Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/24/22: Russian Dissent, Nuke Risk, Trump Fails, Kamala vs Biden, Free Speech, Wall St Greed, Iraq War Amnesia, & More!

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about Putin being declared a war criminal, dissent within Russia, renewed discussions of nuclear war, Trump's fails in GOP primaries, Kamala and Biden infighting, first amendment protections, investors restricting oil supply, Iraq War amnesia, and the future of the Iran nuclear deal!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/Trita Parsi: https://www.tritaparsi.com/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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independent, vibrant ecosystem for media that can resist mainstream pressure. And again, guys, go to BreakingPointpoints.com in order to subscribe. Thank you all so much. We love you and we appreciate you. Enjoy the show. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We still have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Obviously, Sager is on the road,

but that is not going to stop us from bringing you all the latest details from Ukraine and here domestically as well. Lots actually going on today. There's a high-st stakes series of meetings in Europe with Biden and the leaders of NATO, leaders of the G7, leaders of the EU. So we'll talk to you about that.

Also some extremely terrifying, worrying developments with regards to the potential for a nuclear attack. We'll break that all down for you. Some of the planning that is occurring as we speak. Also, some political updates for you on Trump's endorsements and his anti-endorsements. He's just rescinded a significant one. And, you know, we'll tell you what that says about the Republican Party and about him himself. There's a new book detailing open warfare between the

Kamala people and the Biden people within the administration. And also there's a new threat to the First Amendment and free speech protections regarding Project Veritas, which however you feel about them, it's important we be consistent about these things across the board because we know how they can apply to journalists. It may start with an entity that you don't particularly like or don't particularly trust, but it never stays there. We also have Trita Parsi on to give us an update on where the Iran nuclear deal starts. But we wanted to start with the very latest in terms of the war in Ukraine. As I mentioned before, we've got a series of high stakes meetings,

incredibly significant, President Biden flying over to Europe to meet with NATO, to meet with the G7, to meet with the EU. And in advance of that, there were a number of significant steps, preparatory steps that were taken. And maybe the most significant of those was that the U.S. government officially announced that they believe Russia has committed war crimes. Take a listen to this is the ambassador at large for global criminal justice, Beth Van Schock. This was at the State Department briefing. Take a listen to what she had to say. Earlier today, Secretary Blinken issued a statement announcing that based on information that is currently available, the U.S. government assesses that Russia's forces are committing war crimes in Ukraine. I wanted to provide you with some additional information underlying

this assessment. We have all seen really horrific images and accounts from the extensive and unrelenting attacks on civilians and civilian sites being conducted by Russian forces in Ukraine. There have been numerous credible reports of hospitals, schools, theaters, etc., being intentionally attacked as well as indiscriminate attacks. Russia's forces have destroyed apartment buildings, schools, hospitals, other elements of the critical civilian infrastructure. We've been shocked by images of Russian forces and strikes hitting civilian sites in Mariupol, including the maternity hospital, a museum, and an art school. So that's about as specific as they got as to which attacks they

think constitute war crimes. They didn't specifically say that those were the attacks that caused them to make this pronouncement. But, Sagar, I'm really curious for your take here, because this tracks with something we were discussing on the last show. Biden had sort of casually off the cuff been asked, he had responded to a shouted question and said, yes, he believed that Putin was a war criminal. And at the time we said, well, that was kind of casual and flippant. If you're going to make this kind of pronouncement, you would expect there to be some planning and some strategy. I think now we see that this was kind of in the works and this plan was coming. So, you know, his comments may have been less off the cuff than we ultimately thought.

For the U.S. government to directly accuse Russia of war crimes, though, is extraordinarily significant because when we think about, OK, how do we de-escalate? How do we step back from the edge? How do we welcome Russia if they do stop the invasion and stop the war? How do we ever welcome them back into the community of nations? This type of language makes it very, very difficult. Yeah, it makes it nearly impossible. And that's the point I want to make. I'm also not so sure, Crystal, that this was in the works and he got out ahead of it. I view this much more as a cleanup operation. And the reason why is because, as you said, she didn't get specific in what she was saying. And the actual attacks, usually whenever these things happen, they will point to a specific attack. They'll submit evidence either at the State Department, at a briefing, or they'll, you know,

to the Hague International Criminal Court or at the UN Security Council. They haven't done any of those things. They just listed off media reports. I have no doubt that the Russians are committing war crimes in Ukraine. But again, if you're going to officially say that as the United States government and brand this regime a war criminal regime, you have now walked yourself into a position which is very, very difficult in order to get out of. Now, it is not necessarily past U.S. foreign policy in order to do a lot of deals and look past war crimes, but in order to brand somebody a war criminal and to then meet with them. I mean, for example, Crystal, could you foresee a world where President Biden and President Putin are able to have a summit in the event of a diplomatic

resolution. I don't know if that's possible on both sides right now. Obviously, Putin has an immense amount of blame here as well, but it's important that we be strategic. And for those of you who are like, what are we supposed to ignore it? No, of course, nobody's ignoring it. I mean, you and I will happily brand them war criminals all day, but governments conduct themselves on a very different basis and have to think very differently in terms of the future. Well, it comes back to the question of what is most likely to create peace. You know, what Russia believes and what Putin is telling his population is it doesn't even matter what we do. They're going to sanction us anyway. Remember, he said this also in the buildup to the war to

start with. They're going to sanction us anyway. They want to destroy Russia. That's always been their goal. You know, they ultimately want to remove me from power. And so it really doesn't matter what we do. They're going to keep us in this pariah status. So when you use this kind of language, that certainly feeds into that narrative and makes it much more difficult to persuade them that, hey, if you actually come to the table, if you actually come to the table, if you actually negotiate in good faith, we are in fact going to roll back these extraordinary sanctions. We are in fact going to welcome you back into the community of nations. So it makes it that much more difficult to accomplish what should be the ultimate goal here.

So this isn't about like going soft on Putin or pretending that, you know, there are no war crimes being created. This is about thinking strategically of how do we best create the conditions where we could possibly have any sort of negotiated peace in the future. Yeah, and unfortunately, I just don't see the ball is in motion at this point. We've called them a war crime. Let's go ahead and put this next one up there on the screen about NATO sending up battle groups in eastern Ukraine to deter Russia. This is a significant amount of troops, 1,000 to 1,500 troops set up in Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria. This is going to bring the eastern portion of the NATO deployment nearly four times what it was previously. And literally, Crystal, I think the day after the invasion,

this is what both of us were saying, which is, Putin, you have now fulfilled your worst dream, your night hack scenario. I mean, like, NATO has no choice at this point except in order to bolster up its eastern flank. Now we have the ball in motion in terms of the amount of defensive, defensive, right, capability

that's being pushed right up to the Russian border, the Russians are then going to say, well, NATO's here, so we have to do something even more offensive. And now we've branded him the war criminal regime. I saw a great piece in the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. And what they said is that the United States has now accepted a de facto position in which only the fall of the Putin regime itself is the most likely acceptable outcome to the U.S. elite and U.S. foreign policy. And I think we should all ask ourselves, do you think that's going to happen? You know, Putin is, he might be 69 years old, but actually Joe Rogan was making this good point on his podcast. Putin has access to the world's most advanced science on life extension, hormone

replacement. Like he might be 69, but he probably feels like 45 and very much could live for a long, long time. I don't think he's going anywhere necessarily. So that's a very tough line for us to be in. And it just guarantees some sort of deadlock in this region for probably decades to come. That is my fear is that that's exactly the end goal that U.S. administration officials have. I'm actually citing a piece from Niall Ferguson that was in Bloomberg that quotes a senior administration official at a private event saying exactly that, that the only end game is the end of the Putin regime. And the idea is to sort of bleed them out and hope that there's a kind of, you know, we're not talking about like an Iraq-style regime change thing, but putting as much pressure on them as possible to try to foment an internal revolt. And if they're thinking that,

I just think that they're, I think they're delusional. You know, I don't think we're anywhere close to either the end of Putin's life or the end of his regime. So that's what makes me really nervous is if that's your only end game in sight, I don't know how this is ultimately all going to play out. And, you know, there continue to be escalation after escalation after escalation. The next one we can put up on the screen. We now have Biden sanctioning Russian lawmakers. I have no problem with this. They're preparing sanctions on most members of Russia's state Duma.

That's the lower house of their parliament. Those are going to be announced in coordination with the EU and members of the G7 as well. So, again, this was all preparatory in advance of the summit. We know that at these meetings, they're going to put pressure on the Europeans to also ramp up their sanctions. But do I think that, you know, even the sanctions that I support and the people overwhelmingly support against Russian elites and oligarchs, do I think they're going to work? No, sadly, I don't.

Even though I give them credit for, I think they're being much more forceful and actually trying to go after the sort of the yachts and the luxury apartments and the goodies of being a billionaire much more forcefully and effectively than the Obama administration did. But ultimately, remember, these oligarchs depend for their entire existence and wealth on Putin. So are they going to really turn on him? I think that seems ultimately unlikely. The last piece of this, well, there's two more pieces. So also in advance of this trip, it was leaked that Biden is planning to boost LNG.

Let's go ahead and put this up on the screen. And hydrogen to Europe, pressuring them to do more. It says, scoop. U.S. and EU are working on agreement that would aim to boost supplies of American liquefied natural gas and hydrogen to Europe as they work toward ending their reliance on Russian energy. Details still work in progress. This comes as we receive the news that Russia is starting to demand energy payments in rubles. So Putin has ordered Europe to pay for their gas in rubles in an attempt to boost that currency, which, of course, has crashed dramatically

as a result of the sanctions, in particular the sanctions on Russia's central bank. The collective West has killed all their trust in their currencies, he says. Dollars and euro are compromised by sanctions on Russia's central bank reserves. And just to keep in mind here, Europe gets 40% of its gas from Russia. So Russia is effectively saying to Europe, hey, if you want our energy, if you want your people to be able to heat their homes, you're going to have to help us bolster our currency here. Unclear what the European response is going to be to that move.

Yeah, we don't know. But this is the lifeline of the Putin regime. And it's just not going anywhere. I don't think anybody can delude themselves. I'm going to be talking in my monologue about part of the reason why gas prices are so high. I'm here in Los Angeles. Shout out to $6 a gallon. But it's interesting because in Europe, it's already far past that, right? In terms of their per liter price, they have very,

very high costs. They're looking down the barrel of high fertilizer, high food crops. They need Russia. They need Russian gas. There's simply very little way around it. Even if we were to expand LNG, they don't necessarily have the infrastructure in order to have that. So we've both walked ourselves into a position where diplomatically the Putin regime basically has to go for us to find that acceptable. But also, that's just not going to happen. The absolute lifeline of the Russian economy is not cut off. And it's very clear that it's not going to be cut off, at least in the short term. And even if the Europeans were to do so, there are obviously Asian countries out there who would be very willing to buy it as well. So I just don't see it in the same way about the way that this is all happening.

And I just think that a lot of these people need to know a lot of history. I mean, it took 30 years of a rotten czarist regime and two wars for it to break down. The Soviet Union also took like 25 years of terrible life, of wars, and of a lot of events that, frankly, we got very lucky that it broke apart the way that it did. Things don't always happen that way. Things can completely go sideways. So I just think there's a lot of misunderstanding of how exactly these things go and walking yourself into the most maximalist position, which we're going to get to in our next block, can have very, very dangerous consequences. Yeah, that's exactly right. And at the same time, you know, there have been some pieces in the press about, oh, maybe there's

some dissent in the regime and maybe we're seeing the regime starting to crack up. And I think, again, that that hope and that wish is a little bit misplaced. Let's go ahead and put this next piece up on the screen. So we did have the highest level defection so far from the Kremlin. This is a Russian climate envoy, Anatoly Chubai. I don't know exactly how to say his name, has stepped down and left the country, citing his opposition to war in Ukraine, becoming the highest level official to break with the Kremlin over the invasion. And Sagar, I was talking to our friend Igor, who we had on the show on Tuesday. You guys should all watch that interview. By the way, he is a Russian living in Moscow and he's anti-war and has a wonderful perspective on all of this.

And he said that Chubai is very significant symbolically because he was literally the father of those 1990s era reforms. In a lot of ways, he was the architect of the sort of oligarchic regime. So he was central to creating this economic system that they have that ultimately not only creates the oligarchs, but brings Putin to power. You know, he was at one time, as Matt Taibbi pointed out to us, was sort of celebrated by these type of individuals. And so within the Kremlin for a long time, you had a split between the security state FSB types and the sort of liberal column. And this individual who just defected was part of that liberal column. In reality, those quote unquote liberals have been irrelevant for a long time. You know, he's more of a symbolic figure. And so when you see people like this leaving and defecting,

on the one hand, okay, you could say, oh, it's signs of cracks. On the other, they were already irrelevant. And you're also pushing out of the regime any of the voices that might have potentially been a voice of moderation. So it's not necessarily an unequivocally good thing that he is leaving. However, you have some other signs of dissent. Let's put this up there on the screen from The New York Times. Some signs they're trying to read into that perhaps some of the military leadership is unhappy with how this has all gone. They say that Igor Gherkin, a former colonel in Russia's FSB intelligence agency and the former defense minister of Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, said in a video interview posted online on Monday that Russia had made a, quote, catastrophically incorrect assessment of Ukraine's forces. He said, quote, the enemy was underestimated in every aspect. suspect you have another retired lieutenant journal and Russian state television commentator

who said of Ukraine's forces that they were that there was probably the hope that they wouldn't resist so intensely you know we're delusional on that one they were expected to be more quote reasonable and there are some experts quoted here who believe that the failures in Ukraine have quote started to create fissures within Russian leadership. Top Russian intelligence official in charge of overseeing the recruitment of spies and diversionary operations in Ukraine has been put under house arrest along with his deputy. So there are some signs that, you know, the fact that this militarily has been a complete disaster and hasn't gone the way that Russia thought it would is creating some schisms and some fractions within Russian military leadership.

But again, number one, I'd be very skeptical of these reports. And number two, ultimately, does that mean that they're planning to overthrow the regime and put someone else in charge, I think that's unlikely because all of these people depend for their position and for the oligarchs for their money on Vladimir Putin being in power. I'm really glad that you put it that way because for all of the talk of the, and also I'm annoyed with Igor because I was going to make the same point about Chubai in terms of what he meant to the regime. So thanks for stealing my thunder there, Igor. But I guess he's actually Russian, so it's fine. But whenever it comes to the analysis about what's going on within the military, the West, obviously, we're trying to grab on to any item of hope about problems with morale or, you know, Putin firing his generals. I think he fired eight of his

generals reportedly. But at the same time, and I read this with great interest and it came out in a report last night and it wasn't well noticed, but there was a leaked diplomatic cable of two military attachés at the U.S. embassy who met with their Russian counterpart for the first time since the war began. And they said that he had a, quote, emotional outburst at them, Crystal, that he basically accused them and Ukraine of trying to murder his family because his family apparently lives or was of Ukrainian descent and lives in Donetsk, which is one of those breakaway republics, and stormed out of the meeting in an emotional outburst. So for every talk of a general who is, you know, skeptical or upset with the leadership, this guy clearly, I mean, they said that this was an enormous departure from diplomatic protocol for the Russian military attache to just storm out of a meeting with the U.S. embassy attache. These things are scripted and they're very boring normally because we're two nuclear powers and these kind of things should be kept down.

And, you know, we're about to talk about some of the departures from that. But that report, the U.S. embassy was trying to spin it as showing that there's really bad morale in the Russian military. I saw it as, hey, like this guy is willing to blow up a meeting with us over Donetsk. And you have somebody in the military so fanatically committed to this mission, it seems that he is supporting it 100%. So we should also remember that Putin probably has a large amount of support within the military. Also, the Russian conscripts and many of these people, they have no idea what's going on, as we've seen from some of the videos that have come out. They don't care necessarily one way or the other.

They might be against it. And as Igor said on our show, it doesn't matter what the people think. It's like we live in a totalitarian autocracy. It's like, yes, people would be happy if the war ended, but what we think only really matters if things are 100% on the breaking point. And we don't see

that happening yet. So that's my warning again, to people who think that an immense amount of dissent or whatever is coming. One guy, Anatoly Chubai, who's a liberal, who's already connected to the Yeltsin regime, and has kind of been allowed to stay around for a while as a sign of goodwill because he's willing to play ball with Putin, him leaving, that's not, you know, that's just not a lot in terms of what we need to see. That's exactly right. And I think the last thing I'll say here is it seems like there's kind of two potential scenarios playing out in terms of the administration's thinking. I don't doubt that there are people in the administration who do have in mind, like, the only end game is for Putin's regime to end.

And, again, I think that that is incredibly foolish. Not that he's been a good leader, not that he hasn't, isn't actually, you know, guilty of the crimes that he's been accused of because he is all of that. I just don't think that we're anywhere close to the end of the Putin regime. And then the other possibility is that there is no grand strategy and everything is just sort of like reacting to events as they unfold. And I don't know which one of those is the case in a sort of driving the ship. Both of them, though, are really quite troubling. And I think that's a good way to transition to just how troubling, because you can never forget that in the background ofeyed and level-headed we have to be in thinking through every escalatory step. And we got another dramatic reminder of that recently when you had a Putin spokesperson in an interview with Christiane Amanpour refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that.

And I want to know whether you are convinced or confident that your boss will not use that option. Well, we have a concept of domestic security. And, well, it's public. You can read all the reasons for nuclear arms to be used. So if it is an existential threat for our country, then it can be used in accordance with our concept. So he's trying to say there, if it's an existential threat to our country, then we can use them. Now, what do they classify as an existential threat?

That's the real question here. And that's why these words are incredibly chilling, Zagar. Yes, and I have tried to make this point again and again. So I am happy that Dmitry Peskov, this Kremlin spokesperson, will make it for me, which is that what they consider an existential threat is the fall of the Putin regime. This also fits with Soviet nuclear doctrine, which was if the Soviet Union in their leadership is about to be decapitated or there is a threat to that, it also is an authorization for a use

of a nuclear strike. So as what we just spent 20 minutes talking about, if the end game of US foreign policy is the downfall of the Putin regime and we come to pass, let's say that those circumstances do, the risk of a nuclear confrontation goes up significantly. And in order to tamp down these risks by the United States and Russia, over 60 years ago now, we had a Cuban missile crisis, of which the endgame, a very smart man, John F. Kennedy, decided that the most important thing that we can have is communication between the two sides and understanding. And it eventually culminated, you know, Oliver Stone talks a lot about this with that American university speech, which really is a remarkable speech in its own right, in which he talks about the need and the

want of peace without the, you know, without the, uh, the, the halo of nuclear Armageddon, just shining over everything. And here's the problem. We are now entering kind of a new phase of nuclear doctrine. Let's put this next one up there on the screen, which is that this is from the New York Times. They say, quote, a new generation of less destructive nuclear arms may make the prospect of a nuclear strike less unthinkable than what it once was. Now, it's funny because they say a new generation, but it's actually not. Everything is new is actually old. Back in the 50s and in the 60s, we had all sorts of crazy programs in where we considered the use of what were called tactical

nuclear weapons. And we said, and, you know, there were considerations and floated all the way up to the president. Crystal, should we use nuclear weapons at the Suez Canal to protect the Brits and the French? So should we use nukes? It was presented in order to protect the French at Dien Bien Phu in their French Indochina. At the time, we eventually got embroiled ourselves in that conflict. There was a lot of discussion by Henry Kissinger and others by the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the 1950s, in the infancy of the atomic age. And Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, luckily, decided to never break what came to be seen as the ultimate choice because of the chain of events of which it could trigger. However, we should not rule out that this reaching for this old tool of using a small

tactical nuclear weapon. And when I say small, yeah, I want people to know when I say small, I'm still talking about like 250,000 people dead in an incident. These types of weapons and this return to the removing of the taboo on the nuclear option, it's a relatively new phenomenon. I studied it a lot in graduate school. It only really came about in the 1970s. I mean, that's not that long ago. And so in the desperate circumstances, we've always feared you could break that taboo, and that opens up an entire new chain of events that could occur. That's right. I mean, the sort of core concept in nuclear policy has been mutually assured destruction. That's supposed to be the core concept of deterrence.

And so when you have these quote-unquote small tactical nuclear weapons, you have the danger of leaders diluting themselves into thinking, oh, well, we could just do a little nuclear war and it wouldn't actually be that destructive. And we think we could potentially get away with that. And, you know, the New York Times was, I would say, rightly dragged for the phrasing of this tweet, sort of like normalizing a small nuclear war. But if you read the article, they are laying out something that is really significant here, that the calculation on the Russian side

with these tactical, quote unquote, tactical nukes might be a lot different than it once was. And they might think that this could be an appropriate use of force that sort of blurs the lines between conventional and nuclear warfare. And just to give you a sense of how terrifying this is, they talk about a simulation that was run by experts at Princeton University that starts with Moscow firing what they describe as a nuclear

warning shot, exactly the type of weapons that we're talking about, NATO then responds with their own small strike. And the ensuing war yields more than 90 million casualties in their first few hours. U.S. presidents seeing the Russian development of these smaller nuclear weapons, including Obama, have sort of gone along with it and created our own potential responses in size and scope to the weapons that they've developed. Trump moved forward with that as well. Biden on the campaign trail actually said, hey, I think this is a bad idea because then you get leaders thinking, hey, this wouldn't be that big of a deal. But has he done anything to roll back that program? Of course not. So this, again, creates a much more dangerous landscape, which again, look, let's just be really clear.

There is no such thing as a small nuclear war. When you go to nukes and you cross that line, no matter how quote unquote small or tactical the weapons you're deploying ultimately are, you end with potential destruction of a significant portion of the planet. And, you know, in this simulation, 90 million casualties in just the first few hours. Yeah. I mean, the history of U.S. nuclear doctrine and kind of the way that we've been talking about it is very interesting. And this reminds me very much of that 1950s period where before the nuclear taboo, there were all sorts of questions, which, oh, well, we can use a small one.

That one will invite them to use then a small one. And you would have some guy like us in the room be like, hey, you know, they have megaton weapons and the H-bomb and that within two hours, that means the entire planet is vaporized. And people were like, well, that's just what we have to do, right? And this eventually the tide turns against them after the Cuban Missile Crisis. But it appears we've forgotten a lot of this history. That's the sad part to me. I don't feel like we are really considering the consequences.

And look, another thing to consider is, remember that U.S. experts were saying that, or the Pentagon in particular, was trying to spin this narrative. The reason that the Russians used the hypersonic missile, the Kinzhal missile, in Ukraine was because they're running out of precision-guided munitions. Maybe. I don't know if it's true or not. It could be propaganda. But let's say it's true. Well, that then invites the question of it's only been a month. So if you ran out of precision-guided missions in a month,

are you then going to run out of your hypersonics? And then let's say that the war enters a new campaign and they want a decisive end to that. The use of a tactical nuclear weapon starts to seem a lot more reasonable within that framework and that circumstances if you are then the Putin regime, which then invites all sorts of escalation on our part. And we can move on and get to that. But that's that's the big question. That's a perfect transition to the next piece of that, which is the White House is very seriously considering all of those worst case scenarios with the deployment of some sort of weapon of mass destruction from the Russian side. Let's go ahead and put the New York Times tear sheet up on the screen. And this is fairly bombshell report here. U.S. is making contingency plans in case Russia uses its most powerful weapons. Let me read you a little bit

of this article. They say the White House has quietly assembled a team of national security officials to sketch out scenarios of how the U.S. and its allies should respond if Putin, frustrated by his lack of progress in Ukraine or determined to warn Western nations against intervening in the war, unleashes his stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. They're calling this the Tiger Team. That's what the group is known as. They're examining responses. Also, if Putin reaches into NATO territory to attack convoys, remember he said those convoys of weapons are legitimate targets, to attack convoys bringing weapons in aid to Ukraine. The team is also looking at responses if Russia seeks to extend the war to neighboring nations, including Moldova and Georgia, and how

to prepare European countries for the refugees flowing in on a scale not seen in decades. So this goes back also to what we led with, which is Biden in Europe today. One of those meetings with the other 29 NATO member countries is closed door, just with the leaders, no cell phones and no aides. And the expectation is that they will be going through each one of these potential scenarios. And, you know, expectation is the U.S. would sort of lead the analysis of what they think each of the responses should be to each one of these terrifying scenarios. And so that really makes it plain of what a dangerous situation we're in and why we are so uncomfortable when words like war criminals and war crimes are thrown around and when the Ukrainians

are not empowered with the ability to sort of unilaterally roll back sanctions and really bring something to the table, when there seems to be no concern about creating any sort of an off-ramp or persuading Russia that if they did negotiate and if they did stop the war, that those sanctions would ultimately be rolled back, because that landscape makes one of these horrifying scenarios all that much more likely. Yeah, I mean, we talked about this a lot in the beginning. If the prospect of nuclear war is 1%, that's still way too high. And honestly, I think it's probably higher right now. Let's put this next one up there on the screen,

which is that the defense secretary and the general of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have repeatedly tried to call their counterparts over the last month, but the Russians have, quote, so far declined to engage. That's a big, big problem. So I mentioned earlier in the show that we did have a meeting between a U.S. military embassy attache and a Russian military kind of guy who was assigned. But those are low-level meetings. The most important thing that we can have is communication at the very, very top levels of the U.S. military. And the reason that we have those – these are called deconfliction lines at the highest level – is specifically –

so in the event that something crazy goes on, you call and you're like, hey, is this real? Is this really happening? Now, we don't know necessarily, but it's a way in order to make it so that we don't have miscalculations. And the Russians, I would submit this. Absent a time of war, we should never have a situation where a nuclear-armed power is refusing to engage with us at the highest levels of military leadership. And here's the other reason. Let's put this, actually, we don't have the element for this, but it's another important quote within this quote. A senior administration official said any use of a small tactical or nuclear weapon by Russia, even inside of Ukraine, and not directed

at a NATO member would mean, quote, all bets are off on the United States and NATO staying out of the war. So he is then laying a soft red line here, saying if you use even a small tactical nuclear weapon inside of Ukraine, NATO and the United States would declare war then on Russia. And in a sense, it would then be a Russian confrontation. And this is always the issue, right? Which is that it's a gray area, which is that we don't have an obligation to defend Ukraine. And this sounds callous, but we do whenever it comes to NATO. I obviously think it'd be a horrible humanitarian event, but I'm talking specifically from the use of military force by the United States. So we would then have to take a conscious decision for the part of the United States in order to confront Putin over the

use of a nuclear weapon in a country which borders him and of which does not have a treaty obligation for us to do so, which would also almost certainly invite a nuclear confrontation between these two powers. And, you know, we shouldn't, I feel like I've been erasing too, maybe some of these other European states, France and the UK also have large nuclear arsenals. These are nuclear powers in their own right. They also have, you know, nuclear doctrine and they would certainly get involved because their countries would be absolutely destroyed and wiped off of the map as well. So if you just think about it, things can get ugly very, very quickly. The fact that they're opening the door and keeping the door open to nukes,

that we are refusing or that they are refusing to talk to us and that we are then now floating soft red lines here in the pages of the New York Times. I mean, look, they're only they're only raising these red lines if they think it's a real possibility, which means you think it's a real possibility. That's right. And there's a few think it's a real possibility, which means you think it's a real possibility. That's right. And there's a few things worth noting here. First of all, I think that they quote a Supreme Allied commander of NATO from 2009 to 2013, who says, I think he lays out just how dangerous this is very well. Very young people are flying in jets, operating warships,

and conducting combat operations in the Ukrainian war. They are not seasoned diplomats, and their actions in the heat of operations can be misunderstood. We must avoid a scenario of NATO and Russia sleepwalking into war because senior leaders can't pick up a phone and explain to each other what is happening. And that's the horror scenario all along of, you know, the dramatic escalation that we have witnessed in a very short period of time, things that were previously off the table suddenly not only becoming possible, but being implemented with very little debate, with very little consideration. And so the terrifying situation is that you are sort of stumbling into a direct war and a direct conflict without even really stopping to think about what

you're doing. You know, they say not just that if there was some sort of tactical nuclear weapon deployed on Ukrainian soil, would that potentially be a soft red line? But they even raised the possibility of, you know, if there was a chemical or biological weapons attack that was technically on Ukrainian soil, but the impact of which was felt to some extent in a NATO country, does that constitute an attack on a NATO ally? And they raised that possibility and they don't answer the question. So again, these are terrifying scenarios. Biden has been repeatedly warning of the possibility of the use of chemical or biological attack in Ukraine. The intelligence community, you know, got certain critical things right in the run up to this.

So I wouldn't completely dismiss them out of hand. And they are obviously taking all of these possibilities very seriously and sketching out the scenarios right now today with our NATO allies in Europe. Yeah. And look, it's not like the Russians haven't poisoned a lot of people in the past, so they don't have the same level of taboo, especially the Putin regime, whenever it comes to this. And it certainly could be, this could be a really big problem. Let's turn to some domestic politics, a little bit lighter fare, though, still not good, but a little bit lighter fare. Okay. We've been telling you about how Trump's endorsements in Senate primaries in particular, not going that well. So in North Carolina, his candidate is down. In Georgia, you know, we both thought that Perdue probably had a lock on the Republican nomination

because there was so much animosity towards Governor Kemp and Trump comes in, you know, strongly and forcefully on Perdue's side. Right now, Kemp is kind of cleaning up in that race. The other one we talked about was in Alabama, where Trump had endorsed Congressman Mo Brooks in that Senate primary. Now, two things happened. Number one, and probably most importantly, Brooks is losing. He's down in the polls. Number two, he made some vague comments about stop the steal that, you know, he buys Trump's nonsense line about the election being rigged, but he made some vague comments about, but we need to put that in the past and we need to look forward. This apparently pissed off Trump. And so there was speculation Trump might rescind his

endorsement over this landscape. And in fact, he has now officially done that. Let's put that up on the screen. And the details here are incredible. This is a tweet just from David Drucker. Trump, I am hereby withdrawing my endorsement of Mo Brooks. But let's put some of the details of why, according to Trump, he is unendorsing Mo Brooks. Put this next piece up on the screen. So effectively, he argues that Mo Brooks is too woke. He says, Mo Brooks of Alabama made a horrible mistake recently when he went, and he puts this in quotes, woke, and stated, referring to the 2020 presidential election scam, put that behind you, put that behind you, despite the fact that the election was rife with fraud and irregularities, etc., etc., etc. He also goes on to say, when I endorsed Mo Brooks, he took a 44-point lead and was unstoppable. And then he talks about how now he's losing in the polls, and he blames it on the fact that Mo Brooks went soft on Stop the Steal.

The response from Mo Brooks, which we have up on the screen here, is also quite interesting. Number one, he tries to spin this whole thing of, oh, is Trump being manipulated by Mitch McConnell and I'm still the real Trump candidate in this race? But he also says, Trump, quote, asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency.

What? Like, if this is true, Mo Brooks is just one random congressman. Like, this is a new level of completely delusional and insane behavior from Donald Trump. Yeah, I mean, the guy just can't help himself, can he? It's like, it couldn't be a better landscape for Republicans out there than right now. Gas, I'm here in LA, is $6 a gallon. I mean, GOP is apparently registering people at gas stations, which is a brilliant idea. And he's like, no, you know what we're going to do? We're going to go and we're going to talk about the election was stolen. And then I'm going to extract pledges from my potential endorsees that they are going to go and try and pursue blatantly illegal and

like banana republic level schemes in the United States Congress in return for my endorsement. And I'm trying to think, even what Mo Brooks said in his comments were so asinine. They were like, hey, look, the 2020 election's over. We can only fix it by winning in 2022 and 24. Okay, that's what enraged you? That's completely insane. But look, I just think it goes to show a lot of people who do support Trump that when you do, you buy into the absolute most insanity of his personality and which he indulges on a day-to-day basis.

And at the end of the day, the only thing the man has actually shown any ability in order to exercise power on behalf of are his wimps. And this is what he chooses to spend his time obsessing over. This is what he chooses in order to extract of pledges from nominees. Nothing about policy, nothing about anything. Even America first, the term America first, as it exists in our contemporary political discourse today, it has nothing to do with Russia. It has nothing to do with energy policy. What does it have to do with? It has to do with stop the steal.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that's totally a real nationalist cause that we're talking about here. And I just think it shows you also why you have a lot of these Senate candidates absolutely be clowning themselves with, I think Trump won, Trump won the election. And then they try and high IQ it and be like, because the media rigged it against him. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. He doesn't think that. He thinks that the actual election was stolen by bamboo ballots from China.

Do you believe that? Because that's what you're endorsing. And that's what a lot of people who follow him, unfortunately, that's what they believe too. And look, I just think on the one hand, it could be good, Crystal. It shows you that his political influence on this insanity is diminishing, that there is actually a pretty large constituency within the Republican Party who's not willing to play ball. But on the other, I mean, I still think he would win the, I mean, I know he

would win the GOP nomination, and I think he probably will win if the election were held today to become the next president. And if he does, I think we have to be honest that these are the types of insanity that he will pursue. And it's going to be very difficult in order, I mean, you know, because the mainstream media will turn it up to, you know, 15, be like the republic is over. And you can be, we'd have to turn it up to like seven

and be like, well, you know, this is a threat to constitutional democracy in terms of what we're doing. But it's possible that it will all fail. It's just I can foresee a nightmare scenario of what the national landscape is going to look like if it gets reelected. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's a nightmare economy, pissed off about the direction of the country. Republicans are set through no doing of their own or no like plan to clean up in the midterm elections. And yet still, when you do the head-to-head matchups, it's basically tied between Biden and Trump, which I think if Trump just shut his trap about all this crap and moved on, he'd be easily winning in those head-to-head matchups.

So this is the thing that could ultimately – it's all there for the Republicans on a silver platter. But this crap, this nonsense is what could completely unravel it all for them. Now, listen, in the midterm elections, is it going to devastate them? No. But there are signs that they're going to underperform even in the midterm elections because of this. I mean, the Eric Greitens thing is a perfect example. This guy is winning in the Republican polls. He was potentially on the verge of being endorsed by Trump in spite of his previous scandals and allegations that he had tied up a woman, blindfolded her, and taken a picture of her naked in order to blackmail her to keep her from talking about the affair that they

were having. Now we have allegations of domestic violence and child abuse in a signed affidavit from his ex-wife. And, you know, it's a real question whether this guy could ultimately still be the Republican nominee because he said the right things on Mitch McConnell and on Stop the Steal for Trump and for the GOP base. He's the only Republican who could lose that Senate race in Missouri. But I do think if he's the nominee, there's a good chance that he loses. So even in the midterms, there's a chance that they underperform because of leaning into something that, yeah, there's like, you know, an article of faith among the Republican base, but even the Republican base, like, this isn't their top priority. If you look at the polling, they care about the crap you'd expect them to care. They

care about the economy, right? They care about being able to, like, you know, pay the bills and put food on the table and fill up the gas tank. So, you know, even within the sort of core of the Republican faithful, this isn't what they want you spending your time on. And I think it has eroded his influence in these Republican primaries and has eroded his political power to an extent. I mean, as you point out, you always want to be really clear. If the Republican primaries run today, there's no doubt that he's the nominee. He's very likely the nominee if he runs again for 2024. But even in West Virginia, let's put this next piece up on the screen. There's a primary race between two members of Congress because West Virginia lost one congressional seat. So you now have two sitting members of Congress facing off against each other

in a primary there. Trump backed Alex Mooney, and he is right now losing, according to this poll, to David McKinley. So, you know, both of these guys are like sort of run in the mill. There's nothing particularly special about them as far as I know. But Trump puts his thumb on the scale, says Mooney's my guy. And that doesn't seem to have really moved many people in this primary in the state of West Virginia, which is one of the states, if not the state, where Trump has the highest level of committed support. You know, there are a lot of people there who really believe in this guy, and it doesn't seem to have particularly moved them.

West Virginia is as Trump country as it gets. And if they're not willing to vote for some guy based upon his stop-the-steal credentials because they care more about somebody talking about inflation, that's as good of a sign, if any, of not necessarily Trump's diminished influence when he's on message, but his influence in terms of raw power of just like, here's my most stupid, insane point, which, yeah, you kind of sympathize with because you hate the media, but which you don't care about 100%. And yeah, I'm not willing in order to go along with it. But look, he's not going to learn his lesson. He's going to stick with this until the day that he dies in order to go along with it. But look, he's not going to learn his lesson. He's going to stick with this until the day that he dies in order to placate that large ego of his.

So everybody just be honest here about what exactly is happening if he becomes president again. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the other side of the coin here with the Democrats. Okay. We've been tracking. There have been some little rumors

coming out of the White House about dysfunction within Kamala Harris's team, how, you know, she's not doing particularly well in the job, how we know that there have been staffers who have been fleeing her office, like Rat's office and getting shipped. It's very consistent with throughout her career she's had this problem holding on to staffers. There have been rumors about how, you know, she doesn't like to prepare. And then she gets, when she doesn't do well, she gets really angry at the staffers, even though they put the briefing book in front of her. She just was not really willing to engage with it. So there's a new book that is coming out from two well-sourced New York Times reporters, Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns. And they have some inside details about what Maggie Haberman described as open warfare between the Biden people in the White House and the Kamala people in the White House. We've got a few of those details for you.

Let's start with this one. Put this tweet up on the screen. So apparently, reportedly, some of Harris's advisors believed the president's almost entirely white inner circle did not show the vice president the respect she deserved. Harris worried that Biden's staff looked down on her and she fixated on real and perceived snubs. So sounds like she's got a real chip on her shoulder and the and her staffers are sort of channeling that as well. And so the same sort of rhetoric that we hear applied to the American people of like any of her failings is not really her fault. It's the fault of the American people. They're too racist.

They're too sexist. Apparently, they think the same thing about the Biden White House staffers, the man who picked you and elevated you to be vice president. You think the same thing about those people as well. Oh, this woman is a complete and total narcissist. Some of the stuff that is in, is that she sent her top aide to the White House deputy chief of staff to convey her displeasure that White House staff was not standing up in the room when Harris entered and took it as a sign of disrespect. Okay, let me tell you something. As a White House correspondent, I was in the room with Mike Pence on several occasions, and nobody stood up for the guy because he's not the president.

The standard is you stand up when the president enters the room in the White House. You're not the president. So this lady is a complete narcissist. I mean, the other particular one that stuck in my craw here was the discussion around Anna Wintour. And I love this because we'll all remember that Kamala was on the front page of like Vogue and Anna Wintour photographed her and apparently ended up using a photo, which was her wearing sneakers. And the vice president and

her team and her online mob implied that this was sexist and it didn't make her look as powerful as they wanted. And they actually vocated and ended up replacing the photo on their digital edition. But she saw it as a major snub against her by the cultural zeitgeist. And she apparently was upset with the Biden White House top staff who had not yet entered, but were beginning to assume the presidency, that they were not backing her up in her feud with Anna Wintour. And the top aides were like, just so you know, the president's dealing with January 6th, a pandemic, a global economic crisis.

And maybe you should just tone down your little snap with Anna Wintour because we have way bigger shit to deal with. And it just shows you the size of her ego. I mean, she really is Selina Meyer from Veep. There is no better parallel. A total, just untalented politician foisted upon all of us who is a power-obsessed narcissist. It really is just pathetic to see somebody like this. Put D3, guys, up on the screen, because this is about the Anna Wintour piece that you're talking about. They say Kamala Harris felt, quote, wounded and belittled by the photo that Vogue chose for her February 2021 cover. Here's what they say. And this, again, comes from the same book and was, I think, initially reported by Politico.

They say, she asked aides, would Vogue depict another world leader this way? Incoming chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, was, quote, caught off guard by the anger in Harris' circle and contacted a senior Biden campaign official. Given the country's

myriad crises and the recent January 6th riot at the Capitol, the Biden advisor told Flournoy that this was not the time to be going to war with Vogue over a comparatively trivial aesthetic issue. Tina, the advisor said, these are first world problems, according to the excerpt. I really do think it's very revealing, because put yourself back in that time period and the level of crisis that the country was in. As you said, the nation was still in shock over the events of January 6th. This is literally the next month after January 6th, when we're all still going like, what the hell just happened here? You still have, it's very early days of vaccines being rolled out. This was before you or I or many millions more of Americans had an

opportunity to get a vaccine. There was a high priority put on how do we roll these things out? How do we get shots into arms as quickly as we possibly can? There was a lot of economic pain and suffering. This is before they actually passed the Relief Act and are able to get those next series of checks out the door and the sort of final economic stimulus to patch up what was done, not that they've totally recovered, during the coronavirus collapse. So all of this is going on and what you care about is your freaking Vogue cover? I mean, this tells you everything about this person who we know from the campaign, you know, was changing campaign slogans with the seasons, as one of her staffers famously said, was like having a conference call to figure out what her core values should be.

Obviously, they never came to any real conclusion because her core values here are on how she looks on a Vogue cover. And by the way, it's interesting, too, because I also think this is revealing. Anna Wintour said she personally selected the photo of Kamala in the sneakers, which was definitely a little—she's wearing, like, a business suit and something that looks like Chuck Taylors or something like that, low-top sneakers. And so it is a little bit more of, of like an approachable kind of image for her. And the one she liked was the less authentic sort of traditional glossy campaign-style photo that they ultimately used on the digital publication or something like that or swapped it out from. So she wanted the less authentic one.

That was what she ultimately was going from. She was like, this one over here almost makes me look like a normal human being and that is not what I want. Yeah, also, you're not a world leader. You're the vice president. You're senior staff at best. Accept your role, like know your place.

This is the thing that drives me nuts. You have to earn respect. You were not elected. Exactly, you were not elected to be president. If you are, then fine. But guess what? You didn't. And she wants to present herself on the same stage as like a Michelle Obama, who also was

a first lady, you know, last time I checked. And or, you know, Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel actually got elected. So you would have to do one of those things in order to make that happen. I just see a total, I mean, it's just confirmation. Everything that we know about her is true. She's an untalented politician. She barely knows how to string a sentence together in a coherent way, especially whenever she's under pressure or she embarrasses us on the international stage when she goes abroad to Poland or whenever

she went down to the Central America Northern Triangle. On almost every single occasion, she's incompetent at what she does and yet demands respect and subservience from all of us. You know, if I was in the room with her, I wouldn't stand up. There's no way. And no, I don't think people should. You don't demand respect no matter who you are. Even if you are the president of the United States, you have to earn it. And she believes that the fact that it's not just like automatically given to her has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the failures of the people around her. I mean, the Biden team, they ultimately get what they deserve because they're the ones who made this choice, even though to anyone who was watching events unfold and watching her performance on the campaign trail

and watching her career trajectory and watching the lack of response from voters, none of this is a surprise. There's one last piece, tidbit from the book that is also very revealing. This is from the Politico playbook write-up. They also say the book documents the frustration over Harris's policy portfolio. Some of these leaks had come out before that we had talked about Sagar. And they say at one point her staff floated the possibility of the vice president overseeing relations with the Nordic countries, a low-risk diplomatic assignment that might have helped Harris get adjusted to the international stage in welcoming venues like Oslo and Copenhagen. White House aides rejected the idea and privately mocked it. More irritating to Biden

aides was when they learned the vice president wanted to plan a major speech to outline her view of foreign policy. Biden aides vetoed the idea. Imagine the gall to think that you can like, you don't have a foreign policy view, clearly. I mean, we know that, right? You're not gonna do this big personal foreign policy speech. You're the vice president. It's your job to carry on the policy of the president. That's what you're there to do. Yeah, snap too.

I don't understand. You know, it's funny. Even Lyndon Johnson, who had a colossal ego, they sent him all over the globe on these BS foreign trips because that's what you do whenever you're the vice president. You don't get to give speeches about who you are. If you want, you can run. And I think we all know how that's going to go. But look, she demands respect from us, Crystal, even though she doesn't deserve it. And it's going to be very fun to watch her crash and burn on the world stage. Yeah, and if you don't give it to

her, it's about you and your fail feelings, not about her. All right. Last story we wanted to get to here before our monologues is potential threat to the First Amendment that I think is really important to break down. So you all might have been following this story. This has been unfolding for a number of months. Somehow, and we'll get into that a little bit more in a moment, Project Veritas got their hands on what appears to legitimately have been Ashley Biden, the daughter of the president's diary. In it, she journals about her recovery from addiction and whatever else is going on in her life. They get their hands on this. And then we know, and I think we talked about it before. The FBI does this raid on James O'Keefe's home to seize evidence and is sort of insinuating that they directly stole this diary. We're getting more details on both sides about how they obtained this diary and then also the incredibly sketchy and I would say outright abusive practices that the government has been using to go after Project Veritas, an organization that, look, let's be clear, guys, I have no particular use for.

I think every time they post something, Sagar and I are very skeptical of whatever it is because they've been known to deceptively edit. Their tactics are as sketchy as it possibly gets. But those are the instances when it's most important that you stick to your principle, even when you don't necessarily like the outlet that you are talking about. So first we have this New York Times reporting. And by the way, Project Veritas is in this whole feud with the New York Times. So you should take their reporting with a grain of salt. But the story that they sketch out here in terms of how Project Veritas obtains Ashley Biden's diary is that she had been staying in a Florida apartment. She'd been living there for a while. She moves out of the apartment and she leaves, mistakenly, the diary and some of her other personal effects behind. According to the New York Times, she contacted the landlords of

the apartment. She planned to go back and get it. The new tenant of the apartment was a Trump supporter who found this diary, and it ends up in the hands of people who are circulating it at a Trump fundraiser. That's when Project Veritas comes in and, you know, is talking to these intermediaries and wants to purchase this diary for $40,000. New York Times sets this whole article up with the way, the sort of subterfuge that they allege Project Veritas used to confirm the authenticity of the diary. Okay, so diary is, take is, you know, left at this apartment, basically stolen by the next tenant, and then it ends up being purchased by Project Veritas for $40,000. They review the contents of the diary. They actually try to use it as a device to get Biden to sit with them for an interview to answer questions about it.

They're like, no, we're not doing this. This is extortionate, you know, piss off, basically. And they don't end up even publishing the contents of the diary because they rightly figure out that most people are going to look at that and be like, what? It's the president's daughter. Like, what are you doing? These private details of her life? This is way out of bounds. So they don't publish the contents of the diary. They ultimately turn it over to local law enforcement. And then the next thing that we hear, we didn't really know any of that was going on. The first we hear of this story is because there's this FBI raid on James O'Keefe, who's the founder of Project Veritas, the leader of Project

Veritas, on his home. He just released some video of what that looked like. Let's take a look. with you yeah you do not speak to them you are not being the same um yeah we just want to see um so very aggressive here. And now the latest piece, Sagar, and then I'll get your reaction. Let's go ahead and put this screenshot up on up there on the screen. This terror sheet. Project Veritas says the DOJ secretly accessed its emails as part of its probe into how it got Joe Biden's daughter's diary. Effectively, the court had established a certain procedure,

because you are talking about a First Amendment organization here where there'd be a special master that reviews any information and determines what can be used in a court case and not, and that the DOJ secretly went around those rules to execute a search warrant directly with Microsoft and obtain these emails outside of the court-established process. That is what Project Veritas and their lawyers are alleging here. So, just to—that was all long, and let me just boil down a couple of things. Number one, you cannot, obviously, as a First Amendment organization or anyone, directly steal something. That is illegal, right? That is theft. But even the New York Times that has an ax to grind here isn't saying that

that's what happened. Now, they allege, oh, maybe they knew that it was stolen materials. Well, guess what? Journalists know that they're using stolen materials all the time. Is it unseemly to pay $40,000 to pay any money for information and access? Yeah, it's unseemly. It's also not illegal. It's considered sort of bad journalistic practice and it is unseemly, but it is not illegal. So even in the story that the New York Times is spinning here, it's hard to see outside of political motivation, what is the justification for the criminalizing of these activities? Unless, Crystal, they can prove that Project Veritas directly organized the theft of these materials and orchestrated it directly, not purchasing it after it had already been stolen, then this is a BS political persecution.

If you look and you read within the story, they say as one of their accusations for why Project Veritas shouldn't be treated with First Amendment protections is that they contacted a representative for Ashley Biden and didn't identify themselves as part of Project Veritas. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't do that. At the same time, that's not illegal. Like, it's not illegal for you to use false or deceptive tactics in order to get information. And in fact, there have been many instances when reporters have either not identified themselves or inserted themselves into a situation without identifying themselves and have used information around them in order to publish stories. Once again, I would personally never do that. I don't, it doesn't fit within my ethics, but I am a First Amendment maximalist.

And in this case, they did not do anything wrong. I also find it very troubling whenever I read all of this, that the New York Times is just willing to take these criminal prosecution documents straight from the Department of Justice and just establish their narrative. Look, we're talking here about the president of the United States' Justice Department, who is prosecuting somebody who tried to publish the contents of his daughter's diary. I think that's sketchy territory. I'm glad that they didn't ultimately go ahead and publish it. But even if they did, I would say, look, it's a free country. This is the price of what living in a free country is. And you cannot use

the FBI and the DOJ and the goon squad to bust down people's doors at 6 a.m. in the morning, steal all of their materials, and then start leaking it to The New York Times. I mean, this is the part which really bugs me about the mainstream media, which is we have to recognize this for what it is. I mean, is it all that different than New York Times reporters meeting Daniel Ellsberg, who literally stole and orchestrated a theft from the Pentagon of the Pentagon Papers and then transferred them to Neil Sheehan over at the Times? I mean, that could have similarly been prosecuted as some sort of criminal conspiracy and directing of all of this happening or same thing, you know, whenever the Washington Post and them also tried to obtain those materials. We have to protect

that right. This fits with Julian Assange. This fits here with Veritas. And this is why it's just so frustrating that these people don't really believe in freedom of the press. And whenever it's somebody using tactics that they don't agree with or who is an enemy of their, you know, the regime, quote unquote, they're fine. And like one thing, last thing on Veritas, have they, yeah, look, they've been caught with sketchy edits. I personally wish James O'Keefe would just publish the interviews and not do those annoying straight to camera monologues because they actually just ruin the weird music they lay over top and stuff. It's like,

just put on the info, dude. Project Veritas, if you're listening, stop doing that. But we have used some of their stuff before. The New York Times reporter, Jeffrey Epstein,

Amy Robach. I mean, the guy has published some legit stuff in the past. And I'm just going to err on the side of being able to have that in the open and public square. So I think all of us should stand up against this. I 100% agree. And it's really simple. Your principles are meaningless if they don't apply when it's people or ideas or

organizations that you don't particularly care for. And that's what we see is New York Times, all these people, they're so, you know, they'll use all this high-minded rhetoric about freedom of the press and the power of journaling and how important it is and how you've got to protect it. No, we have to resist, you know, Trump and his attacks on the press and all of this. But they only do it when it's easy. You know, they only do it when it fits into, when it's one of their friends, fits into an ideology that's comfortable for them. So they are actively not just silent on this, but they're actively trying to sow this narrative that there was something actively illegal about what was done here. When you read through their own accounting, you can't figure out, okay, well, what is actually breaking the law? Not what is distasteful, not what is unseemly, but what is actually illegal to justify criminalizing this activity and an FBI raid, you know, knocking on James O'Keefe's door.

And even in their telling, there's nothing there that crosses that line. So that's why this story ultimately matters. All right, Sagar, what are you looking at? Well, everyone, I'm here in Los Angeles to speak at a conference, but I've been seeing some very troubling signs all around me. Those signs are gas prices. Gas prices are $6.50, almost $7 a gallon. Los Angeles is the only city in the country which has an average in the city of $6.

And some of the people I've spoken to, working class Americans, some of whom drive Uber and others, are really struggling right now. And it just goes to the question of what can actually be done. And whenever we talk about what needs to be done, we have to consider what the problem is. And one of the main problems right now is Wall Street. Let's go and put this up there on the screen, which is that the Dallas Federal Reserve went ahead and surveyed 100 oil and gas executives, and they all gave an overwhelming reason why there has not been more domestic production. It is not about the biden administration it's not even about policy it is quote investor pressure to maintain capital discipline and this is something i've been

trying to hammer home for a lot of you over the last couple of weeks because understanding what has gone wrong in the oil market is the key to what exactly can be done about it which is that these guys spent about a decade of using cheap capital and burning hundreds of billions of dollars on drilling in domestic production. Now, that could be great. And the problem, though, was COVID. And the price went ahead and went all the way down in 2020. And it killed a lot of their ability in order to reap any profit. So it's at a time like this, whenever gas prices are extremely high, that they are then reaping the rewards of those high gas prices and paying themselves back. And when we have such a capital imbalance like that,

there's only one actor that can do anything about it, and that's the government. A lot of what we see right now, Crystal, are these opportunities for – are these – there are these proposals, for example, from the governor of California to give people gas cards or – not even per household but per vehicle or even gas tax relief. And look, I mean I support some of that in general in order to reduce pressure. But the problem is production and supply. And there is just no current effort by the administration in order to boost supply in a way that we could in the near term, both on the foreign policy front, which we've talked a lot about with Saudi Arabia and with Venezuela, but also here at home. I mean, we clearly are seeing a Wall Street-sized blockade in front of Americans' gas prices. It's because they want to pay themselves back from previous times. And I'm sorry, we can't have this situation

where because you're trying to get paid back, people are suffering. I mean, here in California, the national average or the statewide average is $5.80 a gallon. That is just hundreds of dollars a day or a week that are being taken out of people's property. And, uh, for those who are Angelenos, I think they're called you people drive far more than I ever even thought possible. The amount of traffic in the city is nuts. So, uh, I can't even imagine what these people are spending whenever it comes to their gas bills. I just put it all together and it's very clear here what the issue is. And we're just not even having a discussion nationally about what to be done about it. Everybody's like, oh, well, we can cut the state gas tax. Look, that's like 30 cents. We need to drop this thing by a dollar,

dollar 50, two dollars. The problem too is that those efforts, which I also support, you know, to cut gas taxes temporarily. In fact, we should be moving away from a system where highways are financed by gas taxes because ideally we'll be reducing our consumption of gas or the idea of, you know, giving everybody gas cards, sort of another stimulus to be able to help to afford gases. The problem is that then you likely have the impact of increasing demand. And if you don't deal with the supply side, you're just going to continue to put upward pressure on – You're going to make them more money. Right.

That's it. So, I mean, you have like effectively a capital strike here in terms of short term increased production. Of course, you know that I think the most elegant solution is just to nationalize these companies so that we can ramp up production in the short term and wind it down in the long term. But we all know how politically unlikely that is. And again, I think all of it is politically unlikely, you know. Yeah, no. And I think that's the problem. I mean, I keep trying to find some sort of way. I'm like, there's got to be a way here. And yet, as you just said, let's say we cut the gas tax and we increase demand. Then we're just making Exxon even more money and paying back the billionaires who financed their drilling in

the first place. That's nuts. So if you're anti-oil, uh, oil company, you should not be for that. We should have to be in some sort of solution where we can balance both their profit, our own supply needs, and then also just break the capital strike, which is happening. I mean, there's that clip going around right now. I wish I had cut it for this, which is that the pioneer CEO saying we will not drill even if the barrel is $200 a barrel. And I'm like, what, what insanity is this? We can't have this situation. And the people here are suffering. I mean, yes, it's the entire country, but there's 12% of the U.S. population lives in the state of California. And these people drive all the time.

And, you know, people who drive Uber or people who drive trucks or all of the input costs that go into people's food and more is just outrageously expensive. It is an everyday tax on American working citizens. And we have to do something about it. So at the very least, I thought I would do this short talker thing since I'm on the road for people to at least understand what the problem is, because that's why. That is why gas is right. It's not Keystone. It's not actually Putin even. I mean, you know, there's just like a whole narrative being spun on the Democratic side and the Republican side that is not reflective of what is really going on. Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, guys, confirmation hearings for Biden's Supreme Court nominee, Katonji Brown-Jackson, or KBJ as she is known, continued in highly

predictable fashion yesterday. Democrats fawned, Republicans fumed. If you followed anything about it, you likely heard about the attacks on her as soft on pedophiles and the attempt to cast her as Ibram X. Kendi in judicial robes. But there was another line of attack this week that reveals a lot about our current moment and how little we have evolved from the reign of the neocons during the George W. Bush era. Because several Republican senators were quite exercised about KBJ's work in opposition to the war crimes, torture, and lies of the George W. Bush administration. And the feckless liberal non-response, frankly, was equally telling. As you may know, during her time as a public defender, KBJ was assigned to represent four different detainees who were held

at Guantanamo Bay. Later in her career, Brown Jackson also filed front-of-the-court briefs on behalf of two different advocacy organizations that were challenging indefinite detention policies. This is all, obviously, in my opinion, a strong point in favor of her integrity and values. But official Washington clearly feels quite differently. It was no secret Republicans were planning to attack her record defending detainees. Senator Hawley had already expressed concern over that record. Senator Cornyn, a top Republican, indicated that she would be questioned over her defense of Guantanamo detainees. And when she was previously vetted through Senate confirmation hearings, she was put through the paces on the matter by Senators Sasse, Cotton, and Grassley. And sure enough, Republicans pounced. Lindsey Graham,

as committed to war crimes and torture as he ever was, had a whole meltdown and stormed out of the room over his support for imprisoning people with no charges forever. I'm suggesting the system has failed miserably and advocates to change this system like she was advocating would destroy our ability to protect this country. I hope they all die in jail if they're going to go back and kill Americans. It won't bother me one bit if 39 of them die in prison. That's a better outcome to letting them go. And if it costs $500 million to keep them in jail, keep them in jail because they're going to go back to the fight. Look at the frigging Afghan government. It's made up of former detainees and Gitmo. This whole thing by the left about this war ain't working.

Let me also note that Larry Thompson, who served as Deputy Attorney General. For those of you who are just listening, he then gets up and storms dramatically offstage. But he wasn't the only one. Senator Cornyn was shocked, shocked that KBJ might have suggested that George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld were war criminals. Why in the world would you call Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld were war criminals. Why in the world would you call Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and George W. Bush war criminals in a legal filing? It seems so out of character for you. Senator, you may have been talking, are you talking about briefs that I, or habeas

petitions that I filed? Talking about when you were representing a member of the Taliban and the Department of Defense identified him as an intelligence officer for the Taliban and you referred to the Secretary of Defense and the sitting president of the United States as war criminals. Why would you do something like that? It seems so out of character. Well, Senator, I don't remember that particular reference. And I was representing my clients and making arguments. I'd have to take a look at what you meant. I did not intend to disparage the president or the secretary of defense. Well, being a war criminal has huge ramifications. You could be subject to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and hauled before that international tribunal and tried for war crimes. So it's not a casual comment, I would have more respect for KBJ if instead of trying to deflect, she actually just owned it. But I get it. She's not an idiot.

And as much as the language of waterboarding and the axis of evil and all of that has kind of faded from the public discourse. She knows that Washington has not really changed. In fact, with the rehabbing of W into a cuddly grandpa on Michelle Obama's bestie, in some ways Washington in recent years has actually gotten a whole lot worse. This tortured article from the Washington Post is a great case in point on this matter. Clearly intended to run cover for KBJ, they go through a long analysis of why her briefs arguing that Bush and Rumsfeld were war criminals were just in service of her clients and not really reflective of her views, protecting her from the charge that she might accurately understand the heinousness of the Bush era. After all, rehabbing the neocons to own Trump has made it impossible to condemn the crimes that these villains committed and help to prevent those same

mistakes and crimes from being committed again in the future. And that part's really important. Positioning Bush as the good Republican in opposition to Trump requires denying that liberals ever thought Bush was a war criminal to start with. On the Republican side, in spite of some temporary rhetorical changes, nothing's really different. After a brief nod towards a different approach, they're all lockstep on the neocon talking points once again. Just witness their response to Ukraine.

Biden is weak. He needs to do more. Casual talk of regime change and escalation. Lindsey Graham insanely floating multiple times that Putin should be assassinated. Trump wants to menace Russia with nuclear subs. Liz Cheney is out there agitating for sending in fighter jets. But you didn't really need this exchange to know that nothing has changed here. After all, Guantanamo is still open. U.S. troops are still in Iraq. We are still destroying Afghanistan, now with our cruel sanctions instead of our open warfare. Attacks on our own civil liberties have

only expanded since put into place by the Bushy's beloved Patriot Act. All of this has very real and very immediate implications, especially as there are some troubling indications that the neocon impulse to, quote, spread democracy is guiding the Biden administration's decision-making in Ukraine as well. This time, it's coming wrapped in liberal humanitarianism. According to historian Niall Ferguson, a senior administration official said recently at a private event that, quote, If true, Putin stays, Russia will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. If true, this would indicate that our actions to bolster Ukraine and punish Russia

are not actually about Ukraine at all. They're about attempting to end the Putin regime, bleeding it of resources and creating the conditions for a revolt. I don't know if that is in fact the strategy. It's just as likely that there is no grand strategy only in the moment reaction as events unfold. But it does fit with other indications I spoke about this week that the U.S. is not really working to pursue peace given the total lack of a plausible off-ramp for Putin that could create a near-term deal. Whatever you think of the wisdom or morality of using Ukrainian lives as playthings in this gambit to force out a truly destructive leader, if this is indeed the Biden administration's play, it is also unlikely to work. As Ferguson writes, the Biden administration is making a colossal mistake in thinking that it can protract the war in Ukraine, bleed Russia dry, topple Putin, and signal to China to keep its hands off Taiwan. A colossal mistake which would be avoided had we learned the hard-won lessons of the past 20 years. There are, of course, a whole lot of differences here.

Unlike in Iraq, the crimes Putin is accused of, he has actually committed. And unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, there is currently no appetite for a direct regime change war. But we ought to have a whole lot of humility about just how well it turns out when we pull the strings to try to produce the governments that we want in other countries. KBJ's hearing here is just a disturbing reminder that official Washington has no humility and they have learned nothing. And Sagar, earlier you were talking about, if only we'd learned the lessons of the early Cold War.

And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Joining us now, we have the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Dr. Trita Parsi. Great to see you, sir. Good to see you. So when last we spoke, the Iranian nuclear deal talks were on the ropes, partly over U.S. delays, frankly, and partly over new Russian demands that they be granted a kind of sanctions loophole through these negotiations. And this is when the talks were purportedly right on the verge of a real breakthrough

and possible completion. So just bring us up to date with where we stand today. So the Russian issue essentially has been resolved. The Iranian foreign minister was in Moscow a couple of days after the Russians first came out with that more outlandish demand. We don't know exactly what happened in Moscow but the Russians backed off and are only then demanding that their specific activities in the JCPOA be protected against sanctions. And that's something that from the U.S. side was never a question mark. That was something we were willing to do. So that issue has now been put aside, at least for now. We don't know if something else would blow up from Moscow over for whatever reasons they may have.

So now we're at a stage in which essentially there's only two issues remaining. And it's some of the most difficult issues. And the two sides are essentially staring each other down, seeing who is willing to cave in first on those two issues. And I'll be happy to tell you what those are. Yeah, go ahead. What are the two issues that still remain? So the Iranians have once again asked that the United States needs to provide assurances to give the Iranians confidence that the U.S. is not going to walk out of the deal again. This has been an issue that has been plaguing the talks from the very beginning. And it's been very difficult because it essentially means that without any of those

assurances, most people expect this deal to only last for the duration of Biden's presidency himself. And that for the Iranians have very severe economic implications. It means that they're not going to get any major investments because the investors need to know that their money in Iran and their investment in Iran is going to be safe for at least five, six, seven years. Two and a half years is not enough, particularly when it comes to some energy contracts, et cetera. So it's going to deprive the Iranians from investments if that is not done. But I think the Iranians are quite clear that it's very unlikely that the U.S. will cave on that issue. I think the U.S. side essentially believes that the political cost will be too high to provide anything that gives the impression that Biden is tying

the hand of the next president. The other issue is a very sensitive one for both sides. That is that the Iranian IRGC, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is on one of the U.S.'s terrorist lists. It's actually on several of them. But one in specific, the Iranians are asking that they be taken off of, which for the Iranians have some symbolic value. And from the U.S. side has a huge symbolic cost, a political cost.

And what they're doing right now is trying to see that if the U.S. were to take this step, what would the Iranians be willing to give in terms of regional activities? And it would be quite, you know, it would be quite shameful, frankly, if the talks collapsed on this issue, because the actual value of that IRGC listing is not particularly significant. Essentially, it's a big sign saying, we think you suck. That's it. And we have plenty of more signs of that kind. But it will be a political cost for the Biden administration if they agree to it. The question is, can they get something in return that alleviates some of that cost? And the bigger picture, of course, is are we willing to risk the entire JCPOA over this

issue? I hope neither side is willing to do that. On the issue of the U.S. providing some sort of assurance that this deal is going to extend beyond the years of Biden's presidency, which might be over in just a couple years, given the fact that his approval ratings are relatively low, and I'm sure that factors into the analysis here. What kind of assurances could the U.S. even really provide if they wanted to? Well, there's several things that could be done. None of them in and of themselves is a sufficient assurance. And the U.S. is right in saying that there's no ironclad guarantee that can be provided. I think there are mechanisms, however, that could be provided. And just to go over what was done back in 2015, when the U.S. side had

these concerns about the Iranians fearing that the Iranians would only be committed to the JCPOA under Rouhani and it could change once there was a change in power in Iran. Well, the U.S. cleverly invented a concept called snapback sanctions at the U.S. Security Council, which meant that instead of having to go through a six to nine month period of trying to convince the other countries to snap back sanction on Iran if the Iranians violated the agreement, it would only take 30 days and the Russians and the Chinese essentially gave up their veto. They cannot veto any move by the U.S. or the Europeans to snap back sanctions. The signal was

that if the Iranians cheat, rest assured, you're going to be heavily sanctioned. There is no doubt about that. That was a mechanism put in place to deter the Iranians from doing what the U.S. ended up doing itself, which is to just walk away from the deal. Something similar can be done on the other side then, whether that is to tie the U.N. Security Council resolution that embodies the JCPOA closer to the JCPOA. So any violation of the JCPOA or walkout of the JCPOA that is without cause would also be a violation of a Chapter 7 UN Security Council resolution.

In and of itself, it's not sufficient. But then you combine it perhaps with having European central banks handle the transactions of Iranian trade. Mindful of the fact that the U.S. is not going to be sanctioning any European central banks anytime soon, that would give that trade a degree of protection that would give the companies a degree of comfort, knowing that even if the U.S. reimposes sanctions that the Europeans say are illegal and illegitimate, the European banks will have enough political cover to be able to continue to handle those transactions and that trade,

and the companies will be protected. So there's different ways this could have been done, but it required a tremendous amount of political will. It would be attacked by the other side. There's no doubt about it. But I think ultimately it was an issue of is the political will there and is the political cost sufficiently low that this would be doable? And both sides have essentially come to the conclusion it's simply not going to happen. And they've resigned themselves to believing that they have to just depart from the assumption that this deal is going to last about three years. And if we're lucky, it will last longer. And so let's say that those lingering issues are resolved in a mutually satisfactory way.

What are the domestic politics here of the deal? What are we hearing from Republicans and what are we hearing from some skeptical Democrats? So you have a situation in which I think the noise leaves the impression that the political cost of agreeing to a deal that prevents Iran from having a nuclear weapon is much higher than it actually is. There is a huge amount of support in the country for the deal. In fact, support for the deal has risen since Trump left the deal because it became very clear to everyone how valuable the deal was. Moreover, proponents of the proposal have not been able to rally around anything because there has not been a finished deal. So they've been a little bit more passive, whereas opponents of the deal don't care about

the details. They don't care. They don't need to know what the deal is. They oppose it in principle. And as a result, they've been attacking the deal, as have some Democrats, a handful of them. And it's left the impression that the political cost of doing this is higher than I think it actually is. Once there is a deal, I think we're going to see that there is significant support for that. It's certainly enough to be able to withstand any effort to vote this down in the Senate. And I do wonder if at times the

administration has overestimated the political opposition. Well, and, you know, if we're just going to talk about pure horse race politics, you also have to factor in what the political costs would be of Iran actually acquiring a nuclear weapon, which I would have to think would be quite a bad look for that to happen under this administration. Finally, how do you handicap the odds at this point? Do you think that we are likely to see a deal that's struck here? I think we're still at 70-30. I think there's still a decent chance that this will be done. I'm getting worried because I was hoping that it would be done by now, but I would still say that it's at 70-30. And I think, Crystal, the point you raised there is an excellent one.

The cost of not getting a deal, which then would lead the Iranians to further expand their program towards the capacity of building a bomb, as well as an escalation in the region, potentially military confrontation, you have to juxtapose that to the political cost of some people being really upset that we took down a sign that said, you suck. I mean, it really is a no-brainer at the end of the day. And let me throw out a scenario that I'm worried about. The United States right now is in a dire need of making sure that oil prices go down. There is about 50 million plus barrels of Iranian oil floating around on the seas in tankers. The Iranians have pumped out that oil, but they can't sell it.

So they just put it on these tankers. As soon as the deal is struck, that oil can be sold and it can have an impact on the price of oil. If there is no deal, however, there is a scenario in which the United States would actually start confiscating that oil. It's already happened in the past on one or two occasions. Confiscate that oil, sell it and keep the money. If that happens, 50 million barrels of oil at current oil prices is about $6 billion. If the United States takes $6 billion from the Iranians in that oil, I suspect that the Iranians will retaliate in the region. And then you do have some form of a war scenario

staring at us in the face. And the political cost of that is far, far greater than just signing a deal that everyone knew actually protected U.S. national interests. Yeah, that is a devastating worst-case scenario and something that should be avoided at all costs. Dr. Parsi, it's always great to see you. Thank you for making these things so clear. Thank you so much for having me.

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