomfortable when you start looking at ideologies in this country that motivate people to violence. But I think maybe that's the wrong way of looking at. It's not the ideologies. It's just kind of what is the online process that happens? Because I think it's probably quite similar. Whatever the thing that you believe in, the process that you go through online is probably similar. And so why is it that violence is getting worse alongside the spread of social media?

Yeah, God only knows. Well, a deep... Maybe chat GPT knows. Important. Yeah, last GPT. It's an important topic for another day. Yes. So the good news is as of today, the guy that murdered Charlie Kirk, we believe, was turned

into authorities by his friends and family. But before that, like, the FBI Manhunt to find this guy was a disaster. They seemed to have no clue what was happening. And frankly, like, it made clear the cost that we kind of intellectually knew, but of naming a completely unqualified partisan hack like Cash Patel to be FBI director or Dan Bongino, a podcaster, to become the deputy. director. So this week alone, Ben, like Patel repeatedly tweeted disinformation about his own case. Like on Wednesday, he said the shooter was in custody. That was not true. Then he had to walk it back.

He reportedly didn't coordinate those tweets with his own senior team or with state and local officials in Utah because he would tweet this stuff. And then moments later, like the governor would go out and contradict him at a press conference. This week has also demonstrated the impact of the political purge that we've been talking about that's been happening at the FBI. So back in February, cash mottel and the FBI leadership pushed out and experienced counterterrorism agent who had been named to run the salt lake city field office her name was maytab sayed she immigrated to the u.s from pakistan before working her way up the ranks of the FBI geez wonder why she was pushed out then and then finally there was this extraordinary lawsuit filed against DOJ and the FBI this week by three former senior agents who say they were wrongfully terminated um it i'll give you the very high level like it describes Patel and Bongino as more interested in social media than in running the Bureau itself. Trump's lawyer, Emil Bove, who is now sitting on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, is described as giving political loyalty tests to potential FBI leaders and then just firing agents

who are not like sufficiently MAGA. And then maybe most frighteningly then, it portrays Stephen Miller as giving orders to Cash Patel and Dan Bongino, the leaders of the FBI. So there's a bunch more specifics from this suit that I want to get into in a minute, but I'll just like pause there and get your reaction. We've said before that the combination of the purges that we've seen of qualified FBI personnel, that let's be very clear. It goes so far beyond just kind of cleaning out the senior level of headquarters or something,

which in and of itself would be unprecedented. But they're just knocking people out at field offices. And it's these kind of broad categories of people. It's people, anyone who participated in any of the investigations of Trump, even if they didn't have a choice if they're just kind of a line level agent or something. Yeah. But it also seems to be people that they just

assume would not be supportive of MAGA, right? Women, people of color. Exactly. Same thing that we've seen in the military. Like women, people of color, they're just probably not MAGA, you know. And there were always going to be a couple of problems with that. One of the problems was going to be

that you're losing, you know, hundreds if not thousands of years of experience out the door, which is really important if you need the FBI to solve any case. You know, this is just one. I mean, that's the thing. What are we not seeing? Because the FBI is, you know, we just saw what happened on this one case, where, by the way, the FBI did nothing to bring this person to justice, really.

I mean, it seems like he was turned in. I mean, we don't know the full story, but it didn't seem like there's some crack FBI work. No, but I think that's really important because I don't know if you watched this press conference. Like the governor spoke, then Cash Patel spoke. He looked like a deer in headlights. He was like, this is what happens when you let cops be cops, which is like, again, someone's dad turned him in or something? And then he gives this, but he gives this timeline of what he presumably believes were key events.

One of them was the time that Patel and Dan Bongino got to Utah. And then Cash Patel talks about how he personally walked through the crime scene. Again, this is Dexter. This is a guy who had like no law enforcement experience. Like, what insight did we glean from you? But sorry, I cut you up. No, no, no. You got me too.

You got me pissed. Thank you for, for, for, for, for, illustrating that. So the first point is, without all this expertise, you're just not going to be as good at your job. Right. You know, the FBI is not as good at what the FBI needs to do, and the FBI has to do a lot of different things. The second thing is that the FBI has become fixated on these kind of Trump causes, probably prosecuting or pursuing Trump's enemies, right? We saw, like, a raid on, you know, John Bolton's house. But also, you know, immigration enforcement and all these other crimes, whether it's just murder, like. like high-profile cases where the FBI may get involved like this. Covering up the obscene files.

Yeah. Well, actually, going through the FBI. Lots of analysts. We heard that all these analysts had to go through that. But so nobody's mining the store on these other things. And so you're seeing this kind of like a less capable FBI that is less focused on the mission of crime fighting based on prioritization and is more focused on a MAGA agenda. But there was a third piece, Tommy, that I had not fully factored in. I think you and I both anticipated shit.

The FBI's a lot of crimes aren't going to get caught in the same way they might want would have. The other thing, though, is it felt very disorienting to be like, oh shit, like this guy, Cash Patel is going to be the spokesperson, the face of this. Yeah. Because I was like, he, and this isn't me like, you know, not giving him the doubt. He was wrong. He tweeted out that they had the guy and they didn't.

And then you're like, shit, we're not going to be able to trust the information we get from these people. And I felt very disorientated by that. I felt like, wait a second, there's going to be other shit that happens in the next three plus years here. And I believed it was weird. I literally had the thought process of I want to hear from these local officials. You know, I want to hear from the governor of Utah. Who's a Republican, by the way? So it's not even a partisan government.

Or any cop. Or the cops are probably Republicans too because it's Utah. But I was like, I want to hear. So this is not me saying I only want to listen to Democrats. It's saying like these Trump people, I just frankly don't believe the truth of what they're saying. Looking for a protein shake that tastes as good as it performs? Meet rockin protein max. Packed with 50 grams of fuel.

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Because like the defense intelligence agency has a different assessment of what happened after we bombed Iran than Trump does off the top of his head. You're fired. The BLS puts out data. He doesn't like that Trump doesn't match with like the economic reality. Trump wants to live in, you're fired. Like, why should we believe that Cash Patel, if he were to find out that the shooter of Charlie Kirk was actually some, like, super right-wing guy would be honest with us about that? Well, and this is, we were lucky in some ways in the sense that, I mean, obviously, it's good that they got the guy. But because he seemingly turned himself in, I don't know, again,

too early, we don't know whether he, like, formally confessed or not. But it's not that questionable, right? But what if they, you know, what if it was a person, what if after all these Keystone cops, literally stuff from Cash Patel, they grabbed some guy and the guy denied it. And then you're like, shit, well, do I believe Cash Patel? You know, like, luckily, we don't have to deal with that problem now. But there are going to be other complex cases where, like, Cash Patel and Dan Bongino are the spokespeople for law enforcement in this country. And they already didn't have a lot of credibility. these people have lied in the past, like regularly. Now their credibility is even less because they were putting out wrong information in the middle of a manhunt. Yeah, it is very, very unnerving stuff. So, Ben, there was this lawsuit that came out today. And, like, I think it came out on September 10th the same day Charlie Kirk was assassinated. So I honestly, I hadn't really dug into it until preparing for this conversation with you.

But I need to just read you something from the New York Times coverage. of this suit. So this is about an agent, a former agent named Brian Driscoll, who served as acting director of the FBI from January 20th to February 21st of 2025. So he was like briefly acting director, I think, while Patel was going through the confirmation process. This is about his experience in the vetting process. This is verbatim from the times. Driscoll had, in fact, been applying for the number two job at the FBI and was told that another senior agent Robert Kisain would serve as acting director. But someone in the White House committed, quote, a clerical error, the lawsuit said, an official issued by public statement reversing their titles announcing Mr. Driscoll for the top

job. Trump aides were unwilling to fix the foul up, Mr. Bov said, Emil Bov, even if it meant that one of the most powerful posts in the government went to the wrong man. So let me just repeat what that says. They let the wrong guy serve as acting director of the FBI because they fucked up their press release and they were too embarrassed to fix it. That is crazy. Yeah, we're not dealing with a high degree of competence here. And this is not an agency that like whatever, like a lot of people have grievances against the FBI all over the political spectrum here. But you should kind of be rooting for that institution to work because, I mean, they're charged. with keeping us safe, they're charged with solving crimes, they're charged with preventing

counterintelligence threats in this country, terrorist attacks in this country, and to see it treated so casually, right? I mean, that's part, part of it is a kind of insanity and incompetence of just the wrong press release, the wrong acting director. Wrong guy. Part of it is just the casual nature of it, right? Like, you have to care less about the importance of, I don't know, good government or, you even crime fighting, which these people claim to care a lot about, to just be like, well, actually, you know, we'll just let this one slide because it's too embarrassing to admit the press release. Like, they don't seem to take it very seriously.

Not at all. And that's the thing about Cash Patel and Dan Bonino. Even a friend of the pod, Steve Bannon, I think I saw him say, why is Cash going out there? And he's friends with Cash Retail. Oh, he was promoting Cash Hard. There's no reason for the director and deputy director of the FBI to, it's connected to the press release thing. It's a Christy Gnome shit. It's photo ops. It's fundamentally not taking the job seriously or the institution seriously that you're flying to Utah where you serve no purpose whatsoever. You're in the way. You're getting in the way. You're creating more work. People are probably having to breathe. If they were still in a manhunt and we didn't get lucky and have this guy turn himself in or get turned in. Like people would be spending time briefing Cash Patel instead of like doing their jobs. Who's running the FBI back in D.C. by the way, if both the director and the deputy director are going out there. Remember they made a second director. Seppendectored. Second deputy director.

Yeah, I guess that's true. No, but no, you're right. The fundamental point is crazy. And there's also just the partisan element of it. So the same guy, Brian Driscoll, who was accidentally given the top job, said that during his vetting interview with Patel, he was told he could have the position if he was, quote, not prolific on social media, did not donate to the Democratic Party and did not vote for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Then in a second vetting interview with, like, the DOJ White House liaison,

he was asked if he supported Trump and what he thought about DEI. So they are directly politicizing this agency. And then the lawsuit. talks about how all these like these guys just notice it like dan bonjino only seems to care about his social media presence and it says mr jensen worried that mr bonjino was spending more time on creating content for his social media pages than on actual FBI investigations there's more anecdotes in the story about them just like being unbelievably cruel to a career officer whose wife was dying of cancer as they fired him even though cash patel like assured them he was quote crushing it

and gave him a cigar on the challenge coin and told him me to be fine and then fired him a month later. But like it just sounds like this is a clown show all these guys care about is like, you know, setting up their next thing. Setting up their next gig, yeah. And meanwhile, Ben, like, you know,

you sitting around this Wired article earlier today, like there are a lot of scary right-wing militia types, like the former head of the oathkeepers talking about the violent ways they're going to react to what just happened to Charlie Gert. Yes. Look, there's been a lot of focus on, on what Trump said, which was terrifying, and what certain Republican politicians or kind of

mega influencers are saying about vengeance and stuff that is scary. But let's focus specifically, you know, because we tend to be more natural scary oriented on this militia piece, right? So you had Stuart Rhodes, the founder of the Oathkeepers, which was like a right-wing militia that was deep in January 6th. And he himself, you know, got that nice part in, you know. Yeah. Now.

He was in jail for a long time, I think, like 20. years or something. Yeah. It would have been. Now he's out. And to connect these two stories, you've got him saying he's going to reconstitute the oathkeepers and it's time to, you know, he's going to provide security. And he calls him Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which is a little ironic, given that he was a part of an insurrection himself. But what happens if you start to get kind of oathkeepers, proud boys, right-wing type militias? And they start to do things that would normally attract the attention of the FBI. You know, they're stockpiling weapons. They're making threats. They're showing up ominously at places to intimidate people. Or maybe they're even

beginning to kind of break the law in some fashions. Do you feel confident, Tommy, that the FBI will take action to prevent a danger from far right militias harming people in this country? No, no, because you know, every single person knows whether they're in the FBI or anywhere else that Trump views the proud boys as his allies. Yeah. And he's given them pardoned. And he, what was it, stand back and stand by, the famous comment of the debate? And that actually investigating the proud boys is likely to be a career killer that will get you fired. Yeah. I mean, and it's not hard to imagine scenarios. Like what happens if one of these militias says,

we don't trust the electoral process. So we have to provide, you know, security at polling sites in the midterm elections, right? And then all of a sudden you're going to vote and there's a bunch of far-rearm. right, militia men kind of like loitering around the... Hey, who are you going to vote for? Yeah, yeah. Right. I mean, this is the kind of things that could happen. This is what voter suppression looks like in a lot of countries.

So stay tuned. All right, so another big story this week. On Thursday, Brazil's Supreme Court voted to convict former president, Jire Bolsonaro, of plotting a military coup and sentenced him to 27 years in prison. That's how you do it. Four to five... Is Merrick Garland a part of the process? So four out of five justices voted to convict Bolsonaro along with seven co-conspirators,

some of his top aides who are all quite dumb, it seems. We'll get into that in the minute. The New York Times noted that Brazil has had 15 coups or coup attempts linked to the military since 1889, but Thursday was the first time that the leader of a coup plot has been convicted. One of the justices who ruled on the case, Justice Rocha said, called the coup attempt, an attempt to, quote, sow the malignant seat of anti-democracy. The justice overseeing the case is this guy Alexander de Mirage, who we've talked about on the show a bunch, because he oversees all the social media cases and censorship down there. He was also one of the coups intended victims.

They were planning to assassinate him, which I'm not sure how that doesn't get you to recuse. But, you know, I'm not an expert in the Brazilian political system. But anyway, there was one dissenting judge who said there was no proof that Bolsonaro have been aware of or part of the plot to assassinate the current president, Lula de Silva, or that Bolsonaro was to blame for inciting the riots that ended up ransacking Brazil's Congress and Supreme Court and presidential palace. However, that same justice did vote to convict to Bolsonaro's close allies. So Ben Trump was asked about this ruling. Here's a clip. Bolsonaro was just found guilty by the Supreme Court. You've been very clear that you would apply sanctions.

Are you thinking further sanctions to Brazil because of this Bolsonaro? Well, I watched that trial. I know him pretty well. Foreign leader. I thought he was a good president of Brazil. And it's very surprising that that could happen. That's very much like they tried to do with me, but they didn't get aware with it at all. But I can only say this.

I knew him as president of Brazil. He was a good man. And I don't see that happen. So you can tell Trump sees him as a fellow traveler. So Bolsonaro, like Trump, claims he was just trying to challenge a stolen election through legal means. The evidence shows that that is total bullshit. For example, Ben, Bolsonaro's deputy chief of staff printed out at the presidential palace and then brought to Bolsonaro's residents a plan to do the assassinations.

It's like a three-page document. It typed out in Microsoft Word. So the question is, what happens next? There were big Bolsonaro protests last weekend. Will those continue? Will they get violent? Trump has already slapped a 50% tariff on Brazil to punish them for prosecuting this case. Will he do more?

And then longer term, there's a question of, you know, will he come back? Like Trump just did. Like, can the Brazilian far right win enough elections to find a way to pardon Bolsonaro? to impeach Supreme Court just somehow overturn the case. I guess we'll find out. What is so telling about Trump's response and the kind of whole, I don't know, global far-right solidarity with Bolsonaro is

how little interaction there is with the facts of the case. It's just like, this is wrong. How could this be happening? This is horrible. And he was a good president. So even if you think Bolsonaro was a good president, which I obviously don't and you don't, he's not interacting at all with the facts of this, you know, which is it like this guy's, you know,

presumably sounds like he was guilty of a crime and therefore was prosecuted for that crime. And it's not that complicated. I mean, part of what is so insane about living in the reality that we live in is the absence of a consideration of facts. Like Trump has repeated so much that he was persecuted that we forget that it was actually very strange that January 6 happened. And he didn't face really any, like Joe Biden did nothing about it for two years. You had a January 6th committee. That led to a referral two years later that led to the beginning of a prosecution that couldn't end in four years. And in fact, if anything, like Trump was treated very lightly in the sense that there was this, you know, the clock was run out by the time you got elected president.

So, look, I mean, what should matter here is what the facts of the case and not like the personality of some judge you don't like or you don't like that, you know, even if you think he was a good president, that some of that means he shouldn't be prosecuted or it's somehow unfair. By the way, Lula's serves some time, you know, like that the same justice system, you know, put Lula in prison for a period of time. So that to me is like the most important thing here. It just shows you how arbitrary consideration of actual justice and the administration of justice has become in politics globally, that the reaction to this is not about the case itself. It's about whether, even the people are nervous, even the people are like, well, I don't know if it's a good idea to prosecute him. And then we saw this in some of the European cases, too, like, we might be provoking the far right. Like, well, you either have a justice system or you don't. Now, I think what will be interesting to see is, you know, whether there are more sanctions on these people.

who were involved in the prosecution, whether the tariffs remain high because Trump doesn't like that this happened, presumably it will. And look, you know, just because this happened doesn't mean that there's not still a responsibility politically for Lula and

the Brazilian center and left to win elections, you know, like, because you're right. They could still lose this whole thing if the far right wins and Bolsonaro's pardoned and, you know, we're back where we started. Yeah, and like, like, look, similar to our January 6th prosecution process. There's already like 1,200 Brazilians in jail for like lesser charges and being part

of the insurrection. So like they went from the bottoms at the top. Like we did, we just failed at the end. But like for context, I mean, Brazil was a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. This is why this whole thing is especially serious. And just to walk through the plan real quick, it was, they were going to declare a state of emergency, dissolve the Supreme Court, annull the election results, and then put

the military in charge. And then they wanted to murder Lula, murder his running mate, murder Marize the Supreme court justice. And again, there's this guy, Mario Fernandez, the Army General became the deputy chief of staff. Imagine if Alyssa Master Monaco, who's our deputy chief of staff, wrote up something called the green and yellow dagger plan, typed it a three-page document in Word, printed it at the White House, and then brought it to the residence. This is all like clocked and sort of like check-in, check-out times at securities. And then the plan references things that were already underway, like surveillance, procurement of things. So none of this was notional. And also there's a message from that same guy to

Bolsonaro, like saying Bolsonaro gave them the green light. So this was deadly serious. It was happening, if not about to happen. Basically, they got lucky and that prevented, you know, the Supreme Court justice from being killed or else that they, and there was, I think, some hesitation among senior, like, leaders of the military. There's some question in the Bolsonaro orbit about whether they would go along with the plan. So that might have kind of unraveled it. So as you said, Trump is a 50% tariff on Brazil. Marco Rubio revoked entry visas for eight Supreme Court justices from Brazil. He put Magnitsky sanctions on Marais.

Human rights sanctions. What human rights violations occurred here? Unclear to me. And remember, like, for a little while, Bolsonaro skipped town and moved to Orlando and was like living with some jujitsu instructor. He was eating like fast food. It was kind of sad. Yeah.

And apparently his dumb fucking son has been camped out either. in Texas or D.C., basically lobbying Trump in the administration to go harder. I mean, I think there's a question of, like, I guess only 13% of Brazilian exports go to the U.S., and it's mostly commodity. So our efforts to punish their economy might not bear out. But it's just like, to your point, your initial point about no one's, no one dealing with the facts here is the most important one. Yeah.

And look, a couple other things off of what you said. The first thing is this was a fairly evolved plan for essentially a coup. and they wanted the military involved, and that may have been why it didn't work, right, because the military wasn't fully on board. That said, this is not abstract to Brazilians, as you point out, but also to the whole region. Argentina, Chile, Brazil, these are big South American countries that had periods of time where right-wing military coups, often backed by the United States, led to horrific human rights abuses and decades of... And that's what we're talking about here. We're not even just talking about the danger of one election result not being kept. We're talking about a return to a recent historical memory, like within the lives of a lot of people who are still around to this kind of autocratic politics. And that's what makes it so scary that how casual, like, you know, this is kind of treated like just some news cycle thing or, you know, some friend of Trumps or no, if you're a bit of. Brazilian. Like, this is about whether you're going to go back to dictatorship. Existential.

Yeah. And it's the whole region, too. Because Marco Rubio has this thing where he just, if you're a far-right Trump kind of guy, he's going to do your bidding, including using the powers of the U.S. government to, like, sanction your political opponents. This should terrify people.

I mean, it's even like, you know, you go back to like Henry Kissinger's hidden hand and things like the Chilean coup. this is like even more over the overt than that. Oh, yeah, this is just like happening in public. We're using sanctions and tariffs to try to change your government. I know.

And to add to your point about like, okay, even if Trump, even if we pretend that Bolson Arad didn't try to stage a coup, he tried to steal the election before that. He had his justice ministry prepare like a spreadsheet of all the best performing Lula to Silva precincts. And on the election day, police were pulling over buses full of people in those areas to try to prevent them from voting. And also one last thing in this, Ben, I just find it fascinating. Like, the Brazilian Supreme Court element of this is so weird.

Like, their court, their system is strange. It's a, it's a post-military coup ever to, I think, like, you know, prevent a future military dictatorship. So the Brazilian court, they made 114,000 rulings in 2024 alone, the brilliant Brazilian Supreme Court. And because of that caseload, most of these get decided by individual judges, which is why you see, like, a group of five. judges making this ruling against Bolsonaro and not the full Supreme Court. But they have like, apparently you can go in the Brazilian system. You can take a case right to the Supreme Court. Like if you are a president, a governor, the bar association, a union, or a political party,

you can file rights to the Supreme Court. And hence the number of rulings. And also, they're kind of like the last chance for appeals. They rule on all matters related to the Constitution. And they rule on criminal cases against politicians. So the Brazilian courts basically have taken all the power from the legislature, and there's like no point in having a legislature anymore. And then under Bolsonaro, the court kind of allowed itself to open investigations into online threats against itself. So they're kind of like the victim and the prosecutor and the judge at all the same time.

So it's a messy system that probably need some reforms. And in this case, I think the members who ruled against Bolsonaro were like Lula's former personal lawyer or like a minister he'd name. and like somebody else who kind of felt a little stacked against him, but it doesn't undercut the facts. Yeah. Well, first of all, it feels a little stacked when, like, you know, Brett Kavanaugh, who seemed to, like, promise vengeance against Democrats for raising his, you know, allegations of sexual assault is now, you know, sitting in judgment of everything that Trump's doing. Put that aside. Just two other, if you want to learn more, there's an unbelievable John Lee Anderson story in the New Yorker magazine from a couple months ago, profiling Demerias, who's like the kind of lead. judge. It's a great piece. Boogieman. Yeah, you read it. Yeah. If you want to understand a fascinating

character, what you just said about the power of the Brazilian Supreme Court and the mixture of online versus offline politics, check that out. And look, yeah, their system could be reformed so could ours. No democracy's perfect. I will say, but they do have a problem here because like there's, you start to get a feeling of a lack of democratic legitimacy and you start to get a feeling that every election is existential, right? The only other thing I want to say is a Jason Miller piece. So there's this kind of trend of MAGA people cashing in by trading influence or going to work for other far-right people or what have you. Jason Miller's worked for Bolsonar for a while. Jason Miller, for people don't know, was like a senior communications official

and strategist for, was it both Trump campaigns? For Trump, yeah, for two of them or I don't know. He's very close. He's like Bolsonaro's flack. And he's down there. It'd be kind of like after, you know, the first Obama election, if, like, Robert Gibbs, you know, our communications director on the campaign, like, suddenly was, like, working on behalf of an autocrat in another country. And, like, I mean, so beyond just the fact that it's kind of gross, and by the way, this applies to Democrats as well as Republicans, I've always found this kind of space kind of gross where you get paid exorbitant fees to go basically be a flack for someone, not because you have, like, good campaign strategy, but because because. because they know that you're close to people in the White House. But he literally is, like, putting out, like, threads on X, where he's, like, simultaneously attacking the judges and stuff

and promising kind of vengeance. And at one point he's like, now, I don't speak for the administration. But does anybody really believe that he's not talking to Don Jr.? or he's not talking to people in the White House? And so it's kind of crazy to me that, like, that Bolson-R-R-Literer literally has a team that includes, maga people. I mean, it just shows you how much there's a... It's a... It's a lot of that sea pack

cross-pollination with the Brazilians and the Hungarians. Yeah. Jason Miller, I think, is also filed to do like a Farah, to register lobbyist for the Indian government that's getting paid like 150 grand a month. And there's this weird payola scandal that's happening with right-wing influencer, mega influencers on Twitter that we should maybe talk about next week. But I agree with you. It's super fucking weird. So two more things. So Ben, overnight on Tuesday, over a dozen Russian

drones entered Polish airspace. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk told Parliament that there were 19 total drones. So NATO scrambled a bunch of military assets. That included Polish F-16 fighter jets, Dutch F-35s, German Patriot missiles, and then Italian reconnaissance aircraft. Interestingly, nothing American, but maybe that's a coincidence. Those NATO aircraft, apparently they shot down between three and four drones. And drone fragments were found all across Eastern Poland, some hundreds of kilometers from the border. One of them, like, landed on or hit a house. Thankfully, no one was hurt. But Poland also said some of these drones came from Belarus, which is participating in war games with Russia, starting today, Friday when we're recording this. So Tusk is super pissed. He called it

a large-scale provocation. He also told the Polish parliament, quote, I have no reason to claim we're on the brink of war, but a line has been crossed and it is incomparably more dangerous than before. The situation brings us the closest we have been to open conflicts since World War II. It's pretty serious. Got my attention. Yeah, me too. And then the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine had a joint statement calling it a, quote, deliberate and coordinated strike constituting an unprecedented provocation and escalation. So the eastern flank of NATO's freaked out. The Russians initially blamed Ukraine.

They later released a statement on telegram saying that there were no targets planned for destruction on Polish territory and that their drones don't have the range to reach Poland, but I think most experts think that's just not true. It seems like at least some of the drones were dummy, kind of decontory. that Russia uses, they just fire like hundreds of these things, flood Ukrainian airspace and hope to overwhelm the missile defense systems. So in response, Poland invoked Article 4 of the NATO charter, which convenes a high-level NATO meeting about the subject, but stops well short of, you know, demanding a collective response. Poland also wants a UN Security Council meeting. Trump's response has ranged from pathetic to bizarre.

Like initially, he truth-socialed, quote, what's with Russia violating Poland's airspace with drones? here we go. Sort of like a sign-fell thing. I know, yeah. And it's just like an impotent, passive observer of events. And then this is what he said to reporters on Thursday. What's your reaction to Russia drawn in prison into Poland? Could have been a mistake.

Could have been a mistake. But regardless, I'm not happy about anything having to do with that whole situation. But hopefully it's going to come to an end. So, again, passive observer, not happy about things, not happy about the Israelis bombing Qatar, but never willing to do anything about it. So, Ben, I think the big question is, did Russia do this on purpose? If so, why? And what does NATO do to respond?

Yeah, it's a strange thing because it seems plausible that maybe they're just, they're constantly firing so many drones that some of these went across the border. But it's not impossible that Putin was, I don't know, just showing that the air defenses aren't that strong on the border or testing the air defenses or seeing what would happen. Like, that's certainly a possibility. So we don't know. It wasn't clearly like the precursor to an invasion, but they might, you know, be just kind of pushing the envelope further and further out. That's something the Russians do. When I was in government during the end of the Obama administration after the annexation of Crimea and you had all of this unease in Poland and the Baltics, part of their point was the Russians are unlikely to like invade us, even in the same way that they end up invading Ukraine. But what they might do is just start to push the envelope, right? start to have provocations, start to have, like, quote-unquote, pro-Russian separatists that, you know, they're trying to support. Or this kind of asymmetric stuff, like suddenly there's drones flying in aerospace, and they're just kind of trying to intimidate you and terrify the population.

Yeah, yeah, and kind of precipitate some kind of event. And that's why those countries really wanted there to be a physical, more of a physical presence for NATO in their countries, like air policing. I think when you look at the response, it's pretty interesting me that the Russians kind of there's no statement of any kind of regret. You know, it's not like, oh, yeah, it's just more like, they just lie or they're like, you know, there's nothing to see here. Shit happens. So that just kind of, that's notable that they don't, they didn't try to diffuse the situation, right? I thought what was also telling is how much the NATO response was European as not just a shootdowns, as you said, but all the diplomacy, all the commentary, you know, it wasn't like the U.S.

would usually be very much in the lead. And at that meeting with our NATO ambassador and with the Secretary of State, you know, going out there for consultations and the President of the United States, you know, issuing statements, making phone calls. And so it shows how much the center of gravity for NATO is just moving to Europe in the same way that that support for Ukraine is moving to Europe and the same way that any potential peacekeeping force would be European and. no American participation. The shootdowns were Europeans, the diplomas of Europeans, like the

face of this response is European. I do think in terms of what they need to be looking at practically, they do need to be looking at this air defense question. You know, what is the radar, what is the response time on that eastern flank border? Because this does suggest, you know, perhaps it's a little porous, you know, and so I'm sure that that's part of what they're looking at. Yeah, I mean, so I want to just really underscore this point you're making about how sort of disinterested and disengaged Trump seems because this happened like. And Rubio and, you know. Yeah, well, so this happened like Tuesday to Wednesday, right? Yeah.

So Trump, this happens Tuesday, Wednesday night. On Wednesday, Charlie Kirk is assassinated. Trump has said this morning in this Fox News interview that he learned about the assassination when he was talking to the architect who was building the new Trump ballroom at the White House. So he was... Priorities. Like, Joe Biden was criticized for like, I think Ukraine became an all-consuming task for him. It was like that and Gaza were the only things he focused on. He didn't do politics.

Trump, like, Trump was so disinterested in rush shooting 19 drones into Poland, Polish airspace that he took time to meet with an architect about building a ballroom that might be done in like five years, 10 years? Yeah. And look, it's so insane to me that the news is such that this was. kind of receded to being kind of a pretty secondary story for the week, you know? Yeah. I mean, not just Charlie Kirk with everything that's fucking happening in the world. Let's not lose sight of the fact that you had Russian drones, even if they're kind of not

exactly the state of the art type, fly into NATO airspace. And then you had, like, I can't remember the last time there was like a military contact between NATO and Russia. Like, like NATO scrambling jets. to shoot down Russian drones over NATO territory. It's a massive deal. We are in new, we're new waters here. And to go back to my point about the Russians, like,

that's not usually the last time something like this. You know, like they push out the boundaries further and further. And the question is if the Russians are clocking the response, they're also clocking that America's pretty disengaged. So they're kind of, they're testing and they're adjusting, to a reality in which NATO is really kind of a European show. And yeah, the America's still there. But I don't think the Russians believe that the...

No, we're like half in. Do you think the Russians believe that if, let's say they did actually invade Poland or Latvia, right? Do you think Putin believes that America would be part of the collective defense response? I don't. I don't. I don't know. And that's a huge piece of business that is uncomfortable to say out loud, you know.

It's the whole ball game. Yeah. Article 5. One, two, a one, two, three, four. Give me a break. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that. Kid, cat.

Get me a break. Break me off a piece of that. Kid. Give me a break. Give me a break. Break me off a piece of that. Have a break. Have a Kit Kat.

That's a whole ballgame. Yeah. Finally then, uh, please, uh, pour yourself some tea. Grab a biscuit. Put on your royal correspondent hat. Uh, on Friday, Prince Harry Montecito met with King Charles for the first time since I think a 30 minute meeting back in 2017.

They had tea for 55 minutes. Listeners probably know that Harry announced he'd set back from royal duties in January of 2020. In 2021, they did the full exit and they were lynched all their duties and perks of royal service. They moved to California. Harry's memoir kind of unloads the clip about all the family grievances. But now maybe they're piecing things back together. No. my brain initially went to

wondering if this means Prince Charles's cancer is getting worse. I forget exactly what he had, but he was very public about it. That would be a moment where you would patch things up, but who knows? Maybe they're just maybe you just missed his dead.

What are your thoughts? I thought this is really interesting and look, there's several different things you might summarize from this, right? One is actually just, so Harry ended up going to Ukraine. Did you see this?

Yes, like a couple weeks ago, right? So maybe he, like, I assume if Prince Harry of Montecito is going to Ukraine, and he went all the way to Kiev, like he took the train, did the whole nine yards. He probably had to kind of go to London and get like security briefings or something, you know, and some support probably. Yeah, some support in getting to the border and getting his train arrangements. And it may just be like, all right, I'm a minute. in town, I'm going to swing by C-DAD, you know. So that's one scenario, right? Because Harry,

you know, his military background, he has the Invictus Games, which helps, you know, he was in Ukraine to meet with, like, disabled. He does very good work, by the way. He does. With disabled veterans. Second theory is, yeah, like, this is the beginning of a reconciliation. That could be because, like, let's face it. I mean, I'm now going to be the California correspondent, too, like, Montecito, very nice that Santa Barbara area. I would start to be bored after about three days up there. I don't if you go up there. You don't think it's fun making jam? I don't. Making terrible Netflix content. I honestly, that's my point. I have a theory about Harry, which is, and this is not even a shot at Megan. It's just like, this guy had this pretty global and cosmopolitan life, and sure he didn't

like the real piece of it that much. But now he's just kind of parked up in north of Los Angeles doing what? You know, making pretty crappy Netflix. content. That didn't exactly take off, right? No. He wrote his book, and he's like, what's he doing? You know? And so I think that he may just, yes, he want to reconcile, but also just kind of want to reenter the world. And he kind of can't do that without repairing this bridge, right? Now, there's a lot of I want to say. To me, the main event, though, is not reconciliation with his dad. The rural watcher and me is interested in the brother.

Yeah. Because if you looked at that memoir, man, that was a tense. They had a fistfight memory detailed. And, I mean, Kate's got racist comment about their kid. Yeah, racist comment. Cates not doing well either. And is he concerned about that? So I'm very curious about whether there's a, to me, I'm not like counting a reconciliation

until I see T with William or maybe a pint, but that could lead to fisticofts. I think that's well said. That's well said. I hope for all their sake. I hope for all their sake that there is some sort of reconciliation. Not being in touch with your family would be terrible and hard for a lot of reasons. But I don't know. Hope it's not for bad health reasons. Can we just say, yeah, I do hope that.

You don't wish that on anybody, obviously. And I do feel bad for the Royals having to, I mean, we'll cover this next week, but I was reviewing Trump's state visit. I'm writing something about it. And there's a lot of baggage being put on the Royals. Like they've got to host them at Windsor Castle. Yeah. Because they know that what Trump wants is to be treated like an emperor or something, right?

And so they're going to just take him around palace to palate. And they also know that they don't want him in London for too long because they're going to be protest, right? You can't really protest at Windsor. So poor Charles, because we know Charles's politics, right? Yep. I mean, nobody really knew. Biodiversity. Yeah, he's a lefty.

You know, he's woke, you know. He reads books. But he's got to sit there and just flatter Trump. Yeah, poor one out for Charles and the royal plumbing. There are a few things to make you feel sorry for King Charles. like this does. And so maybe Harry's just, maybe it's a little solidarity there, dad. Bucking up your dad.

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