Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 5/17/23: AI CEO Warns Congress UNCONTROLLABLE Tech, Fetterman On Debt Ceiling, Kentucky/Pennsylvania Elections, Giuliani Sexual Harrasment, Elon Subpoenaed In Epstein Lawsuit, Turkey Elections, Durham Report, Pentagon Propaganda Office w/ Ken Klippenstein

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Ryan and Emily discuss a top AI CEO warning Congress that the technology is uncontrollable, John Fetterman speaks on the Debt Ceiling, Ryan and Emily go deep on Kentucky, Pennsylvania elections, Rudy Giuliani is accused of sexual harassment of a former employee, Elon Musk is Subpoenaed in the Epstein lawsuit, Ryan looks at Turkey's Erdogan arresting election overseers, and Emily looks into Durham Report and its Russia Gate legacy, and guest Ken Klippenstein joins the show to talk about his new piece on the Pentagon's new "Perception Management" office to counter disinformation. Ken's article: https://theintercept.com/2023/05/17/pentagon-perception-management-office/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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Hey, guys. Ready or not, 2024 is here, and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show. Good morning. Welcome to CounterPoints. I didn't shout it like Sagar does, but I tried my best. Still fired up.

Yes, super fired up. We actually do have an awesome show for you guys today. We're going to start by breaking down everything going on with the AI hearing from yesterday. There's so much to get into. We're going to talk about a big... No, no. Then we got elections from Turkey to Kentucky and everywhere in between. Some L's for Ron DeSantis. Some wins and losses for Bernie Sanders.

A couple of wins for Mitch McConnell. We'll get into the whole thing there. We got an update on debt ceiling talks. Yeah, there were elections last night, there were debt ceiling talks yesterday. We've got some crazy new allegations to talk about when it comes to Rudy Giuliani. Elon Musk did an interview on CNBC and is being subpoenaed by the Virgin Islands in the Epstein-JP Morgan case. Ryan, you had a scoop this week that you're going to break down for us on Turkey. Oh, yes. It's going to be good.

It's a wild one. And then I'll be breaking down the Durham report. And then the one and only Ken Clippenstein is here. Right. Ken has a new scoop on the kind of disinformation industrial complex and a new agency that he uncovered. He's finding, like, these are like mushrooms in a cow field. He just keeps finding new ones. It's an Easter egg hunt. Ken, just how many agencies can he find in the

Pentagon? We'll be talking to Ken about that for sure in just a bit. But let's talk about yesterday's congressional hearing on AI, generative AI, we should say. We can put the first element up, the tear sheet up. You can see, yeah, so this was Sam Altman's first testimony before Congress. He is obviously the head of OpenAI, which has ChatGPT. So it's a big deal that he came and was grilled by the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy and Technology. He had all kinds of what I would probably describe as like juicy quotes things that you know He this is why he's in front of the Senate testifying. So let's start with the first of those We'll go with a one here. Look we have tried to be very clear about the magnitude of the risks here. I

I think Jobs and employment and what we're all going to do with our time really matters. I agree that when we get to very powerful systems, the landscape will change. I think I'm just more optimistic that we are incredibly creative and we find new things to do with better tools and that will keep happening. My worst fears are that we cause significant, we, the field, the technology technology, the industry cause significant harm to the world. I think that could happen in a lot of different ways. It's why we started the company. It's a big part of why I'm here today

and why we've been here in the past and we've been able to spend some time with you. I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that. We wanna work with the government to prevent that from happening, but we try to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening. But we try to be very clear-eyed about what the downside case is and the work that we have to do to mitigate that. My worst fear is just that we destroy the world. And this is someone who describes himself as an optimist when it comes to this stuff. So I'm curious, just to

frame and set the conversation, where do you put yourself on the alarmist spectrum when it comes to AI? That's a great question. I'm very alarmist about AI. What about you? I mean, I'm alarmist about everything So what do you it's like what do you got? I'll be alarmed about it Well, no, but I think for good reason because we live in an era Where things change really really quickly and it's like almost exponential technological advancements And so, yeah, we have to be sort of alarmist about all kinds of things. But that's a good question, because yes, in full disclosure, I think both of us are like extremely concerned about rapid changes in AI. That doesn't mean that it can't be harnessed for good, but it does mean that our

government needs to catch up. And that's something we've heard from a lot of people in the tech industry, Tristan Harris, et cetera, that we do not have the capability as the government right now to properly regulate generative AI, large language models, because Congress just can't adapt quickly enough. I think that's very clear. And so that's cause for alarm, whether or not you think AI is ultimately good or bad. I get all of the concerns about hampering our ability to be competitive in this space. You know, when you have China putting lots of work into AI, lots of regulation into it too, and this potentially becoming a weapon of war, absolutely understand that we don't want to, you know, handicap our industry. At the same time, we don't want to destroy civilization.

Right. And yeah, and my struggle with AI is that civilization has always been this kind of contest between the good and evil within all of us. And the evil is often so much more motivated than the goodness in us. Every new technology that comes out, the pioneers in it are often the scammers. Like how can I use this to either extract money from people, to crush my internal rivals within a country, to crush external rivals in another country. And then eventually the world kind of freaks out at that and puts in place regulations and norms to try to control things. But if it comes too quickly, then we might not have an opportunity for that. But here, so let's roll Sam Altman again from one of his other clips here.

I believe that there will be far greater jobs on the other side of this and that the jobs of today will get better. I think it's important. First of all, I think it's important to understand and think about GPT-4 as a tool, not a creature, which is easy to get confused, and it's a tool that people have a great deal of control over

and how they use it. And second, GPT-4 and things, other systems like it, are good at doing tasks, not jobs. And so you see already people that are using GPT-4 to do their job much more efficiently by helping them with tasks. Now, GPT-4 will, I think, entirely automate away some jobs, and it will create new ones that we believe will be much better. This happens, again, my understanding of the history of technology is one long technological revolution, not a bunch of different ones put together. It's kind of insane, by the way, that he is the CEO of OpenAI. And GPT has been integrated into

all of these different products. This is his first time in front of Congress having to explain some of this in public. That's outrageous. It's a great example already of how our government is not adapting quickly enough to the technology. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah. Yes. Like, okay. Basically, they had to launch it. Right.

And people in congressional offices had to start using it and flag it for the lawmakers and be like, this is kind of revolutionary. We might want to talk about this. Now, I come down on the side of it's actually okay if really bad jobs go away. Like the BuzzFeed aggregator jobs? Those jobs, most actually, like most jobs. And what I mean by that is if you think back to the 19th century and you think about what most of the jobs were at that point, you've got right now in Kentucky, there's fewer than 4,000 people working in the mines. Working in the mines sucks.

Automating that or even better getting that from the Sun or the wind or nuclear power or whatever like is is better than going down into those filthy mines. All the typists you know hundreds of thousands of typists around the country typing sucks nobody wants to do that Like the fact that you can automate typing, it's good. But if people are, as a result, thrown out of work and all the wealth flows up to the top, that's a problem. But that's not a technology problem. That's a social problem and a political problem that we need to sort out. So if, you know, fast food jobs are mostly automated way, most people didn't like working in fast food places to begin with. If those people can do

something more enriching and rewarding with their time, that makes the world a better place. If those people are immiserated and thrown into poverty and made vassals of some techno state, then that makes things worse. But that isn't the fault of the AI. That would be the fault of us. Well, or it can be the fault of AI for moving too quickly. Sure. Yeah. Right. So that's him on jobs. Speaking of moving too quickly, that's him on jobs. By the way, after people's jobs have already been lost to AI, again, this is his first time in front of Congress and these jobs have already been affected. Let's hear what he has to say about elections. We can go and roll the next element. Mr. Altman, maybe you can help me

understand here what some of the significance of this is. Should we be concerned about models that can, large language models, that can predict survey opinion and then can help organizations, entities, fine-tune strategies to elicit behaviors from voters? Should we be worried about this for our elections? Yeah. Thank you, Senator Hawley, for the question. It's one of my areas of greatest concern, the more general ability of these models to manipulate, to persuade,

to provide sort of one-on-one interactive disinformation. I think that's like a broader version of what you're talking about. But given that we're going to face an election next year and these models are getting better, I think this is a significant area of concern. I think there's a lot of policies that companies can voluntarily adopt, and I'm happy to talk about what we do there. I do think some regulation would be quite wise on this topic. Some regulation would

be nice. So what he's talking about here, basically imagine a bot program that you can deploy at scale and that appears to be real people. We have seen attempts at that, you know, for years, whether it's like from that little Russian agency, you know, trying to like mess with Bernie Sanders supporters in a Facebook thread. What he's saying is, you know, exponentially advance that to a place where people believe it. And I think that that means basically the end of social media, like end of mass social media. I think you'll have Discord servers, smaller social media sites where you're interacting with people who you know are real. But the idea of a global town square when everybody suspects that every single one of

their critics is a bot and they are correct 90% of the time, you can't have a conversation anymore. And any attempt at a conversation will only then be manipulated by whoever can afford the best bots. And most of the conversations will be bots arguing with other bots and us just kind of watching or hopefully not watching and returning more to human to human interactions, like actual community, actual friends meeting up face-to-face. Because at some point, even Zoom isn't going to be ultimately persuasive. I think it'll be years until they can fake that. But you're going to need to kind of look in the eye of another person to know that you're having an actual conversation with a person. Right. Well, yeah. And that's where also you get into

this question of trust. So even if there are all of these lingering suspicions, I mean, it's somewhat interesting to think that in 2016, there were suspicions that, not suspicions, I should say, outright accusations from the leading Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton herself, that bots had somehow swayed the election for Donald Trump. Well, that suspicion, that lack of trust in and of itself is the social breakdown that can start to happen because of AI. So yeah, this stuff is a really big deal. As soon as those seeds are planted in our minds as human beings, whether it's person to person, person to election, person to their democracy, it's extremely problematic. And now, actually, let's roll this clip from NYU professor Gary Marcus,

who also testified during the Senate hearing and just, I think, laid out, did a very good job. Good alarmism. Yeah, here's some more good alarmism from Gary Marcus. Open AI released chat GPT plugins, which quickly led others to develop something called AutoGPT, with direct access to the internet, the ability to write source code, and increased powers of automation. This may well have drastic and difficult to predict security consequences.

What criminals are going to do here is to create counterfeit people. It's hard to even envision the consequences of that. We have built machines that are like bulls in a china shop, powerful, reckless, and difficult to control. Yeah, and that goes to the point that Sam Altman was making earlier where he was saying, think of these as tools and tools that are accomplishing tasks, not as jobs or things in themselves that are kind of thinking like people and developing ideas and strategies.

And the question then is, how much do we believe him? How much do we believe that the bowl, the China shop might have its own ideas about how it feels like this China shop ought to be arranged? I mean, NBC did a segment last week, then not a lot of other media coverage followed about how artificial intelligence in a study decoded brain activity into dialogue recently. So it can take your brain activity and decode it into dialogue. I mean, this stuff is happening at a rapid, rapid clip. And I just think it's worth mentioning while we're on the subject that these companies are pouring millions and millions of dollars here into Washington, D.C. Yeah, you can see this on ASICs. Open Secrets did

a really excellent breakdown of all of the lobbying happening here in Washington. In the first three months of 2023, they wrote 123 companies, universities and trade associations, lobbied the federal government on issues relating to AI. They collectively spent roughly $94 million lobbying on AI and other issues just from January until March. Now, it's hard to say how much of that was just about AI because these are big tech companies. So you have Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet, IBM, Meta, some really big ones. And you can break down, for instance, that Oracle spent specifically $3.1 million on AI and machine learning policy, lobbying just in general on those. Amazon has

been lobbying in the space of 5 million to lobby Congress in just those first three months on issues that include AI. Amazon really gets a pass in this whole conversation too. You don't hear much from Amazon, but watch, Amazon will be the one that ends up just dominating this space because they can dominate everything else once they add AI to their matrix lookout. Yeah. Well, and so General Motors, there's some other people in this space that are doing AI lobbying that might not be exactly expected. So General Motors, obviously, that makes sense because of autonomous vehicles and all of that. The Chamber of Commerce obviously makes sense as well. But $19 million lobbying just in that first quarter.

And some of that did include lobbying on AI. Also, State Farm Insurance, interestingly enough, and some other insurance companies have been lobbying in this space. So there's just millions of dollars pouring into Capitol Hill right now. It is great that they finally hauled Sam Altman after his technology has already caused some damage to testify in front of Congress. This is technology, by the way, that whether you're an alarmist or not, it has massive potential. If you're not an alarmist, you love it because you're like, this has massive potential. Either way, you agree that it has massive potential. So it's great that Congress finally hauled him in, but he had a private dinner with members of the House the night before. Some of this is going to be cozying in the same way that we saw

Facebook and Twitter do that in the sort of early Obama era This this is not just going to be Congress like getting tough on open AI There's going to be a cozy relationship to some extent. So just encourage people to keep an eye on that Yeah, and this is one of those classic Washington arrangements where you have concentrated power behind one side of the issue and one company basically one company and then diffuse opposition or diffuse skepticism very much take ethanol being like the very classic example where you have some ethanol producers in the Midwest who like Really really really care about ethanol like that's the only thing that they care about they spend all of their time energy and money

Lobbying Congress on ethanol the rest of the public is like, this seems like not worth doing, but you know what? I have so many other things to do with my day that I'm not going to turn myself into an anti-ethanol lobbyist. And so they just steamroll their way through. And so you have a version of that because there isn't really a kind of concentrated opposition. It's whereas everybody is kind of opposed and kind of nervous, but they're not aggregated together in a way that can push back. There's also a huge irony, moving to the next block here, in what we're actually talking about in our politics compared to what the future would look like under AI.

The entire debt ceiling debate so far has come down to the question of work requirements for food stamp recipients. So on the one hand, we're hearing from Congress that most jobs might just be wiped out within a decade by AI. Congress's response to that is, let's make sure people who are getting food stamps are doing meaningless make work in order to get those food stamps. And I'm really curious from your, so if we could put B1 up here, this is Kevin McCarthy saying that this is a red line for him. Like, to pretend that he's serious for a second, he'd be saying that you have to increase work requirements for SNAP beneficiaries, or else he will default. He will drive the government into default and drive the global economy into a crisis. Now, that doesn't seem credible to me because the threat and the demand don't seem

to line up to me, but pretend that the words coming out of his mouth are honest ones, just for giggles. Why are they claiming to be drawing this red line when just a couple years ago, you and I are talking about how you've got this new energy on the right around being more generous to working families and more generous to the poor. And pushing for child credits and other credits so that families can kind of make it through the difficult times. How did we get back to the Paul Ryan era all of a sudden? Well, you know, that was always paired, interestingly enough, if you read some of like Marco Rubio's speeches where he was making that argument that the conservative movement needed to like shift its focus to individuals over like the free market. The market exists

to serve families is the line that a lot of sort of new right people will use. It was always coupled with this intense focus on the dignity of work, that you cannot just disrupt people's lives with all of these different programs that are hard to get off of and create all kinds of different community-based issues. And then this is the argument that's made, and then expect everyone to be happy. So it was always coupled with that. And I'm not surprised at all that McCarthy is referring to it as a red line, because in a way, I think what happened yesterday, Kevin McCarthy obviously met with President Biden, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell. What happened yesterday, I think, despite what the media is saying, was a really big win for Kevin McCarthy and Republicans and an L that Biden took. I think the White House

knew that they were taking an L. I don't think they were caught off guard by this. But Biden said he was not negotiating, period. He said there will be no conditions on a debt ceiling increase. That is his red line. He said that for months, which is why these conversations are just happening now, by the way, when we have like days to go until a potential default. And that turned out to not be the case because here Biden has actually appointed negotiators. And that's like a big, big, big loss for Biden because he said that was never going to happen. We've talked before about why Biden strategically didn't have to happen. He doesn't have to be doing any of this. Republicans have the losing hand here in the battle of public

relations. But I think that's why Kevin McCarthy is saying this is his red line, because he feels like he's in a stronger negotiating position right now. So he can say, you know, something that obviously is out of whack proportionately is his red line. I think it reflects actually that he feels like he suddenly has the upper hand. Yeah, complete clown show from the White House, Because on the one hand, they said, we are absolutely not negotiating on lifting the debt ceiling. And on the other hand, they said, we're not going to take any creative action in order to push past the debt ceiling if we get to it. Like, we're not going to look into minting the coin. We're not going to explore the 14th Amendment. That would be a

constitutional crisis, although he started hinting at it more recently. But earlier to have taken those all off the table, said, well, then your only option is to work with the House. If you're not going to negotiate and you're not going to do anything creative, then all you can do is just rubber stamp the House bill, which you're not going to do. So it was a completely incoherent response from the White House. The way they're trying to pretend that they're not negotiating, but they keep slipping a little bit, is they say, we're negotiating the upcoming budget deal. And also there's this debt ceiling thing on the side, which we assume that once we reach a budget deal, they will agree to lift the debt ceiling. But they will be doing that on their own, not through any result

of any negotiations. But then Biden in shorthand will refer to it as like debt ceiling negotiations or something close to that. So it's like, nice, nice try there. So here's Kevin McCarthy, by the way, outside of the White House after the meeting yesterday. This is B2. The great thing about that question is we've already had to take a default off the table because the House Republicans passed a bill that raised the debt ceiling, limited our future spending, saved taxpayers money by being able to pull back unspent money and waste and actually grow our economy by making our economy stronger and helping lifting people out of poverty into work. And so those are the parameters we'll talk about. So, yeah, the McCarthy quote is when you're talking about work requirements, remember what we're talking about, able-bodied people with no dependents, it's 20 hours.

Biden says, quote, I voted for tougher aid problems. That's in the law now, but for Medicaid, it's a different story. And so I'm waiting to hear what their exact proposal is. Then the White House comes in with a tweet that says the House Republican wishlist would put a million older adults at risk of losing their food assistance and going hungry. Rather than push Americans into poverty, we should reduce the deficit by making sure the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes. So you can see how the White House kind of steps in to say, we're not negotiating on this. John Fetterman then swoops in as well. Yes. So I think, I want to play this Fetterman clip because I think people should see it. I think Fetterman has a brilliant idea for a question to these Silicon Valley bank people.

But his his disability as a result of his stroke is still quite, quite, quite noticeable, even if you're completely supportive of the question that he's firing at these bank executives. Let's let's roll Fetterman here. The Republicans want to give a work requirement for SNAP, you know, for a hungry family has to have these kind of penalties or there's some kinds of working requirements. Shouldn't you have a working requirement after we sell your bank with billions of your bank? Because they seem to be more preoccupied than SNAP requirements for works for hungry people, but not about protecting the tax papers that will bail no matter whatever does about a bank to crash it. I mean, I love the idea, but you have to kind of like slice

through there to kind of get to the idea. But basically, as you can tell, I think from that, he's saying, why don't the rich have to suffer the same indignities as the poor do? And I think that that's a great idea, that if you want to kind of maintain some of your income from crashing a bank after you get bailed out, then once a week you have to walk down to the Social Security office and you have to piss in a cup and you have to otherwise be humiliated in all the ways that they humiliate the poor and the working class for their very meager benefits. But clearly, you know, Fetterman's, you know, still got a ways to go in his recovery. Yeah, no, it's tough to watch, but I love the question and I'm all for it. You know, I think what happened in 08 sticks with a lot of Americans still. And the more we see SVB

and all of these different things happening, the more that I think that's going to be on people's minds. Yeah. And Elizabeth Warren and some other senators might have been bipartisan, had introduced a bill yesterday that would claw back basically all income from bank executives, or maybe not all income, but all income above a certain threshold within five years of a bank collapse, which is, to me, should be a no-brainer and is a great way to reset incentives. I was going to say, that's exactly it. The incentive system is shattered, especially when you have J.P. Morgan just acting as our national bank and swallowing up different things. There are no incentives, basically, and there have to be incentives. So those conversations about guard

rails, I think, are important. You actually would not even necessarily need legislation. And Gary Gensler, I know he loves to watch CounterPoints. So if he's watching now or if his staff is watching, the Dodd-Frank Act says that there can be no bank compensation that produces instability in the markets. And so that can easily be read as if you incentivize reckless behavior on the part of bank executives, that can be banned through SEC rulemaking. And so you could easily then say, and you could hit private equity with this too, say if your entire pay is based on a huge share of profits that you took from massive layoffs, you can't have that money.

Now the company, if you think that that's the right decision for the company, fine. Go ahead. We're not going to tell you how to run your company, but we're going to say you can't take that worker's money. You can't take the pension money and put it in your own pocket. And so then if you want to make the decision for the benefit of the company, okay. Let's see. Now we're in the free market.

Go for it. But you can't just loot the company. I mean, these are like completely reasonable discussions. Anti-looting. Yeah, anti-looting. There you go. Well, just we'll put the last element up here just to kind of put a cherry on top of all of this. The White House did confirm that Kevin McCarthy is going to be negotiating with two top Biden officials. Steve and Shalanda will represent us in talking with McCarthy about the budget and with the goal of reaching a bipartisan product that can pass both houses. Talk about the budget, not the debt ceiling. Don't confuse these for debt ceiling

talks. These are budget talks. Exactly to Ryan's point. They're trying to say budget, but you can see right there they are negotiating, period. They said they wouldn't. It's not just about the budget. It's about the debt ceiling. Everybody knows that.'t. It's not just about the budget. It's about the debt ceiling. Everybody knows that. But that's an L for the White House. And I think if you're on the left or the right, you can see it. I don't think they were taken aback by the fact that they had to take that L, but they clearly did. And it's also an L for our imperial power projection because Biden had a longstanding trip to Australia. Australians have been begging the United States to get into a tighter alliance with them as

they're trying to counteract China and get all tough in that region. And Biden is now canceling the trip to Australia, which the biggest news in Australia for a long time, Biden's coming, the United States president's coming, we're going to do this, we're going to show them that, we're going to, you know, it's going to be amazing. And Papua New Guinea, it was a very much anticipated trip. Yeah, absolutely. And necessary for our kind of imperial ambitions in the region, he's still going to do the G7 trip over the weekend, which Republicans were pressuring him to cancel, saying we have more important things to do at home. It's like, no, there's

nothing more important for the empire than sending the president out there to project power. Like that's, there's a real disconnect in what it is that allows us to run the deficits that we run. Yeah. Let's move on to elections. Believe it or not, there were elections on Tuesday. We're getting into primary season, actually, from Kentucky to Pennsylvania. Ryan, you were paying attention to some of these races pretty closely. There's some interesting implications for the left. We can see one up on the screen here. FiveThirtyEight did an article just saying, you know, here are some of the races to watch. They were looking at the Jacksonville mayor's race, looking at the Kentucky Republican gubernatorial primary, which did have some interesting results.

And then you have the modern progressive Democrats, as FiveThirtyEight puts it, facing off in the latest skirmish of their nationwide war for big city city halls. You want to do Democrats or Republicans first? I said we'd do Democrats first. Let's do the Democrats first. So the partisan race was a special election in Delaware County, outside of Philadelphia, to decide control of the Pennsylvania State House of Representatives. Whoever won it was going to control the House. It's a blue-leaning seat, but it was a competitive race.

Heather Boyd, who was a Democrat, was even endorsed by Biden. That's how significant it became. It's unusual for the president to come in and endorse in a state house election. Republicans were threatening that if they won that seat, which would give them control of both the state house and the state senate, that they were going to then put an abortion ban on you know an amendment like on on the ballot which in pennsylvania i i think that loses there's pennsylvanians who think that it actually carries it's not it's not clear exactly you know how that would have gone instead she ended up winning in basically a landslide something like 60 to 40. and so democrats will will maintain control of the House.

They also have the governor's mansion that will give them an advantage as they go into these deficit talks. So that's the partisan red-blue one. On the intrademocratic stuff, you had basically three key races in Pennsylvania. You had a prosecutor race in Allegheny County, which is Pittsburgh. It was between kind of a tough on crime prosecutor and a criminal justice reformer, a very reform-minded person, with the whole debate being about rising crime and trying to pin that on the left and defund the police. And the reform candidate wins, like won in a blowout, knocked out the incumbent. Chicago style. Prosecutor. Yes, a Chicago style win in Pittsburgh.

You then had basically the most powerful position in Pittsburgh is the Allegheny County executive, something like a $3 billion budget. That race was won by a DSA member, a former DSA member at least, Sarah Imamurado, who was endorsed by Bernie Sanders and who rose to prominence in Pennsylvania in 2018 running as a kind of co-DSA person with Summer Lee. Summer Lee running for the state senate, Imamurado running for the state house. Both of them won these kind of shocking upsets that were over overshadowed at the time by AOC and the rest of the squad winning the congressional races. But at the at the state level, I was like, oh, wow, here's some up and coming energy coming out of the Bernie Sanders campaign. And now one of those is in Congress, Summer Lee, and the other is on her way to becoming county executive because whoever wins the primary in Allegheny County is going to win. Whatever Democrat wins is going to win the general. Over in Philadelphia,

the left took a significant loss. So that's interesting, just on the other corner of the state. Right. And this was also a race that was heavily about crime. You had Helen Gim running as the kind of left candidate She had sort of quasi endorsed Minnesota's What do you call it recreation of its police force that went to the ballot right after the George Floyd protests So you have you know a serious reformer? running up running against a basically an Eric Adams style candidate who said she was going to hire more police officers and she was going to,

she's going to bring into effect what they call, what she was calling constitutional stop and frisk. So extremely clear contrast. Now she had the backing of the building trades unions, which are extraordinarily powerful in Philadelphia. There was an enormous amount of super PAC spending attack ads against Helen Gim. And so the combination of those things had her finish in third place even. She didn't even finish in first place. But I also think it shows the limits in some ways of the left when it's unable to bring in black working class voters. Right. And Brandon Johnson was very much able to do that in Chicago. Helen Gimm, who is not black, was not able to do that. Like if you if you you look at the, if you look at where she lost in heavily black neighborhoods, she was kind of wiped out. And the left can't and really shouldn't

be able to pull off victories in a way like that. Because if you're not, if you're not pulling in that coalition, are you then really able, going to be able to bring about fundamental change that you need. So that was their shot. Helen Gim had been council at large, so she had already won citywide. And so that was kind of Philadelphia left's best shot, but came up significantly short. So a mixed bag. And it's kind of interesting on the Republican side, the Kentucky gubernatorial primary, Republican primary in over in Kentucky had some interesting results. We have a little a little audio to play here. Let's roll that. This is Ron DeSantis who jumped into the race, actually really the last minute, like 24 hours before it was before the race was over to endorse and do some robo calls for one of the candidates, Kelly Craft, who ultimately lost to Daniel Cameron. You may remember he gave a kind of

barn-burning RNC speech back in 2020 that got a lot of media attention that Republicans were really happy with. Here's what DeSantis said on behalf of Kelly Craft. Hello, this is Governor Ron DeSantis coming to you from the free state of Florida. You've had a woke liberal governor who's put a radical agenda ahead of Kentuckians. The stakes couldn't be higher. I know what it takes to stand up for what's right, and Kelly Craft's got it. She's proven it. I'm strongly encouraging you to go out and vote for my friend Kelly Craft.

Well, Kelly Craft lost to Daniel Cameron, who is the current, yeah, she was, I believe, Trump's UN ambassador for a couple of years towards the end of his presidency. Daniel Cameron is the attorney general of Kentucky, one of the most prominent, I would say, black Republicans in the country. He's sort of a McConnell protege. That's how the media likes to describe him. And he has cleared the field, won an easy victory, which I think people expected. I will say the reason I think,

I think it was Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis both got into this race. I'm almost certain it's because they share a consultant with Kelly Craft. I think Axiom Strategies, Jeff Rowe, were probably involved in all of that, which is often how it happens. People say like, why the heck is Ron DeSantis wading into this weird primary race at the last minute? What

possible benefit is in it for Ron DeSantis? Well, I also pulled Kelly Craft's FEC record. She did donate to Ron DeSantis, like 10 grand to Ron DeSantis. Maybe not in total, but she had at least won 10 grand donation to a DeSantis pack. So in total, but she had at least one 10 grand donation to a DeSantis pack. So there's that too. But I think it's more, it's one of those things that was probably organized by, about like consultants. Does that hurt the consultant? Like does, when next time the consultant goes back to Cruz and DeSantis, I got a horse, I got a horse, you got to get behind. Or is it like, look, she's going to lose by 30 points, but just do this favor for her and she'll give you money? You know, I think the DeSantis-Trump

feud right now is getting so bitter because normally I don't think it hurts the consultant at all because that's just, it's just, it's just perceived as business as usual in Washington, D.C. This is what you do. It's the horse trading. You know, it's just, it's how things go. But I think in this case, because it's such a bitter feud, it could definitely come back and be like, well, what are we doing here? Why is why is Ron DeSantis extending his credibility in ways that he can't really afford to in such a tightly contested presidential race? Obviously, Ron DeSantis is not formally in the race yet, but obviously is heading that direction.

The other thing I think is worth mentioning is the Jacksonville mayor's race, which actually flipped from a Republican incumbent to now the first female mayor, I think, of Jacksonville, who is a Democrat. Jacksonville is in a county that Joe Biden did win, but DeSantis also won it. So it's a competitive area. DeSantis came in and endorsed as a law and order candidate the mayor or the Republican who was running in the mayoral election to replace the Republican incumbent. But that person lost by about four points as it stands right now to this new Democrat female mayor. And again, that's, you know, it makes sense that DeSantis would obviously endorse a Republican candidate for, Jacksonville is the largest city, I think, that had a Republican mayor. There's not a lot of Republican mayors in a city. Even if you're

in a red state, your city's probably blue. You probably don't have a Republican mayor. But this is one of the big cities that did have a Republican mayor. Not anymore. And if you have a Republican mayor, the chances are that you are a wildly sprawling city. What's funny is that Oklahoma City, and is Fort Worth one of them too? But Oklahoma City and Jacksonville are the two biggest cities that consistently elect Republicans as their mayors. That's what made this such a big upset. But if you've ever been to either of those cities, they take like 40 minutes to drive from one end to the other. And you're like, when do I get into the city? Right.

And the downtown is like one block and then the rest of it is just 40 minutes of sprawl. Right. That is aggregated together and called a city. Right. And so you end up then getting the same kind of political dynamics of a suburb, more or less. Right. In Fort Worth, you're right, it does have a Republican background. Yeah. So in Fort Worth, I haven't been to Fort Worth, but if I had to guess based on my own—

You are right. Okay, see? You are correct. Yes, absolutely. Let's move on to the allegations against Rudy Giuliani, very serious allegations against Rudy Giuliani. I'm reading from a Politico article here. A former employee of Giuliani's is suing him for $10 million over allegations of sexual assault and harassment, wage theft, and quote, other misconduct, including several instances that were recorded according to a complaint filed Monday. Noelle

Dunphy, the employee bringing the lawsuit, was hired by Giuliani in January of 2019. She said it was an opportunity that was, quote, too good to pass up, but then that the offers were, quote, a sham motivated by Giuliani's desire to, quote, pursue a sexual relationship with Dunphy, and the abuse began, quote, almost immediately, she alleges. This is a 70-page filing. It has multiple accusations of sexual harassment, sexual assault, including, as Politico says, accusations that Giuliani forced Dunphy to perform oral sex on him in his Upper East Side apartment. And while he took phone calls, Giuliani aggressively pursued a sexual relationship with Dunphy, the filing says, and made clear that satisfying his sexual demands was a requirement of her job. He continually pressured her into sex and was

unconcerned about whether Dunphy had given consent. The complaint says, Politico goes on, Giuliani did not respond to requests for comment, but a spokesperson told the AP that the former mayor, quote, vehemently denied the allegations. Now, I think I want to also mention that with all of the sexual stuff, he also in the filing is accused of going on, quote, alcohol-drenched rants that included sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic remarks, and there are recordings of those according to the file. The recordings are the podcasts and the TV shows where he would do those live. Yes, I believe that there are recordings of those. They're on YouTube probably.

Well, if you see them in public, imagine in private what those recordings could potentially be. Or when he thinks he's in private. The lawsuit included footage from that Borat film where he's – everybody's seen this one, I'm sure, where he's lying on a bed and saying that this is basically a recreation of what he was doing with her on a regular basis. The big debate that I've seen about this is, is Giuliani more wretched than people thought, or is this expected from Giuliani? Like that seems to me to be the only question that's left open by a lot of this stuff. Except for the kind of sideways allegation of a major crime that involves President Trump that hasn't gotten much attention, which I think says a lot about our politics as well. She alleges that Rudy Giuliani and Trump were selling pardons for $2 million and that they were splitting the money. And he said to her, if you know anybody

that needs a pardon, that's what it costs. Send them directly to me. Obviously, do not go through the pardon office because that creates a paper trail. We're just going to do this back channel. And the thing here is, A, that's the most believable allegation could ever possibly come up with be really Giuliani is the least credible witness yeah in any case is he just saying something because he thinks it's you know gonna impress his assistant right or is this a real thing if it is it seems like it would be the easiest thing to prove. All you have to do is find million dollar transactions, two million dollar transactions

moving around between Giuliani and Trump and people who got pardoned because we know who got pardoned. I think that's the thing is with Rudy Giuliani, especially if he's going on, what's the exact quote here? Alcohol drenched rants. Is he spinning his wheels on his own? It seems unlikely to me that Donald Trump, whatever you think of him, would be dumb enough to put a $2 million price tag on a bribe and then say, Rudy, go sell these. It sounds more plausible to me that Rudy was just selling these because he's clearly been, I think, impaired by- And ripped him off Trump too. Yeah. I think he's clearly been, I think, impaired by- And ripping off Trump, too. Yeah.

Well, yeah. I think he's clearly been impaired by the disease of alcoholism. I mean, you can see it pretty plainly. It appears that way. You know, we don't know him. We're not in his head. We're not personal acquaintances or friends of Rudy Giuliani, obviously. You could probably call him and ask him. You could definitely call him and ask him. You could definitely call him and ask him. But you can see it pretty plainly in public, what appears to be constant impairment from alcohol in public spaces.

And to the extent where he doesn't have a lot of control over what he's saying, I think Rudy Giuliani has undergone a pretty tragic arc. What an incredible arc, yeah. Yeah, just an incredibly tragic arc happening before the public. And now other people apparently were caught up and are damaged, collateral damage in that journey that Rudy Giuliani has been on. And so as this goes to court, as this is litigated, I expect we will learn more and more about these allegations. I expect we'll have pretty good, if there are recordings, we'll have an, you know, the Borat recording is actually kind of interesting because the media took some out of context framing that

was served up to it on a silver platter by Amazon. And then when you watch the full thing, it was like, I mean, Rudy Giuliani is clearly not in a good state of mind, but what you're saying it is isn't exactly what it is. So who knows what the deal is with these recordings. But if they are coming out so aggressively in this filing and they say that the recordings exist, that leads me to believe that they probably have something there. So this could go in a pretty bad direction for Rudy Giuliani. Yet in two years, he could be best friends with bad direction for Rudy Giuliani. Yet in two years he could be best friends with the President of the United States. And remember he's at

the center of the Hunter Biden laptop story and so there's all kinds of implications not just for Trump but for like American politics period as we get closer to whatever the truth is about Rudy Giuliani's both personal and professional life here there's a lot of stuff actually on the line, whether it's bribes, more allegations about what it was like being in Trump's orbit, more allegations about somebody who was in Trump's orbit perhaps acting on behalf of the president or not, but perhaps acting on behalf of the president doing, saying ridiculous things. And Rudy Giuliani, what's the timeline? How does it mesh up with the laptop timeline? Because Rudy Giuliani is

the guy who had the laptop. Sure was. Yeah. All right. So we got some more conspiracy fun. Let's talk about Elon Musk and conspiracies that Elon Musk is once at the same time dispelling and then dispensing. Elon Musk actually just this week, we can put E1 up on the screen. He's been subpoenaed in the Jeffrey Epstein suit that is being brought by the Virgin Islands. So if you haven't been following this, basically the Virgin Islands is in a lawsuit against J.P. Morgan because they believe J.P. Morgan was enabling the Epstein sex trafficking operation, essentially that J.P. Morgan knew that the bank knew he was engaged in this kind of conduct and was enabling it by giving him access to the banking services. They deny, J.P. Morgan denies that it had any knowledge of Epstein's crime, but the Virgin Islands is basically saying,

as Reuters puts it, that they missed red flags about Epstein's abuse of women. Now, a Monday filing in U.S. District Court in Manhattan hit Musk and said that he may have been referred to J.P. Morgan by Epstein. So they subpoenaed him for records related to this. Musk says, quote, that cretin, referring to Epstein, never advised me on anything whatsoever. He put out this tweet. You can see it on the screen. We just read that part of it. The notion that I would need to or listen to financial advice from a dumb crook is absurd. JP Morgan let Tesla down 10 years ago despite having Tesla's global commercial banking business, which we then withdrew. I have never forgiven them. The tweet ends. Ryan, what do you make of Musk's reply here? And what do you make of the move by the Virgin Islands to subpoena him?

I mean, it does seem like a fishing expedition on the part of the Virgin Islands. But there's plenty of evidence that they did know each other and go around in similar circles. If you remember back in 2020, it was reported that Epstein was trying to get close to Elon Musk. And to do so, he set his brother up, Musk's brother, with Epstein's former girlfriend, and also was given a tour of the Tesla, the SpaceX facility out in Hawthorne, California in 2012. So that's Epstein after his conviction touring a SpaceX facility. He also had some type of a, Musk went to his mansion at one point, but Musk claimed that he went there only for like a half an hour in the middle of the day because his then wife wanted to do research for a novel.

Musk said that he was, quote, obviously a creep of Epstein. He also had, I think, he attended a dinner organized by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman, who helped finance E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against Trump, a big Democratic donor. It was, quote, was at his house in Manhattan for about 30 minutes in the middle of an afternoon. But he said that a dinner was organized by Reid Hoffman and that Musk didn't have anything to do other than kind of accepting the dinner invitation. So, you know, some significant points of contact between Musk and Epstein there. And certainly, Epstein would want to get close to somebody with Musk's global connections and his wealth and took steps to do that. And his technological interests, yeah.

So while it's a fishing expedition, sometimes you catch fish if you go to the right place with the right bait. Yeah, and I mean, just totally hypothetically, even people who recognized Epstein as a creep who did come into contact with him may have valuable information about that, especially if they were in that Venn diagram with J.P JP Morgan. So it's not, I think the idea that Musk is implicated in wrongdoing is what he's responding to because it's not fun to get headlines like that you've been subpoenaed by the Virgin Islands in the Epstein lawsuit with JP Morgan. But yeah, I doubt this leads to anything significant about Elon Musk. Who knows? He did sit for an interview on CNBC yesterday. We have one clip here. There were a lot of sort of tidbits that came out of it.

He kind of per usual talked about everything. But let's roll this clip right here. This is E3. I mean, when you link to somebody who's talking about the guy who killed children in a mall in Allen, Texas, and you say something like it might be a bad psyop, I'm not quite sure what you meant. Oh, in that particular case, there was a, somehow, that's, not that the, obviously the people were killed, but it was, I think, incorrectly ascribed to be a white supremacist action. And the evidence for that was some obscure Russian website that no one's ever heard of that had no followers. And the company that found this is Bellingcat. Right.

And do you know what Bellingcat does? PsyOps. Right. I couldn't really even follow exactly what it was you were trying to express there. So that's part why I was curious. I'm saying that I thought the ascribing it to white supremacy was bullshit. I mean, first of all, he just got bellingcat as a psyop on CNBC, so major props to him for that, because he's mostly correct on that point. On the white supremacy point, that's a different question.

I think it's obvious. I mean, the police have confirmed that the shooter, whose name we won't repeat, had white power tattoos, despite the fact that he was Hispanic, and has made this argument, Sagar and I talked about this last week, and you can go check out that video, because Sagar wanted to talk about this question of, can a Hispanic be a white nationalist? Well, his ideology was one of white nationalism, from what we know, he was like actually explicitly making that argument, so whether or not you think it makes sense is another question. The shooter himself thought it did make sense. Right. And there are also white Hispanic people. Like that's a thing. Like there's enormous amounts of racism within the Hispanic community. So that is, you know, certainly could fit too. But this seems glommed on to more of an American version of it. But right. So I think what's interesting about this is Musk is disgusted

that there could be some conspiracy theory about him when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, but is willing to throw out a much, much more ludicrous conspiracy theory that Belling. So to try to explain what he's saying there, because the interviewer was clearly deeply confused. Well, and I think Musk was sort of confused, too, because I feel like he shoots from the hip. Like, first of all, every time we talk about a Musk clip, I think it's the same thing. Like, the guy seems completely, like, overworked and overtired, shooting from the hip.

Like, he tweets about so much stuff every single day that there's no way he could be, like, completely versed in every story that he's weighing in on with this like massively influential profile. And I feel like he himself had incomplete information about this theory that he's positing. Yeah, or selectively incomplete, we can't know. But so Belling, it's not at all surprising that Bellingcat would be the one that would surface this guy's information. What they are is one of the most sophisticated kind of private intelligence companies around the world that works for a variety of corporate clients, NATO. They have all sorts of different clients.

What they do is they surf the entire internet. They do it in lots of different languages. They're very good at it. They are good at it. And it's not surprising that they would be the ones that first would land on this guy's profile. If you give somebody at Bellingcat, say, like, just a handle. Like, here's the guy's handle that he was using on Instagram. With a couple of clues, they'll be around the world quickly. And the idea that a complete loner, nutjob, was using a Russian-based forum should not at all be surprising. So that's the thing where Musk is saying, this doesn't make sense.

Therefore, there must be a conspiracy. Like this loner was using this obscure forum to post his racist rants. Yeah. That to me, to I'm Elon Musk, that doesn't make sense. You should be posting as a loner, your racist rants on 4chan or whatever. Like if it's outside of that, then it's a frame up job. And then it gets even crazier because if you draw out what he's actually alleging, and what was being alleged at the time, is that this guy was not a white supremacist, but that the feds were framing him up as one, were planting his rantings on obscure Russian sites so that they could then elevate the specter of white supremacy

and use it to crush domestic dissent and take away everybody's guns. That is the conspiracy that he is alleging happened and still alleging it after the police have said, no, we have his body. It's covered in white supremacist tattoos. And you even had some people, thankfully, musked and engaged in this, saying, boy, those are really fresh looking tattoos. It's like, whoa, you guys have lost your minds. And finally, if you want to take the entire conspiracy theory seriously, this is like the 400th mass shooting of the year. I mean, I'm pulling that number from thin air. We've had dozens and dozens of mass shootings, and we have not, as a result, taken away the guns of anybody. Plenty

of those shootings have been by actual white supremacists that nobody denies are white supremacists. So why on earth would the feds think that all, what we need is one more. You orchestrate it. We're going to orchestrate a mass shooting because the last 400 haven't allowed us to take anybody's guns away. Yeah. But this one, we just need one more. It's one of those conspiracy theories that's predicated on an often like unspoken truth about Bellingcat, right? That doesn't, because that is unspoken and true that they, I mean, they do get in for, they get funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which basically functions as the CIA. Yeah, like it's sort of like what the CIA or like

the OSS, if you go back, it's sort of like they kind of do that stuff. And so they'd have funded Bellingcat. But that being true and being also unspoken does not mean that there's this broader conspiracy theory and that Bellingcat, because they were the first to make this connection to white supremacy, that they were, it was a setup for, to increase surveillance powers. Like, listen, they're proud right now to say that they're increasing surveillance powers. They don't need any more predicates. Like they, they have every, they talk about January 6th every single day as a predicate for increasing surveillance powers on average Americans. So, yes, like, just because it's predicated on something that is unspoken and

is also true, which is Bellingcat's connection to the intelligence community and things like the National Endowment for Democracy, doesn't mean that, you know, that tip of the iceberg doesn't mean there's everything else under the water. Well, Ryan, you had a, what you described in our show planning group text message as a quote, little scoop, but I don't think it's a little scoop. You've read some good news this week or some big news, I should say this week with a great story. Break it down for us. Yeah, we put this first tear sheet up. This is a story that I wrote over at The Intercept. So on Sunday, Turkish voters went to the polls, and it was the closest contest that Tayyip Erdogan has faced in the 20 years that he's been in power

in Turkey, because you finally had a coalition that was able to bring together kind of the basically most elements of the Kurdish opposition with the Turkish opposition that oftentimes had been at odds and unwilling to kind of unite to confront Erdogan. There's a parallel in some ways over in Israel where oftentimes you will have the kind of Jewish opposition to the right unwilling or unable to link up with the Arab opposition. And so a splintered then opposition isn't able to contest. This time in Turkey, they were able to put it together. And so about a dozen international officials, elected officials and civil society representatives went to the Kurdish region to observe the election. I spoke with one of them yesterday. The full interview will be in my

Intercept podcast. But basically what happened is in the morning, the Turkish police come by and just start rounding up these officials and taking them to the local police station. They discovered that the rest of the officials were back at a hotel. They went to the hotel, rounded them up too, brought them to the station where they were then held throughout the night. And we're talking about two basic members of Congress, it's called deputies over in Spain, and a Spanish senator on top of other kind of civil society folks. Finally, at around 7 a.m. the next day after the election, they said to them, look, if you guys leave the country, we will free you. And so they agreed, okay, well, the election's over anyway. And so they were given a police escort to the airport and throughout Monday and into Monday

night and Tuesday morning, flown back to Spain and basically expelled from the country. Just rather kind of a doing it because I can do it type of situation from Erdogan, just a real flex of his power. And I don't think it's at all a coincidence that this happened in the Kurdish region, which the deputy told me they were still seeing checkpoints everywhere as they're going through. It's like, it's not the type of kind of free society that you and I would think of when we think of like a NATO country. So yeah, complete mess. But I also wanted to talk about what's going on in Yemen because I don't think there's a whole lot to talk about with Erdogan.

He is what he is. By the way, he fell under 50%. He outperformed polls, but he did fall under 50%, so there will be a runoff election on May 28th. He's favored to win that one because this guy that got 4% is a hard right-wing nationalist, and most of his people will probably go with Erdogan. But we'll keep following that. His losing would have significant implications for the EU, for NATO, for the war in Ukraine, and for other things. So I want to go over to Yemen, talk about this one for a little bit. So over there, as you guys know, because we've been

covering this, the Iranian-backed Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition that have been battling them have paused hostilities for more than a year now. And after a detente between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is brokered by China, peace talks have been making real progress, meaning a real end to the war is in sight. But the biggest risks to those peace talks continue to be the United States, which has staked out a position that says the Houthis should give up more territory and more concessions than they're currently offering. The U.S. diplomatic term for that is, quote, inclusive government. All we want, we say, is an inclusive government. And by inclusive, they mean significant power for the

Saudi and U.S. proxies that have been thoroughly beaten on the battlefield. An inclusive government, apparently, to the victor goes just a little bit of the spoils. No victor, of course, would agree to that. So the U.S. plan appears to be to jam up negotiations for as long as possible in the hope that hostilities resume. the Houthis launch attacks across the border at Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia responds with a devastating round of bombing, and then the U.S. gets a nice chunk of territory in peace talks when they start up again amid all the rubble. Now that's not only quite obviously evil, but it might not even work if the Saudi bombing campaign can't inflict the kind of damage

it would need to to set the Houthis back. After all, the war is now eight years old, so it's unclear why another year of killing Yemenis would obviously change the calculus. Today, more than 40 Democrats, or perhaps tomorrow, led by Rashida Tlaib, are going to send a letter to the White House urging the administration to tell Saudi Arabia that if hostilities resume, there will be no U.S. assistance in the bombing, according to people who've seen the letter. Now, sadly, this whole dynamic is probably a window into how difficult it will be to end the war in Ukraine and how unhelpful the United States will be in those negotiations, since we seem to believe that our negotiating position can always be improved with just a little bit more killing, just a little bit more bombing. Making a peace deal requires

painful concessions. And to both the Houthis and the Saudis' credit, they've been able to do that so far. And some of that has involved ceding territory to the Houthis that they seized by force. You can believe that's an unfortunate outcome or it sets a bad precedent, but that's also how wars end. The U.S. posture, as usual, requires other people to take risks for us. The calculation for the Saudis now is how much risk they're willing to take for potentially no benefit. Have the Houthis' capabilities improved over the last year? Will they light up a refinery again? Strike deeper into Saudi Arabia?

Cancel some glitzy affair with Davos types who don't like the sound of explosions nearby? Saudi Arabia is trying to transform itself into a leader on the global stage and wants to put this war behind it. And if they do launch a new bombing campaign, how much will the U.S. actually help? You may have noticed our intelligence forces and weapons makers are kind of busy lately. And so as I was thinking about this, it feels, have you seen Dirty Harry? What's your point today? Well, I'm going to break down the Durham report. Now, a lot of people, if you haven't been following this closely, I completely understand. I personally don't love this story. It's just so convoluted and complicated. The Trump-Russia stuff is essential and very, very important, but there's so many different loose ends.

And when people start talking about George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, my eyes admittedly glaze over a little bit. But it's an essential storyline to follow because it says so much about our government. It says so much about the elite perspective on average Americans. There's so many different things wrapped up in this one storyline. So if we could start by just putting the first element up on the screen, I really like this tweet from Lee Fong. He says, FBI informants were unethically deployed post 9-11 to entrap and ruin the lives of ordinary Muslim Americans. The extreme partisan abuse of FBI informants in the Trump-Russia inquiry continues that trend. If Congress wasn't so broken slash polarized, the potential for

reform is clear. That's really critical. That's actually, I think, the crux of all of this, that at this point, you have even the FBI putting out a tweet after the Durham report came out saying, we have already, because of the problems identified in the report, taken corrective measures to ensure that some of the problems raised by John Durham wouldn't happen again. That's a concession of wrongdoing, pretty obviously. And the Durham report that came out this week essentially lays out the extent of that wrongdoing, the scope of that wrongdoing, and all of the nuances of that wrongdoing. But note, it's very important right now that even the FBI, which is defended vigorously, I should say hysterically, really, by people on MSNBC and CNN, where Andy McCabe is a contributor and you're going to get Frank Figaluzzi on immediately to break down, Andrew Weissman

immediately on to break down all of the problems in the Durham report. Even the FBI is acknowledging that there were serious problems. And if you haven't been following the storyline closely, because like me, your eyes sort of glaze over when people start to talk about Garbage and George Papalopoulos. Back in October of 2020, John Durham was appointed by William Barr, who was then Bill Barr, who was then the attorney general in the Trump administration, as special counsel on the order of investigating the FBI's opening of Crossfire Hurricane. So that's the investigation into Donald Trump's potential collusion with the Russian government, his potential, his campaign's potential collusion, potential connections to the Russian government at that time. Now, John Durham, he's a longtime prosecutor in New England, has done some stuff with the mobs, with the mob. He's a registered Republican. But somebody who even at that time, you have Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, he told

CNN that Durham is, has a reputation for being, quote, apolitical and fair. He actually backed Donald Trump's decision to choose Durham as the U.S. attorney for that region. This is more from Chris Murphy. He's been a prosecutor in Connecticut forever. He's a law and order guy, tough nose, well-respected. If I were him, I wouldn't have taken this job, but he's got a reputation of being apolitical and serious. So he was appointed to sort of look into this. It became a criminal investigation, which is where Bill Barr appoints him to then serve as the special counsel back in 2020. So this has been going on for a really long time, about two and a half years.

Durham has been looking into this. He recommended or he brought charges against three different individuals, one of whom actually did plead guilty. So you have Igor Denchenko, a former Brookings Institute guy who was accused of lying to the FBI. He was acquitted. Michael Sussman brought up on similar charges, also acquitted, and Kevin Clinesmith, who did actually plead guilty. Now, the fact that they were acquitted here in Washington, D.C., I think probably says a whole lot more about Washington, D.C. I was talking to someone the other day who said, you know, we should not, probably not try things in the federal district where so much of the government

and special interests, et cetera, are located, but farm those out to sort of random districts around the country. Because I think the wrongdoing on behalf of Danchenko and Sussman is pretty clear. Even if a jury didn't find it to be criminal, it was pretty clearly problematic at the very, very least. But you don't have to take, you know, my word, a conservative for it, that the Durham report is damning. There are a lot of people like Lee, like Matt Taibbi, like Glenn Greenwald that have followed this story for a very long time from the left perspective, people who were on the right side of these questions during the Bush administration when, you know, I was a teenager at the very end of it and an actual child in the beginning of it. So I wasn't really old enough to be hypocritical quite yet. That's probably lucky for me because who knows where I would have been on

those issues. But my side was on the wrong side of this for the most part, except for some of the sort of civil libertarian type people. So some of those folks who've been following these stories since the 9-11 era, the post 9-11 era, have been following the wrongdoing in the Trump administration. And here's from Susan Schmidt in Racket, which is Taibbi's excellent publication. I'm going to read this quote. According to John Durham, the senior FBI officials who ordered the probe did not look at the Bureau's intelligence databases or consult as experienced Russia analysts who could have told them that they had seen no information about Donald Trump being

involved with Russian leadership officials, nor did they seek such information about Trump and Russia from the CIA, the NSA, or the State Department. Neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion when the investigation began, the report said. That is a really key sentence you've seen some of the media pull out. Remember, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion, and they opened Crossfire Hurricane, started leaking details of it to the media in order to condemn a presidential campaign because they had partisan opposition to the president. Further, the FBI opened a full-scale investigation, quote, without ever having spoken to the persons

who provided the information, Schmidt notes. So you can see there, Durham in his 300-plus page report actually contrasts the opening of Crossfire Hurricane with the way the FBI treated, for instance, investigations into Hillary Clinton. They were very cognizant that Clinton, as Peter Strzok say, might be the next president, and she might not be distinguishing between something that's DOJ and FBI and might just be coming down hard on the FBI. And so we can put up the second element here.

This is some reporting in The Federalist. This is, I think, in the headline you see it. Here's the headline. Here's everything the FBI deliberately ignored to get Trump and Russian collusion hoax, according to Durham. A lot of the media coverage of the Durham report that came out this week after two and a half years of special counsel investigation has been downplaying the findings. They said he didn't get much, two of his prosecutions failed in court. There's really nothing new here. But I think what's essential

to know about the Durham report and about his probe, where it's sort of investigating the investigators back in 2016, is that he is laying out what the FBI did not do. And you can see that in the quotes that Susan Schmidt pulled out for Racket. They did not possess any actual evidence of collusion. They did not seek out the Russia analysts or other intelligence information about Donald Trump's potential connections with Russia. They laundered essentially gossip from Christopher Steele's primary subsource, Danchenko. Christopher Steele himself put it in the dossier that was funded by the Clinton campaign. The FBI knew that. And they laundered that and they turned it into, you know, this very credible information. They treated it like it was very credible information

when it clearly, clearly, clearly was not. They seem to have known that at the time. And so I think, again, that's what's really essential to know about the Durham report is a lot of it is proving what the FBI did not do. And he has quotes from people saying, you know, this is kind of thin, et cetera, et cetera. And so that's why, you know, I think it's this whole thing is really a bombshell. The media has compared it to Donald Trump saying it's the crime of the century, that Durham is going to find the crime of the century. And because they don't think it lives up to the crime of the century sort of stuff that therefore it's nothing, right? Like this is, there's nothing new here, blah, blah, blah. No, this is a lot of, you know, information about what the FBI declined to do. So it's true that, you know, there's not tons of stuff about what

the FBI did do, like active, et cetera, et cetera. It's a lot about what they did not do. And that stuff is huge, even if it's not, you know, we've known about a lot of this because he tried three people in court. So it's definitely useful to see the full 300 plus page report. But because there were three trials, a lot of this has already come out and we know that. But, you know, this is, again, another line from it. Our review found no indication that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators ever attempted to resolve the prior Danchenko espionage matter before opening him as a paid confidential human source. They were paying Igor Danchenko, this is the subsource to the Steele dossier, without ever following up on intelligence that he may have been compromised. And that's, again, I think we put the third element up on here. A big takeaway from the Durham report is that, and here's another quote from Jerry Dunleavy's reporting in the Washington Examiner,

it's important, according to Durham, that in not resolving Denchenko's status vis-a-vis the Russian intelligence services, it appears the FBI never gave appropriate consideration to the possibility that the intelligence Denchenko was providing to Christopher Steele was in whole or part Russian disinformation. So this brings us full circle to the fact that the opponents of Russian disinformation who were breathlessly, hysterically trying to take down Trump as a potential Russian agent, they said that over and over again, we may have a Russian asset, a Russian agent in the White House. If you

go back and look at what was being said on MSNBC, all the time, just really casually thrown around on Twitter, actually that in and of itself may have been Russian disinformation. It's like they're fighting fake Russian disinformation potentially with real Russian disinformation. And that is huge because it's not just a failure, it is partisan corruption of the FBI. We talked last week about the CIA potentially, or no, not potentially, clearly having been used in a partisan fashion to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story in the signing of that 51 intelligence, a former intelligence official letter. The CIA was, as we talked about last week, getting people, it appears, to sign that letter from their, using their official capacity as the CIA to get people

to sign that letter. That's insane. It's not without predicate or it's not without precedent in United States history, obviously. The FBI building is literally named after J. Edgar Hoover. So it's probably no surprise that we see all of this stuff coming out from the American intelligence community time and time and again. But to just, again, go back to the point that Lee Fong made in his tweet, there should be a real appetite for reform in Washington, D.C. There certainly is among the public, but we're not in the church committee era anymore. We look back on the wrongdoings that were uncovered by the church committee with a sense of consensus

that this stuff was really bad. It's happening now before our eyes, and the media is actually cheerleading. They are actually cheerleading the intelligence community, helping the intelligence community, not just cheerleading them, but assisting the intelligence community by doing really sloppy and bad reporting

and being openly partisan for the intelligence community over dissenting individuals, independent media. The FBI, Lee reported actually this week how they target vegan activists, but the media takes their side time and time again. And I think that's a really, really pessimistic, but rightfully pessimistic perspective. We are not in the church committee era, despite the fact that we are seeing very similar stuff come out of the intelligence community. And Ryan, I'll kick it over to you with that question. It just seems like... Joining us now is The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein to talk about his latest scoop. We can put this up here. Inside the Pentagon's new perception management office

to counter disinformation. So Ken, to start with, before we get into the details of this, how did you come on this latest scoop? Well, you guys had me on recently for my last one, which is the establishment of the Foreign Malign Influence Center, established in the office of the Director of National Intelligence, which also was not disclosed a multi-million dollar agency That's established never, you know, no press release telling the public that this thing exists And so since reporting that I kind of alluded to this agency We're talking about now and I got it some people reach out to me I sort of shook the trees people inside the community reached out said, oh, it's funny. You just noticed that.

Thanks for catching up with us. Right, because they had established it last year, actually. And its only public record was it was mentioned, what, in a list? In a budget. In a budget document. As like a line-up. A line-up, like money for this office. Yeah.

But nothing else. And not even the money. They didn't tell you how much money. They just said this. Money for this thing. So I want to read one part of your story to get you to unpack a little bit. And this is a document that you, when you shook the trees, this is one of the documents that fell out. And so it's an interesting, it's like kind of a university assignment. It's kind of interesting how it like.

Yeah, they contract with these private institutions and it's not entirely clear what, to some extent, when it concerns speech, that helps them get around certain First Amendment protections, because they're saying, oh, actually, the private group is what's doing this. weapon system from country B because we believe the continued purchasing might jeopardize DOD's military advantage in some way if the U.S. ever had to engage in armed conflict with country A. Assuming the IPMO has worked to establish the desired behavior change, how might key influencers be identified that have sway over these leaders' thought processes, beliefs, motives, reasoning, etc., including ascertaining their typical modes and methods of communication. Thereafter, assuming an influence strategy is developed, how might the DIE or IC determine if DOD's influence activities are working,

aside from waiting and watching, hopefully, that country A eventually stops purchasing the weapons systems in question from country B? So, translate that. What is this office tasking itself with? Yeah, so as the name suggests, they're managing the perceptions of foreign governments and foreign nationals. But part of the concern is that in the age of the internet, it's really hard to limit the public diplomacy is what they call it, but really it's propaganda. It's really hard to target that at a foreign audience and not have it blow back on domestic because the distinction has been completely dissolved

between foreign and domestic. In fact, the law was even changed to reflect that. We have a longstanding law established after World War II. Of course, there were tons of propaganda at the time, and so this law was created in response to it. It's called the Smith-Mundt Act. It's supposed to limit public diplomacy that's targeted at domestic Americans. Well, there was a Smith-Mundt, it was called the

Modernization Act. It was rolled into the NDAA several years ago. And what that did is it got rid of that protection. There's no longer that protection that once existed and their rationale for it was kind of interesting. They said, well in the age of internet, this stuff isn't really meaningful anyways. It's like, well, so that means we should take it extra seriously, right? But instead, they just threw it out of the window entirely. Well, and the history of this is really interesting, not just with Smith-Mundt, but with the term perception management going all the way back to the Contras. Can you tell us a little bit, Ken, about the intelligence community's concept of perception management historically, sort of what it evolved from?

Yeah, so perception management is a term of art from, as you said, the Reagan administration. It was what they used. He assigned CIA's top propaganda expert to the National Security Council at the time to perception manage, to shape the narrative around the Contras because they were you know found responsible for all kinds of you know Horrible atrocities and really grisly crimes and so it became important and and they were coming out of the Iraq I'm sorry. They were coming out of the Vietnam War and so the concern was how do we kick the Vietnam syndrome? This idea that the public is just you know averse to any sort of foreign policy because of what they learned

from Vietnam. And so this was kind of their response to it, is we're going to shape the public narrative around these things, particularly in foreign press. But even then, there were problems with that because, as we know, you know, wire services like Reuters are based in other countries, and so they have circulation within the United States. So there were always problems with this foreign versus domestic distinction but now even the kind of paper-thin wall that they had separating the two has been just completely removed. So that's sort of the historical context for it. And there's one more thing and then during the Bush administration... But wait, there's more! Yeah, but wait, Billy Mays. So during the Bush

administration there was another attempt under then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to stand up a perception management office right after 9-11, but before the invasion of Iraq. And then when it became public that he had done this, and that they were planning disinformation that was actually getting picked up by the American press and misinforming them about things that were going on in the so-called global war on terror, there was enormous pressure to shut it down, and he ended up doing that. And so what's interesting is there's no attendant outrage now, perhaps because we're not in a war climate or whatever, but it's the same thing.

It's not just a perception management effort. It's within DOD, which is what happened during the Bush administration. Under a Democratic president who was obviously an opponent of the Bush administration. Right. And as you write, the New York Times is the one that kind of called out the Office of Strategic Influence, as Rumsfeld called it, and pointed out that encountering disinformation, oftentimes they were like putting out their own disinformation to do that. And it's just so remarkable to think of the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq war complaining about the administration putting out disinformation. Like the entire war was predicated on disinformation that the Bush administration was funneling through the New York Times. Well, that's kind of the sleight of hand in all of this is they try to say, oh, you know, as a senior defense official who works in the psyops area told me he was laughing at that

I in my previous story just you know kind of candidly said Propaganda he's like you're not supposed to say that the monocles are gonna be dropping all over Washington. He's like it's called public diplomacy Yeah And so that's the kind of the sleight of hand they do because they say oh, we're actually countering falsehoods with with the reality But then when you break down the facts, it's like this stuff is politicized as anything because they have their own set of you know political motives and interests so that distinction between countering disinformation and Propaganda is is I think a lot thinner than people generally recognize how many? Small little barely publicized offices in the Pentagon do you think you will uncover for the remainder of the year?

I actually just got another one since publishing this story, and that will be my next story. But what's interesting about the Pentagon is that what's happening with this office and the office I mentioned before, the Formulon Influence Center, these are highly classified efforts that exist on what's called the high side. So they have special skiffs where they're talking about things. There's a culture of secrecy. When I reported initially on the Department of Homeland Security, most of that stuff is unclassified. So in DHS, there's almost half a dozen counter disinformation entities established since 2016. So that gives you an idea. But this is just what we know from DOD. I'm sure there are more, but it's a lot harder to find. And it's a lot harder to find specifics about what exactly it is that they're doing.

And this is a kind of a how government works type of situation, too, because once something becomes the thing to do within the government, then everybody has to have their own office. Remember how you're like, wait, the post office has a counterterror operator? Yes. Why is the post office doing it? And the post office the post office like hey there was anthrax in the mail so we got to do our own right Intel and so if it becomes a thing that you think you can go to Congress and get more funding for and so what clearly I think what you're exposing here is is that there's so much momentum on this side that if you're a bureaucrat who wants more funding, actually that's redundant, all bureaucrats want more funding, then the thing that you need to do is say we're gonna counter disinformation and we're gonna do public diplomacy. And here's why we are uniquely capable of filling this role and it's outrageous that

we do not yet have our own office that is directed in this fashion. Well, and if I could add on to that, turning it over to you, Ken, that this is all coming in the context. I mean, just in the last couple of weeks, you know, we talked about the Durham report earlier, which even the FBI has conceded in a tweet that it posted this week. It already, you know, sort of handled the errors. That's their claim that were uncovered in the Durham report. But basically, it's a concession that things went wrong, that the intelligence was not handled properly. January 6th, the intelligence was not handled properly. The CIA involvement in the 51 officials of the Hunter Biden laptop letter, that was false intelligence as well. That was intelligence spreading false information. And so they use all of these things. I'm assuming

in your reporting, you've realized this. It seems as though they're using all these things to say we need more power because things are, you know, there's just such a need for strong intelligence. We need more resources. We need more offices, more bureaucrats, despite the fact that what we're seeing is actually just their system is broken. Yeah, it's always a quibono kind of thing. Like when you have this sort of hysteria around things, you know, who benefits, and it's often the national security state, they take full advantage of these things.

I mean, the elevation of the idea of falsehoods to a new status, disinformation, it is just falsehoods. Why do we need a special national security-ized term for that? And I think we're seeing why, because then they can go to Congress and say, well, we need to counter the national, you need to counter the threat.

Vicious cycle. As these offices proliferate, they're going to then be in competition with each other for congressional funding. That's why they're leaking to me. And power, and they're gonna start spreading disinformation about each other. They absolutely need to do that.

Well it's extraordinary, so the previous one, the FMIC that I reported on, came on to discuss with you guys about a week ago, that's just to orchestrate and coordinate between all the various. They don't even handle anything internal. This is like a top-level effort to manage everything else. So it's like it never ends. And the secrecy is just a windfall for them because we're in the context of this debate about like cutting food stamps and how are we going to save money? And there's these multimillion dollar agencies.

Nobody, the DOD is completely exempt from this. I mean, we can have a discussion like if you, you know, certain number of people want to reduce the size of government. Okay. It's like, but shouldn't we talk about this $800 billion colossus? It is completely out of the discussion. That's a great point. Well, I'm sure we'll have Ken back next week to talk about the newest disinformation. They're just like popping up like Easter eggs.

Ken, thank you so much. You can check out Ken's story, obviously, over on The Intercept. We will be back next Wednesday with more CounterPoints. We're really looking forward to the new studio. We keep seeing teasers of it from Mac and Griffin. And, man, it looks cool. Yeah, it's going to be good. It's going to be right over there. It's going to be right over there. It's coming soon, too. So

we'll keep the bricks for like the tours that we give, right? Just for the nostalgia. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll be back next week with more CounterPoints. Thank you so much for tuning in. We'll see you then. This is an iHeart podcast.