Breaking News from Pod Save America - Zelensky Vs. MAGA Idiots in the Oval Office

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Tommy and Ben react to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s White House visit and explain how a call from Russian President Vladimir Putin the day before might have kept Trump from providing new weapons to Ukraine. They also cover reports that Trump has authorized the CIA to conduct covert, lethal action in Venezuela, and other signals that the United States is preparing for war with Venezuela, explain why former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton could be in deep legal trouble for mishandling classified information, and break down Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s attack on the Pentagon press corps and press freedom. Get 50% off your new system. Visit https://simplisafe.com/crooked. There’s no safe like SimpliSafe®. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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That's 1-800flowers.com slash Spotify. On Friday, President Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. So Ben and I are back with a YouTube exclusive for POTSafe of the world to cover it all for you guys. We're also going to get into some breaking news this week that President Trump has authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela. Great idea. And we're going to talk about why the indictment of Trump's former national security advisor, John Bolton, is pretty dicey and why basically the entire Pentagon Press Corps has been kicked out of the building. Ben, good to see you again, buddy. Long time to see.

Just a few things happening. Slow news week, huh? President of Peace, starting new wars. President of Peace, starting new wars. We're welcome Zelensky to the White House for what feels like the thousandth time, although the tone is so different every time, it's kind of like hard to keep a handle on it.

You know, the press corps is like no longer allowed to cover the Pentagon. Everything feels a little weird. And the White House press corps feels a bit North Korean in their approach to their jobs. Yeah. That's a other thing. We'll have a selection of,

that content for you today. So let me just like quickly set the stage for this meeting. I'm sure everybody remembers the disastrous Alaska Summit back in August. According to a bunch of news reports, the way that came together is that Trump's golf buddy turned diplomatic Swiss Army knife, Steve Wickhoff, met with Putin before that summit. Wickoff left the meeting thinking to Putin's demands had softened. He was completely wrong. And then Putin meets with Trump. Putin rejects the idea of sanctions relief for a ceasefire. he gives Trump this typically long lecture about Russian history and grievances and then demanded more territory from Ukraine. And the Financial Times reported that that meeting went so badly that Trump nearly walked out of it,

but ultimately stuck around for the one-on-one version and then canceled the working lunch. But as everyone remembers, Putin got the ride in the beast. He got the photo op. He wanted and that sucks. And then Trump is sort of a, you know, Trump is a narcissist and only cares about the PR. So he had to pretend it was okay. But after the Alaska summit, Trump again, promised. to get tough on Russia. He threatened to sanction Putin. He threat to support a security guarantee from Europe for the Ukrainians. Surprise, surprise. It's October. And none of that has happened.

So if you fast forward a bit to the last few weeks, there's been all this chatter that Trump might give Ukraine Tomahawk cruise missiles. Those are highly advanced U.S. weapons. They cost about $2.5 million each. They're basically jet airplanes with warheads on the front that can deliver a 400-pound warhead or can carry cluster munitions. So they're very serious. And they can, most importantly to Putin, they can travel a thousand miles so they could hit Moscow. So Putin, I'm sure, saw those reports about the U.S. giving Ukraine tomahawk spend and wanted to prevent it. So Putin called Trump on Thursday the day before this meeting with Zelensky.

They talked for two hours. Then afterwards, Trump announced he was going to meet with Putin in two weeks in Hungary. And then, surprise, surprise, Trump seemed to be playing down the idea of providing Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles. So that brings us to Friday's meeting between Trump and Celest. Sorenski, here's a super cut from the press spray they did that I think gets you a flavor of Trump's comments, what Zelensky said in return, and then just how embarrassing the MAGA media is. We're going to be talking about that. That's something we'll be talking about. You're right.

It's an escalation, but we'll be talking about that. Our president has stuck out his neck in many ways to make a piece deal for your war as well. What specific concessions are you willing to make to end this war with Russia? Will you give up joining NATO? Americans have foreign war fatigue and our presidents, as he said, we need our Tomahawks too. To me? Yes, you, President Zelensky. What do you see is the biggest difference in diplomacy between President Trump and President Biden?

President Trump has a big chance now to finish this war. President Biden now is not the president, so he doesn't have a chance to finish this war. Well, India is not going to be buying Russian oil anymore. What's going to happen if the United States isn't a conflict, and we need the tomahawks? Well, that's a problem. We need tomahawks, and we need a lot of other things that we've been sending over the last four years to Ukraine. Do you concern that maybe the Russian president is trying to buy himself more time? Yeah, I am, but you know, I've been played all my life by the best of them.

And I came out really well, so it's possible. This is number nine, okay? This will be number nine for me. I've solved eight, including in the Middle East, I've solved eight. This, I thought, would have been among the easy. He's been played all his life, Ben. Not going to get played again. Yeah, getting played in Atlantic City is a little bit different than getting played by Vladimir Putin.

The new policy is crystal clear. I have no idea what he's going to do. What was your takeaway from watching all these events today and reading about it? I think my takeaway was that Trump actually believes this theory they have that he has all this momentum. In part because he seems to believe he ended in eight wars when he, I don't think he ended really any of them. I mean, we've cataloged this, but it's just worth mentioning that the war and Gaza's not even over. It's a ceasefire. The war over Kashmir is not over.

It's a ceasefire that would have happened anyway. We can go on and on down that list. But I think they believe this idea that the world, the big, unruly complicated world, kind of operates in the optics of kind of maga media. And there's such a positive feedback loop for Trump from the sick offense around him and from the media that he consumes that he kind of thinks it is as easy. is I had a peace photo op in Gaza, now I have a peace photo op with Putin and Zelensky, and all these problems will be solved. And I just think at a certain point, that gets dangerous, you know, and Putin's figured that out, because what's Putin figured out is that he can play for time. You know, we got an Alaska summit, now we'll have a Budapest summit with Trump's favorite

European autocrat, Orbán, and he's just going to keep stringing this thing along. And it doesn't seem like there's much of a theory. Now, Zolensky has to go and he has to play along. has to wear like a black suit instead of a t-shirt. And I'm sure what he wants is he wants consequences. He wants Russian assets that are frozen in Europe to the tune of like several hundred billion to be released and made available to Ukraine. He wants advanced weaponry. Tom Ox is the most extreme version of that, but there's other things that he wants in terms of weapons package. So Zelensky, Putin's playing for time. Zelensky's playing for, hey, look, Putin's jerking you along, like just give me some of this stuff to put some leverage on him

or impose some new consequences on Putin. But Trump doesn't seem to want to do that. He wants it to be kind of a force of personality peace deal. But I just think in the war in Ukraine, as in the war in Gaza, right, the hardest problems do not lend themselves to the kind of optics diplomacy that Trump likes. Yeah, he's definitely jerking something. I thought about saying that, but I didn't know. Yeah, I mean, like, I'm just like, I can't get over the whiplash about reading the Tomahawk

missile coverage. Again, like Tomahawk missiles can go travel 1,000 miles. They're very advanced weapons. Moscow was about 500 miles from Kiev. When the Biden administration told Ukraine that they could hit targets inside of Russia with the attack missiles that only can travel up to 190 miles, very senior Trump officials, including Don Jr., accused Biden of starting World War III. That was like a big kind of theme of the way Trump ran against Biden on foreign policy

was that we had this reckless policy of supporting Ukraine. that would lead to World War III. Also, by the way, Trump said he was going to end the war in 24 hours. None of that has happened, but it's just sort of like it's confusing to watch him escalate and escalate. I do wonder, Ben, if they're just kind of like dangling that out there in the press as a way to try to get Putin to the table. But like Putin knows how to play this game better than Trump. And he saw these, the reports of the Tomahawk missiles being provided to Ukraine. So he made one phone call and probably ranted it, you know, Trump for two hours, you know, suggested he'd buy some Melania coin.

And now they're having a meeting in Budapest in two weeks. And it's like nothing will happen. Yeah, if I had to guess what happened here, right, is it, this meeting was probably set up for some kind of announcement of additional military support to Ukraine, maybe the Tom Hocs or maybe something else. Putin front runs out with his call yesterday pretty transparently. He probably lathered Trump up by talking about how historic the Gaza ceasefire was and let's get back together again. There's so much we can talk about. There was this Russian proposal that came

out to build like an $8 billion Trump, Putin, you know, tunnel or bridge or something connecting. Really? I don't know if you saw this on me. Connecting Alaska to Russia. Oh, good. Why not? And they're going to name it the Trump Putin piece, something or other, you know. And that's what they're going to do. They're just going to appeal to his ego, appeal to his vanity, praise him, promote all this economic cooperation, talk about all these fossil field resources that can be made available to American companies, Blame Zelensky for the war going on. And look, I will say Trump doesn't seem to buy that anymore. Like, you know, eight or nine months in, he seems to get that Putin's playing him. I mean, he said himself, I've been played. But he's not yet adjusted

course. He's not yet decided that he's willing to kind of shift applying meaningful leverage on Putin over that. And so in the absence of that, I think we're kind of in this kind of repetitive diplomatic dance where, yeah, maybe you can eke out like some ceasefires in some places. That would be huge progress. Putin doesn't even seem to want to do that. Otherwise, I just think we're nowhere different today that I can tell than we were before that Alaska summit. Yeah, I mean, this has been the same pattern. I think as far back as March, Trump was accusing Putin of like playing with fire. He threatened to impose sanctions. He never did in August. You know, he gave him a two-week deadline to end the war. Putin did nothing. That led the Alaska summit.

That achieved nothing. It's just like promise after promise, and no problem. Nothing's actually happened. I also saw there's a big report in the Times this week, Ben, that Russia is now using drones armed with North Korean cluster munitions to attack Ukraine. For those who don't know, a cluster munition is a bomb that basically explodes into a bunch of little bombs and those scatter everywhere and can take out a huge surface area. But the real, the big problem with cluster munitions is there's always a bunch of duds. They don't explode. And so 10 years later, some little kid will pick up something that looks cool and get his or her arm blown off. So they're just horrific weapons, which is why, you know, when the Biden administration agreed to give

cluster munitions to the Ukrainian side to use in the war with Russia, both of us thought it was a pretty grim, a grim move. But, you know, I just mentioned that to kind of like catalog the ongoing escalating North Korean Russian military access that's developing and just kind of all the ways these things are getting worse. Yeah. And again, the war in Ukraine has escalated. The Russian attacks have escalated. And I think if, you know, we were to provide Tomox to the Ukrainians, Russia would do something to escalate in kind. That's how they tend to react to this thing. Maybe just far more indiscriminate attacks on Kiev and other population centers. And look, I mean, I think there's also other, you know, there's not been another major American weapons package to Ukraine since Trump took office.

There's just been a little bit of a spigot from, you know, the existing weapons packages. So you can do something without giving the Tom Hocs, too. Right. There's more incremental stuff. Yeah, there's more incremental stuff here. It's just weird that he's doing the Tom Hocs, but also yelling at the Europeans for not sanctioning China for buying Russian oil. And then he's so focused on whether India is buying Russian oil. It's just like the things he's kind of like seized with and talking about publicly are just weird and like kind of maximalists.

Like the European Union is not going to sanction China over buying Russian oil. That's crazy. Yeah, they are. And they're easier things for us to do. And again, I think an important point here is where Trump and Putin's own interests weirdly converge is in European politics. Yeah, far right. Putin likes these far-right parties because they tend to be more pro-Russian and more isolationist. Trump likes them because they're like him.

It's people like Orban. Trump knows that the Europeans are far more dependent, some of them, on Russian oil and gas than the U.S. is. So if people ask, why are they still buying any of this? They've actually done a lot to untangle that. But they're dependent also on their China relationship. The Germans sell a lot of stuff to the Chinese. And so all of these things that Trump is bullying Europe to do would cause economic pain or inflationary pain in a lot of big European economies. And we've seen time and again that the beneficiaries of that are the far right.

So whether consciously or not, Trump and Putin's political interest kind of converge in Europe. They both like these far right parties. And again, that's why Trump's strategy is kind of at odds with itself, you know, because the things he's doing. instead of applying direct pressure from the United States on Russia, he's demanding all these other people do it in ways that are going to bring huge costs and political costs to them, and that will in turn help his friends, the National Rally Far Right Party in France, the AFD in Germany, the Orban crowd, that's kind of part of the cognitive dissonance of this Trump strategy. Yeah. All right, let's switch gears to Venezuela. So listeners to this show have heard us sounding the

alarm about all these signs that the Trump administration is just barreling towards a war with Venezuela and a regime change war at that. The U.S. military is now bombs at least five boats off the coast of Venezuela that they claim were filled with drugs and gang members. It's worth noting that Colombian president Gustavo Petro said that one of those boats was Colombian and filled with Colombian citizens, but never mind that detail. Also, Ben, I just saw there are reports that there might be two survivors from the fifth strike that have now been picked up by the U.S. Navy. They're sort of like doing an after-action sweep to see what was going on. With the boat, they just bombed.

They saw two survivors. They've now picked them up. So the Trump administration was to figure out what to do with these individuals. Like, Rubio was asked about this latest strike. He didn't want to comment. And then Trump was like sort of ranting about how they bombed a submarine or something. It was really weird. We'll get to that.

But so we've talked about the broader points, which is there's this big military buildup in the Caribbean. I was reading this report from CSIS that said that more than 10% of all deployed U.S. naval assets are currently located in the Southcom area of responsibility. That is crazy. Remember, like, we've been told to the last decade, 20 years, that the real threat is from China, and now 10% of all naval assets is sitting in the Caribbean to support whatever is going to happen with Venezuela. Also, earlier this week, our mostly drunk Secretary of Defense, Pete Hagseth, announced that Admiral Alvin Holsey,

the head of Southcom has retired. Again, Southcom is the era of operations that would oversee some sort of war with Venezuela. There's a lot of chatter that he was retiring or forced out because he's not on board with this policy of murdering random people on boats that we suspect of being in drug gangs. We'll see if they name someone who is more on board to that position. And then finally, Ben, the thing that really caught both of our attention is earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Trump has secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, which, which Trump was asked about in the Oval Office earlier this week. Let's listen. Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela? And is there more information you can share about these strikes on the alleged? Well, I can't do that. But I authorized me for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America.

They've allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, mental institution, people from mental institutions, insane asylums. emptied out into the United States. And the other thing of drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela. And a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea, so you get to see that. But we're going to stop them by land also. Does the CIA have authority to take out Maduro? Oh, I don't want to answer a question like that.

That's a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn't it be a ridiculous question for me to answer? It's so weird. People also spotted U.S. military helicopters doing training exercises. like 90 miles off the coast of Venezuela, and they figured out it was a special element of the U.S. military that supports special operations work. So, Ben, I could go on and on with all, like, the signals

that are flashing red out there. It just sort of feels like no longer a matter of if, but when this happens. Yeah, it does. I mean, we had a podcast titled, you know, Trump barrels towards war with Venezuela two weeks ago, and we barreled a lot this week. Yeah, we did.

And if you look at this, first of all, Admiral Holsey, the guy that is out at Southcom, anybody you talked to suggest it was definitely tied to this. He'd only been in that position for about a year, maybe even less than a year. Not anywhere near the normal term that you would be in. And like part of that may be policy differences over maybe getting into a military conflict in Venezuela, but also one of the things that you're here and talking to people is that they were questioning the legality of the strikes against these boats. I mean, if you're a military commander, if you're in a chain of command, you kind of want to know that what you're doing is legal, right?

both because, you know, you want to have some kind of ethical code, but also because you don't want to be committing war crimes. You could be prosecuted. You could be prosecuted at some point, you know, down the line here. And it is very worrying to me that we're continuing to see, look, I'm glad people resign on principle, but I'm sure they'll find somebody. Just like they found a prosecutor to put James Comey or to indict James Comey, they'll find somebody who's not as, you know, scrupulous about following the law. So that's a concern. But when you look at this, what you see is the options being developed, right? On the cheap, let's get the CIA in there.

Like, how's the history of CIA-backed coups in Latin America gone? Not particularly well. What do you make of that finding? Like, do you think this is like a CIA finding that would allow drone strikes? Does this allow some sort of like special operators that get detailed over to the agency that can go in on a covert authority? Like, what do you think we're looking at here? Like an authority to topple the president?

Like, what could this be? I don't know, but, you know, knowing this crowd, I have to imagine it's a very open-ended authority. And so, you know, one way for people to think about these things is what a CIA authority allows you to do is not just do something in secret, but it kind of is an end run around the law, right? Because the covert action by definition is not subject to the same legal oversight in domestic or international law as things that even the military does, right? And so what a CIA finding might do is give you options. Go in there, destabilize the regime, go in there, try to, and again, I'm speculating here, but, you know, peel off members of the Maduro regime, try to sow dissension there. And yeah, at the far end, it could be, you know, try to dislodge Maduro. Now, Trump himself, you know, talks about Maduro as like an indicted narco trafficker. So as if he's a criminal who could be literally arrested and brought to the United States. But that's regime change. whatever you want to call it, you know. And I think the narco-trafficking thing, whatever you want to say about Maduro, is kind of bullshit. Because, again, it's not as if Venezuela is the main source of drugs from Latin America and the U.S.

But they've got a CIA finding. They got all these military assets. They're blowing up boats. They're threatening land strikes. They've got a Nobel Peace Prize winner in Ria Machado calling for a U.S. regime change operation. I don't know how many more pieces need to align for people to understand that Venezuela is in the crosshairs of a potential regime change, either CIA action or military action. And that is not likely to end clean that could lead to far more complicated. I mean, we've seen this in the past,

right? You open up a Pandora's box whenever you remove a regime anywhere, no matter how justified you may feel that that's a bad regime. And so this this cries out for far more attention that it's getting, it points to the absurdity of him calling himself like the peace president when he's got a department of war, like mobilizing for action in our hemisphere. I also think Trump seems to have this conception of himself as kind of the emperor of the entire Western hemisphere. And so I also worry, we're bailing out Mila in Argentina because he's our right-wing autocratic buddy. We're potentially toppling Maduro. Maybe we'll grab the Panana Canal. Maybe we'll start bombing Mexico. I feel like this may become, unfortunately, like a common occurrence as long as Trump is in there.

Yeah, he's definitely cool with the spheres of influence kind of view of the world. This video is brought to you by SimpleSafe home security. John, do you think SimplySafe's proactive protection is good enough that it could have stopped Joe Biden from stealing the 2020 election? That's what Sidney Powell tells me. That's a joke. No, probably not. But Simply Safe can stop an intruder from breaking into your home with its proactive protection that confronts criminals while they're still outside. with SimplySafe, the moment someone steps onto your property, AI-powered cameras detect threats

while they are still outside your home and alert real security agents right away. To get 50% off your new system, go to simplysafe.com slash crooked. That's simplysafe.com slash crooked for 50% off. There's no safe like SimplySafe. Again, it's worth noting like Venezuela is huge. It's the size of France and Germany combined. So like it would take a massive military footprint to actually occupy that country if things go south.

Venezuela also has like pretty, modern Russian-made air defense systems. They have the S-300 missile defense system. They have other mobile systems that are harder to track and take out. They have what are called SA-24 shoulder-launch systems that people can just like take into the jungle and fire helicopters or whatever. So like I think we've gotten way too accustomed to there being not much of a cost to war, right? Because of the way Trump talks about the Iran strike and Midnight Hammer, for example, this one could go very differently. It's also, you know, I agree there's been way too little attention to this conflict, Ben.

It's worth noting that last week there was a bipartisan vote in the Senate to block these lethal strikes on Venezuelan boats. Unfortunately, that failed. It was a 51-48 vote. Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski voted to block these strikes, but John Federman voted no, unclear why. And then finally, it just I did want to play one last clip about Venezuela for you, Ben. And this is from the Zelensky meeting today when a reporter asked him about Maduro essentially trying to cut a deal of some sort.

Here's what Trump had to say. So since he followed a message to you in English recently, offering mediation, what should we do? He has offered everything. He's offered everything. You're right. You know why? Because he doesn't want to fuck around with the United States. If he's offered everything, like, what are you waiting for?

What, like, what's preventing you from going to war? Do you just want to go to war? You just, like, horny for regime change? What's the deal? What do we want? Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. I mean, it shows you how much expectations in a president have collapsed that he has not articulated a Venezuela policy, you know?

Like, blowing up boats is not a policy. Yeah, or a demand tactic. What do we want? What do we want? Do we want Venezuela's oil? Do we want, we want to stop all drug trafficking from Venezuela? Are we going to go to war in Colombia and Mexico? where there's far more drug trafficking.

That doesn't, that doesn't, why we focus? This is actually the thing that Trump has not entered, is why are you so focused on Venezuela? You know, and I, and I look, we can answer that question. It's like, it's a left-wing autocrat. He only likes right-wing autocrats. There's a lot of oil there. It's softened up from years of sanctions. Stephen Miller has already said we're at war with Venezuela for the purposes of deporting

Venezuelans under the alien enemies acts. But there's no policy here. And so whether you're, you're Nicholas Maduro or whether you're another leader in Latin America or whether you're an American citizen or whether you're some sailor sitting on a U.S. Navy vessel in the Caribbean wondering what the fuck you're doing there. Like nobody has any idea what is going on here other than the fact that we seem to be getting ready to go to war with Venezuela. And that's, and he's certainly not making some value saying, you know, about like human rights for the Venezuelans

because he knows that would be without any credibility coming from him. So that's another deeply strange thing about this. Is it like we may be on the verge of a major intervention, a regime change intervention in a large, wealthy, resource, wealthy country in the hemisphere and nobody has any idea what

any of it's about. Like literally I haven't articulated an argument, except that we need to stop drug trafficking, specifically fentanyl, which doesn't come from Venezuela. Which doesn't come from Venezuela. Okay, a couple more things here. So things are not looking good for John Bolton.

That's Trump's former National Security Advisor. For those unfamiliar with John Bolton, he's the guy you see on TV with the mustache. She's kind of an old school warmonger. Work for Bush for a while. Not my favorite guy, but whatever. Trump fired Bolton from the National Security Advisor job in 2019. Bolton released a book not long after called The Room Where It Happened, where he was not particularly kind to Trump.

He called him stunningly uninformed, for example, shared a bunch of damning anecdotes. and has been a pretty stalwart Trump critic in the media since. I think there's clearly a direct line from that book and his criticism of his Trump to his legal troubles today. It's also worth pointing out that Trump tried to block publication of that book on national security grounds at the time. But Bolton claimed he'd gone through the clearance process. A judge ultimately let him publish it.

But the judge kind of like scolded him and reprimanded him for doing so. So on Thursday, that brings us to this week. On Thursday, Bolton was indicted on 18 felony counts of transmitting or retaining national defense information. These are very serious charges. Each of these counts could lead to a 10-year sentence. And what the authorities say happened is shocking. So Bolton, clearly planning to write this book, shared contemporaneous daily diary notes over email and a messaging app with his wife and daughter who did not have security clearances. The indictment says some details included in those messages were top secret. This is from the New York Times. been, quote, after sending one 24-page document about his time as the National Security

Advisor, Bolton followed up with a message that read, none of which we talked about, three exclamation points. One of the recipients wrote back, shh, good obsec. After Bolton left government, someone associated with government of Iran hacked his email and gained access to these details. Bolton, I guess, notified the government of the hack, but he did not say that there was sensitive material access. And then according to the economist, this Iranian hacker sent him a series of messages that read like blackmail, which I'm sure was terrifying. That brings us to August.

So the FBI raids Bolton's house. They found printed copies of his diary entries containing classified information, as well as some documents with low-level classification markings. And Bolton has been in serious shit ever since. So on Friday, Bolton pleaded not guilty to these charges. And so I guess the case will go forward now. So, Ben, I guess a couple things. If we take what's in this indictment at face value, and I think we have a lot of reasons to be skeptical, but if these, you know, details are true, this does seem quite different than the kind of made-up bullshit prosecutions of Jim Comey or Tish James.

Like, I, again, if this is true, I was totally wrong about this guy. Like, I figured he had shockingly bad policy and political views, but that he would be festidious and, like, kind of follow all the bureaucratic rules about, classification and document retention, et cetera. But if you are, if you are sending your wife and daughter emailed notes of your day-to-day work as National Security Advisor, that seems like a big fucking problem. Yes. I mean, my dear Blue Sky and Bullwark friends here, let's not lump Bolton together with Tish James and James Comey, because that would be deeply unfair to Tish James and James Comey, if John Bolton did this, it was illegal, it was stupid, and it was incredibly narcissistic. I mean, Tommy, could you imagine sitting at your desk at the West Wing where you and I once, you know,

were in adjoining offices and writing a 24-page, like, email to yourself that you then signaled to your, you know, girlfriend or at the time? Like, I mean, it's crazy. And the fact that his mind was so much on his book, even when he was in the job. tells you a lot about John Bolton. And by the way, it's kind of an indictment of a certain kind of national security type person that feels like because they've been in national security forever, they're somehow immune to things.

Now, that said, one of the problems with this thing, though, is that Trump is the guy that had boxes and boxes of highly, highly classified documents like next to the shitter in Maralago or they were moving around there. And so even though Bolton, if this is true, could be. guilty of a crime, it's still actually selective justice because Donald Trump himself, like, broke all the same laws. I saw Pam Bondi going out there talking about needing to uphold the integrity of classified information. Wasn't she the fucking defense attorney for Donald Trump when he was being prosecuted for doing the same thing? And so it still doesn't feel right because it still feels like

selective justice. And you still wonder whether John Bolden would be actually prosecuted or whether he'd get a slap on the wrist if he wasn't a political opponent. So both things can be true. Look, the hypocrisy goes every direction. Like, they also have not prosecuted Pete Hegseth, who is putting, like, forthcoming airstrike data into a signal chat with his random lawyer and his wife. You know, Abby Loll, the lawyer for Bolton, says that the underlying facts in the case have been investigated and were resolved years ago and that this is bullshit and that has been known to the FBI as far back as 2021. I guess we'll find out. I'm kind of amazed that Bolton would keep any documents in his house when Trump got reelected. I mean, it feels like a good time to do a bit of a

approach. But to your point about the hypocrisy, Ben, I mean, it's also worth noting that John Bolton famously went nuts about Hillary's emails and went ham on Pete Hagsseff over the Signalgate controversy earlier this year. Let's hear a little super cut of that. It never would have occurred to me to discuss anything sensitive, whether classified or not, anything sensitive, anything potentially sensitive on any system other than government's own secure telecommunication system, which we have spent decades and billions of dollars to perfect. I just can't conceive it. My brain doesn't get it. There's simply no excuse for it.

This to me is more evidence that Donald Trump didn't give much attention to the sensitivity of the classified information. So many elementary security precautions have been violated here that's just hard for people who have been in the government and actually had this kind of classified information to understand how she got away with it for so long. If you're conscious of the need to protect classified information, you remember what the rules are. I mean, this really was a demonstration of gross negligence. Tough.

I think some of those quotes ended up in the indictment. Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, like, the fact that that first clip was from News Nation, the fact that this guy's, like, self-booking on News Nation tells you a lot about him. Like, he's just that thirsty. you know, to be in front of a camera. I mean, you know, I'm not trying to be too mean to News Nation, but I mean, like, John Bold, not everybody needs to hear from you on everything.

But also, I think the problem here that pisses me off is that John Bolton, all the, everybody else who criticized Trump for Signalgate and for keeping classified documents in Marlago, he, like, makes us all look, you know what I mean? Like Trump's play is, I may do it, but everybody does it. everybody's bad, everybody's a liar, everybody's corrupt, so you know, you don't feel as bad about me being a liar and corrupt. And every time someone like John Bolton is proven to be such a fucking hypocrite, it's the biggest gift in the world to Donald Trump because it kind of

delegitomizes not just John Bolton, but everybody else who's criticized Trump. And so thank you, John Bolton for being so self-interested and so attention-starved and so focused on your fucking book that, you know, you've now played right into the Trump playbook that every Everybody does it. Not great. Speaking of surveillance, Ben, I just saw a tweet from Eva Dow over the Washington Post. She said, recent official remarks in federal contracts reflect ICE intends to use some of its growing powerful surveillance tools to probe what the administration defines as Antifa.

Civil rights watchdogs say ICE may now have brought authority to surveil dissenting Americans. That's good. I'm glad the personal Trump police force can now spy on us. We'll dig into that next week. Finally, Ben, so we've covered- If we're here. Yeah, over the last several months, we've covered these efforts by Pete Hegsef and the Department of War to shut out the press corps, to shred the First Amendment and to just curtail what we all are able to know about what the Pentagon is doing. But there was a serious escalation this week that warrants an update. A couple days ago, folks might have seen that there was this mass exodus of reporters from the Pentagon over Hexeth's new rules for media covering the Department of Defense.

So they rolled out the first version of these rules a month, like last month, I think. That was one page. The new ones are 21 pages. The original rules were crazy. It required reporters to get their reporting pre-approved by the Pentagon before publishing. That was obviously a non-starter and rejected by the press because it even included unclassified information. But this revised version is really just as bad.

So in addition to restricting movements by the press throughout the Pentagon, these new rules say that reporters can have their credentials. stripped for soliciting non-public information. In other words, doing the job of being a reporter, like seeking out information. Like, hey, what's going on in the secretary's office? Was this announcement accurate? Is this true? The memo says, press rights, quote, are not absolute and do not override the government's compelling interest in maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive information. And, quote, soliciting or encouraging government employees to break the law falls outside the scope of protected news gathering activities. So, so far, almost every major news outlet, including

News and Newsmax have rejected this ultimatum from the Pentagon and they've declined to sign the new agreement, which means they all got their badges stripped and thrown out of the building. Dozens walked out on Wednesday night. Hegsef, ever the mature, totally sober leader, posted the kind of waving goodbye emoji above all of them, a bunch of them in statements from the Post and the Times. 15 journalists did sign. It's sort of like the Star Wars bar scene of journalists. It was like a bunch of right wing outlets, the Federalist, the epic times, like China connected

newspaper, the one American newsgoons, a bunch of stringers who are confused about what they were reading. But this is just like, it's a huge deal then. It's like, it's really frustrating because I'm sure this will get folded into the culture war, the attacks on the media, et cetera. But like truly we all will be hurt if there is less coverage of the Pentagon. It's like a trillion dollar budget. These are people where there's a long history of shading the truth and duplicity to outright lies.

You know, good media coverage can prevent wars. Bad media coverage can help drive us into wars as we learned during Iraq. Like this is a really big and bad thing. Yeah. Look, in a normal administration, which this isn't, right, this would be like an earthquake that people talked about for weeks and now it barely registers. This basically makes the U.S. no different than China. If you've ever read like a Chinese media outlet, it just all does is reprint like the official comments by the officials and maybe the press release and that's it. And that's what Pete Hecks at once.

And for people to understand this, this is not just about classified information. You know, it's talking about soliciting kind of non-public information, right? You and I dealt with this in government. The vast, vast majority of reporting is actually not about a classified program. It's just something that you didn't want, you know, that somebody didn't want to get out. By definition, news gathering, non-public information. If it was public, you wouldn't care to report it. It can be everything from like an internal policy disagreement at the Pentagon to like a waste, you know,

billions of dollars waste in some big defense program to like a dishonesty about something's happening in Venezuela to like, you know, the strike assessment that, you know, that that was probably classified, but that the Iranian nuclear program was only set back a few months. Like, and if you take all those eyes. away. Not only we no longer, you know, we're no different than Russia or China and how we approach the idea of the media as just a propaganda tool. But to your point, Vietnam starts on a false premise. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was on a trumped-up bullshit thing. The Iraq war starts on a trumped-up, like claim of weapons and mass destruction. And that's with fucking journalists,

you know, in the place. Now, one of the reasons why Vietnam and Iraq got uncomfortable fast for administrations is you had journalists poking around in places like the Pentagon who were able to tell people, hey, they're gas-letting you or they don't even think this behind closed doors. And so particularly at a time when we just talked about maybe going to war with Venezuela, like not having eyes into what's happening in a trillion-dollar agency that runs the most powerful military in history of the world is just, it's not just a terrible thing for like the value of free press. It is a terrible thing for Americans in the world, generally. Yeah. And like you and I have had our fair share of fights and arguments with reporters.

I've had conversations where, you know, I was on the phone with some reporter, begging them not to print a detail about how the U.S. gathered some information because it would blow up sources and methods. I think there was, you know, lots of media frustration over prosecutions of leakers, et cetera, et cetera. I just think, like, this is such a massive escalation, like just telling all these reporters that doing your job can get your bad strips. I mean, all these reporters will keep reporting on the Pentagon from outside the building, but their jobs will just be that much harder.

And I'll say that for every time that we may have had to engage someone because we're worried about some classified information getting out about a military operation, they were far, far more times when Tommy, I don't know about you. I learned shit from the Pentagon Press about that it was useful for my job. Like, holy shit, they're gaslighting us about Afghanistan or. I don't know that. How was I supposed to know there's a bunch of waste in this Pentagon program? And this is not to say everybody who works at the Pentagon is bad, but in an organization of a couple million people, there's a bunch of bad apples, right? And so I actually learned, I like valued the Pentagon Press literally for the function of my own job at the White House. Yep. They are, a lot of them have been there for decades. They know what the hell they're talking about. They know the place inside out. They have sources who have access to information that you would never even dream of. It's a really, really bad thing. All right, Ben. Well, it was very fun talking with you. I came away with absolutely no clarity about what the U.S. policy towards Ukraine is. Or really, Venezuela, I feel like we got that one nailed.

I think we know Venezuela, unfortunately. But Ukraine is a little murkier, weirdly enough. I guess maybe we'll find out two weeks in Hungary. Like, you, we didn't just because I didn't want to make your blood pressure go up, I made sure we didn't clip Trump fluffing Victor Orban during his remarks. But there was a lot of that. Yeah. Well, look, what I think what the policy is in. Ukraine is he's just hungry for a photo op like he had in Charmell Sheikh, whether or not the war's over or not. If he can claim that there was some ceasefire, even if they're just sitting there pointing guns at each other waiting to start firing them again, that's all he really wants. That's his policy. Yeah, yeah. A good headline and a Nobel Peace Prize. All right, well, thank you for watching this episode of Pod Save the World on YouTube. Please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube.

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