Bulwark Takes - JD Vance Humiliates America at Munich Security Conference

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell discuss JD Vance’s Munich meltdown—where he attacked U.S. allies, ignored Russia, and cozied up to authoritarians. Plus, the DOJ scandal that could shake the country—thanks to Barb McQuade’s revelation.

Hey everyone, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark here with my good friend Bill Crystal. We wanted to jump on because this morning Vice President J.D. Vance spoke to the Munich Security Conference and it was weird. And I, Bill, you're an expert in this stuff so I wanted to ask you about it. But you know, I watched the speech and Vance was not attempting whatsoever to unite our European allies, which is I sort of assume what the vice president's role is at these things, and instead was like insulting them. And I don't know. I don't know how to interpret it other than emboldening slash siding with our enemies. Let's just watch one opening clip to set the tone.

We gather at this conference, of course, to discuss security. And normally we mean threats to our external security. I see many great military leaders gathered here today. But while the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine. And we also believe that it's important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense. The threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia. It's not China. It's not any other external actor. And what I worry about is the threat from within the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

OK, so Senator Andy Kim was there in the room and he tweeted this as his initial response. I was in the room in Munich for VP Vance's speech. No talk about Russia, Ukraine, China, just criticism of our allies and focus on the threat from within. His speech is going to embolden our adversaries who will see this as a green light to act while America is distracted slash divided. I mean, there wasn't no mention of Russia, China or Ukraine. He basically said, Russia, Ukraine or Russia, China, not the big problem. The real problem is the enemy from within, which is the same language they use about us. Anyway, Bill, I know you read the whole transcript. Tell me what you think about it. It's really appalling. I mean, but predictable. This is the Trump administration's view, right, that they should be working. I mean, the enemy within, he then specified – well, let me just back up. The Munich Security Conference has always been a big security conference, very big in the Cold War.

Defense ministers, presidents, occasionally vice presidents, secretaries of state, congressional delegations – that's why Senator Kim was there – go to it. People from NGOs, I've been a few times. I mean, it's – you know, it's like all these conferences, too much conferring and too much chit-chatting and too much sitting there listening to speeches, not quite enough anyway. But it is, everyone's there. And you're supposed to have a serious discussion. And it has been the venue for serious discussions on foreign policy security threats. We have the biggest war in Europe in 80 years going on. Brutal genocidal invasion by Putin of Ukraine, a European country, very close to many of the countries in this. At the conference, we've all helped those countries at the conference have

all been very much involved in trying to help Ukraine beat back this aggression. J.D. Vance's one mention is the one we just heard, that this war, this conflict going on between Russia and Ukraine, we hope to work it out. Then he decides to go criticize European countries for individual instances, he lists them, of maybe misguided applications of laws having to do with free speech and religious freedom. They have different laws that we do, for one thing. And in these cases, they may have got overboard a little bit in their own, you know, application of them. But literally literally instances of an individual who was convicted here for protesting against abortion in a way that J.D. Vance doesn't think is appropriate. That's what he used his speech, which is supposed to be, as you said, uniting the allies against

threats from abroad, external threats. That's what he used the speech to do, to sort of chastise them for not being up to Trump administration standards of defending individual rights. So it's crazy and appalling and in so many ways. But yeah, but it's what they care. I guess that's what they don't take seriously, the threats from abroad. Incidentally, you mentioned China, which was very good. I don't know, did Vance even mention China? I'm not sure he did. Only there when he said Russia, China, like that's not where the big threats come. I mean, this is an administration that it's hawkish defenders. It's normie Republican defenders in the foreign policy world.

We're like, well, Bill, you may not like them on Ukraine too much. But, you know, they're really tough on China. Oh, man, are we going to stand up on China? You go to the literally to a place which has prime ministers, defense ministers, and where Europe's a very important player because we need them to stand up against China with us on all kinds of trade matters and so forth. And he says nothing. So it's all fake. There's no toughness in foreign policy. It's all appeasing dictators. It's all not caring about defending our fellow democracies. It's all about advancing their domestic agenda here and in Europe. And the final point I'll make is implicitly and almost explicitly a couple times in the speech,

he defends the populist parties of Europe. He chastises the European nations at one point, I think, for excluding some of these parties from governance or from politics to some degree, not from politics, but from government. And so he's in Germany. There's an election there in a week. The speech will be understood, consistent with Elon Musk's endorsement, as a quasi-endorsement of the AFD, of the populist anti-immigration, and I think it's fair to say neo-Nazi or anti-anti-Nazi party.

And so, but nothing, if he's going to talk about domestic politics, maybe you should defend democracy against those threats. No mention of Hungary, of course, right? No mention of Putin. No, I mean, it's really, I don't even know, what would the comparison be? It would be to go give a speech in 1938 or something in Europe and discuss, you know, some individual cases in France and Britain that might be controversial of how they're applying their laws and never mention Germany or Italy, right? Yeah. Yeah, it struck me as genuinely wild to listen to him. And if you watch it, God, he is, smug's not the right word.

There's just, there's something about listening to him lecture them about, and it is, there's like this one case on abortion where he's talking about a guy engaged in prayer and he's within, they set up some buffer, like there's a law that's like you can't get with this close to an abortion clinic, it sounds like. And he wasn't doing anything other than praying silently, but he was violating this buffer zone. And, like, that just sounds like such a specific instance of something, some kind of domestic political situation that it's bananas that that is what he decides to focus on and also, like, criticize the to bash the democracy of our Romanian allies for canceling the results of their presidential election, saying that if Russian disinformation was able to destroy their democracy, then they are not a strong democracy. Let's watch. Now we're at the point, of course, that the situation has gotten so bad that this December, Romania straight up cancelled the results of a presidential election based on the flimsy suspicions of an intelligence agency and enormous pressure

from its continental neighbors. Now, as I understand it, the argument was that Russian disinformation had infected the Romanian elections. But I'd ask my European friends to have some perspective. You can believe it's wrong for Russia to buy social media advertisements to influence your elections. We certainly do. You can condemn it on the world stage even. But if your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn't very strong to begin with.

Few Russians in the back clapping, I presume. I don't think the Russians, no, there were no Russians there since they've been excluded. It was literally probably his own staff. I mean, it's unbelievable. I've been at this conference several times. Everyone's very polite. You applaud for your, you know, the vice president of an ally. It's very telling that he had five people, his own staff, applauding. Yeah. What's the deal with the Romanian election? So the court, as I understand it, I am no expert, as J.D. Vance is no expert on Romania. I happened to talk with someone from Romania earlier this week, and she explained to me a little bit, as it happens, the Supreme Court

canceled the election because there was massive Russian interference, not buying a few digital ads. It may as well have changed the result. And they're rerunning the election. There's no coup. There's nothing like that. They're rerunning the election in Romania. We'll see what happens. It's actually a democracy that's trying its best to be a democracy under huge pressure from Russia and huge infiltration

really by the Russian intelligence services and so forth. And for J.D. Vance, the cavalry, well, if your democracy is so weak, you get, you know, it gets, you'd be destroyed by Russia. A, yes, Russia can destroy democracies. Some of them are weak. They were under Soviet control for 40 years. Before that, didn't have much of a democratic tradition. So yes, they're a little,

they're not quite where we are. Not that we're so great, incidentally, in resisting all these pressures. And again, they're rerunning the election. I mean, no one said that, you know, so it's really demagogic and dishonest for Vance to do this. But it plays well here because the candidate who was, who won with Russian help or seems it was ahead with Russian help and are now asked to compete in a hopefully fairer playing field. Was the pro Putin populist right wing candidate? I got to say, the main thing that I thought was, can you imagine being lectured about elections and democracy by the guys who claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from them with absolutely no proof and lost in court like i just can't imagine being somebody sitting there who's a serious person listening to this guy and it's funny you you're you lapsed into not an impression but kind of like because that is sort of it right it's this who is this pipsqueak who we all know lies about this stuff, who has no it's like it's just it's such a diminished level of moral authority from the United States with this guy up there.

No, you're absolutely right. I hadn't really quite focused on that aspect. He is up there because his predecessor refused to go along with rigging an election. That's why he was picked, because he won't say the 2020 election was honest and fair and honest. And yeah, he's lecturing the Romanians who are doing their best in a difficult circumstance way over there near Russia, helping a lot of Ukrainian refugees there and so forth, doing their best to maintain their democracy. And we're doing, and what Vance is saying is, forget, you know, we're not helping you, right? We're lecturing you on a few cases,

actually from the rest of Europe, that we don't like. And basically, as Hank Seth said to the Secretary of Defense the other day, right? You're kind of on your own now, Europe. You know, good luck. You know, so all the talk about how he wants Europe to do more

and, you know, bear a burden and, as I say, want to be tough on China. It's all total nonsense. You watch that speech objectively. It's friendlier to the dictatorships than to the democracies. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. me that it clearly he would love to stay on this sort of lecturing about specific laws that he doesn't like from the EU, which is Brussels. He kind of does this thing with Brussels, as opposed to talking about the importance of democracy, because they flagrantly

behaved in anti-democratic ways here and with a straight face couldn't possibly, they can't mount a good defense of democracy like they are an anti-democratic force uh so uh it was disgusting and gross and this was also in the middle of like this happening this other thing broke that i just wanted to ask you about really quickly because i it's just a it's just a tweet and so i want to be careful but barb mcquade um who i think used to be a united States District Attorney, said, she tweeted, DOJ leadership has put all public integrity section lawyers, so these are within DOJ, their public integrity section, into a room with one hour to decide who will dismiss Adams,

meaning Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who will dismiss Adams' indictment or else all will be fired, sending them strength to stand by their oath, which is to support the Constitution, not the president's political agenda. Wait, this can't be real. I mean, you would think not, but look what's happened in the last 24 hours. I was also struck by the coincidence, as you say, of Vance giving a speech a couple hours ago, and then we discovered there's a continued effort to use the Department of Justice to remove, dismiss the charges against Adams, which seemed to have been very, which were serious in the first case, and now they were about to supplement them with further charges of obstruction,

which sound pretty worn and tight, honestly, from what you can tell from reading about them. Anyway, there have been resignations both from the New York, the Southern District of New York office, and from Maine Justice, from the Department of Justice itself. First, Beauvais, the acting, I don't know what he is, acting Deputy Attorney General, tried to get the New York people to drop the charges. They've been, Danielle... Sassoon. Sassoon, really, in a wonderful resignation letter, resigned. One or two others, I think, have resigned there. And then they tried to say, OK, we're going to have public integrity, that division here at Justice in Washington, do it.

And there have been resignations there. And now they're trying to browbeat someone from there to go to New York. And you have to show up in court to drop the charges. They'd already been filed. This isn't like they had a case under consideration. I mean, this thing is filed. They had the supplementary apparently filing, superseding, I think it's called superseding indictment, ready to go. And they've chosen to drop it. Why? Because Adams went to meet with Trump, because Adams is going to support Trump's immigration agenda. He was on TV this morning

with Trump's... Homan. Homan, the Borders are guy. I mean, they're just basically embracing the corruption. I mean, it is corrupt to drop charges in a criminal case because of a side deal about political side deal, right? And they're just embracing the, in effect, the corruption, I would say at this point. And I mean, if I can just say a word about Danielle Sassoon, who I wrote a bit about this morning in Morning Shots, I think she's 38, 39, something like that, judging from her when she graduated from college and law school. Very well respected, got an award last year for her prosecution of criminal cases in New York. And her letter's eloquent. And it reminds one, though, I mean, people like her are standing up, and it's reminding

me of some of the work we did back in 2022, 2023, 2024, with the Cassidy Hutchinsons of the world, and others who stood up to Trump, and stood up to unbelievable pressure, and testified before the January 6th committee. But they're early in their career. They're taking a real risk. They did not have to do this neither Cassidy and others who worked for Trump nor Danielle Sassoon

a career person there in New York who was a clerk for Justice Scalia federal society member she's not like some liberal no not at all she could have gone along that path and have just

quietly done what he asked and who knows what uh what you know where her prospects would be over the next four years in terms of judgeships and promotions within the justice department and so forth another fellow quit in new york a veteran maybe seems like 10 years older perhaps than than danielle sassoon who uh was a roberts clerk so these are not a bunch of left-wingers uh they won't they think it's corrupting the, you know, the course of justice. They're acting on principle. Meanwhile, all the Republican senators, who are, half of whom were at the end of their careers, or in safe seats, or have nothing to lose, or have already made their name in life, and are, you know, they're

busy caving and voting to confirm Kash Patel as FBI director and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as HHS secretary. It's really unbelievable. I mean, why are the young women so much and young people, some young men, too, so much more courageous than these than these old men at the end of their career? Yeah. And I just just to further, you know, give Danielle Sassoon like a I was talking about this with JVL and Secret Pod. But like a we've been so starved for somebody to do the right thing and just say like Chris Ray could have done this and written a letter. He could have hung around and then waited to stand in the breach against some illegal action and then written a letter explaining why it was illegal. Like she is doing exactly the thing. And she does it in this crisp, clear, buttressed by like the prosecutor's code of conduct, her oath of office. And she says, I was taught this by these revered conservative justice, including Antonin Scalia. And so I just, it feels like, A, it feels like the first bit of real pushback.

It's clear to me, if that's true, that they've yanked everybody into a room and they're like, we're going to fire you if one of you doesn't go do this thing. I hope they make them all fire them because this is what it's going to take. This is the courage is contagious moment. Danielle standing up, I think, has clearly paved the way for some of these other guys to then stand up. His letter, the guy who wrote the letter earlier today was pretty remarkable. He was like, I have no doubt you will find somebody either corrupt or foolish enough to execute this, but it won't be me. And I was like, yeah, you know, so I just it feels like we're seeing some signs of life.

And I'll tell you, for Democrats who've been looking for something to do with themselves, like go defend these people, go defend them, help them and stand behind them. Because this is these are people putting everything on the line. No, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I hope I really do hope it's a model. And I think there is some you can see that this this is broken through, I think maybe, in a way, some of these other, you know, let's just say there haven't been this many dramatic resignations yet. People have gotten fired. Chris Wray, unbelievable, right? They wipe out the entire top leadership of FBI, whom he put in place there. He presumed we thought they were capable and people of integrity.

The Trump administration comes in, fires them all. Chris Wray has nowhere to be seen. He doesn't even say a word about it. It's my knowledge that these were fine people. They served the country well. It's very unfortunate that Trump, he could have done it in a much milder way than you and I would say it.

Nothing. What's with these people? What is it? This law firm doesn't want to stick his neck out because they'll lose some cases from Trump-friendly clients? I don't know, really, I don't know. But the pressure is great. I was just talking with someone this morning about this too, and sort of the think tank foundation, but also private sector world.

The pressure to not cross the Trump people, the sense that they're taking names, and they will punish their enemies and reward their friends is great. So we'll be, but yes, people need to stand with these brave individuals who have taken a real, you know, taken a real stand and are paying some price. Well, happy Valentine's Day to Danielle Sassoon. You know, you, you're a great American, Danielle. And Bill Kristol, you're a great American. Thanks for jumping on and talking to me about it.

Guys, go subscribe to the feed. We're going to be at a million so soon. Tell all your friends. Subscribe to the Bulwark feed here on YouTube. We'll catch you soon.