Pod Save America - "Putin Finds His Pretext."

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

Ben Rhodes joins to talk about the potentially imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine and all the political and economic implications both globally and here at home, and Strict Scrutiny’s Leah Litman talks about whether Donald Trump’s lifetime of legal troubles may finally be catching up with him.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. And filling in again for Tommy today is the co-host of Pod Save the World, Ben Rhodes. Hey, guys. Good to have you back. Yeah, glad to be here. I mean, we wanted to have Ben with us today to talk about the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine,

which is dominating the news cycle as well as the Biden administration's time and energy. So we'll talk about all the political and economic implications both globally and here at home. Later, we're joined by Strict Scrutiny's Leo Lippmann to talk about whether Donald Trump's lifetime of legal troubles may finally be catching up with him. Little dessert with your vegetables. Sure, yeah. Is this it? We got him. But first, before we start, we are just two months away from Pod Save America, alive and on tour.

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It'll be back on March 6th with new episodes on its very own feed. Go subscribe right now. Just search for Offline with Jon Favreau wherever you get your podcasts. One more thing. I thought you weren't going to say it. I know. I wasn't going to say it. Wherever you get your podcasts. Wherever you get your podcasts. We decided today. I'm so sick of saying wherever you get your podcasts. One more thing. From now until Thursday. I thought you weren't going to say it. I know. I wasn't going to say it. Wherever you get your podcasts.

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Shop friend of the pod sweatshirts, keep it teas, work from home coffee mugs, and more. Now at crooked.com slash store. All right. Let's get to the news. You know it's a big deal when a Pod Save the World topic becomes the lead of a Pod Save America episode. And here we are. Vladimir Putin is inching closer to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, an act of unprovoked aggression that would have serious political and economic consequences around the world and here in the United States. whiny speech that Russia will recognize the, quote, independence of two Ukrainian territories along its eastern border, which is being seen by much of the world as a pretext for a war and

not a great sign for the prospects of a potential summit between Putin and President Biden that could lead to a diplomatic solution. Also not a great sign. Shortly after Putin's speech, he ordered Russian forces into those two Ukrainian territories for what he's calling a, quote, peacekeeping mission. Sure. I want to start with some basics for people who may be just tuning into this crisis. Ben, two questions for you to start. Why would Putin want to invade Ukraine and why should the U.S. care? So I think you could divide this into three pieces, strategic, political and historical. Strategically, you've heard a lot about NATO, right? So NATO, the US-led military alliance that gradually expanded after the Cold War to include countries like Poland

and even former Soviet republics like Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, which border Russia. Russia didn't like that. Putin didn't like that. NATO in 2008 offered membership to Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics that also obviously border Russia. And Ukraine is the biggest former Soviet republic and the one with kind of the deepest ties to Russia historically. And since that offering of a NATO membership action plan, which is a step towards joining NATO in 2008, Putin has invaded and occupied two chunks of Georgia. He's invaded and occupied chunks of Ukraine, and now he's escalating there. Clearly, he's seeking to reverse what he thinks is the post-Cold War order that disadvantages Russia.

Second is political. Ukraine is a democracy. Ukraine has had two popular revolutions in 2005 and then in 2013 that ousted pro-Russian leaders and set the country on a more democratic path. That's the scenario that Putin wants to prevent at home. So just as he wants a buffer between him and NATO, which is what Ukraine is, he wants a buffer between him and democracies. He wants to stamp out democracy before it can get to Russia potentially. Democracy getting a little too close to Moscow. A little too close to comfort.

A little too far from us. It's a real bummer. But the last piece here is someone who's had to engage with Vladimir Putin's psychology far more than I'd like over the years is the history. And that's what was on display in the speech he gave today. Putin believes deeply that Russia was humiliated at the end of the Cold War, that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe, that we rubbed his face in it with the enlargement of NATO. And he thinks that this is a part of reclaiming Russia's rightful historical place as a leader in Europe. And he thinks, frankly, that Ukraine shouldn't even really be an independent country. It has ties with Russia that go back a thousand years in his view. And so all these things are converging

now for him to make this play. Why should Americans care about it? I think one is that the basic principle under which the whole system operates globally is that big, powerful countries can't just redraw the borders of other smaller countries when they like to. World War II was about that. A lot of tragedy in history has come from a circumstance where leaders begin to violate those principles and they don't stop. And so one of the concerns is if there's kind of a cost-free invasion and takeover of Ukraine, where does that end? Where does that end in terms of what Putin does? Where does that end in terms of what China might do? And those are real questions. I think it's also the case that, as we've experienced in this country, and you guys have talked on this podcast, Putin seems not just content in weakening Ukraine.

He wants to get into Western politics and European politics and American politics. He's at the vanguard of kind of a ethno-nationalist authoritarianism that is all around us right now. And this is a part of the momentum behind that. So I hear we will describe Putin's interest around these sort of geopolitical stakes, right? The encroachment of NATO and so forth. What are the practical benefits? What are the kind of non-strategic, non-political reasons for invading Ukraine? What are the actual advantages it might afford Putin from having control of this

place? Well, I mean, look, historically, Ukraine has been, you know, it was the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. There are tremendous agricultural reserves there. It further solidifies his dominance of the energy market of oil and gas fields and the transport of oil and gas into Europe. So it does give him some geopolitical advantages tied to things like natural resources. But at the end of the day, I think one of the things that's been challenging people to understand is the sanctions he's going to face are going to offset whatever certainly short-term benefit he gets from that. And that's why I raised that historical point. This is a big risk for Putin, right? I mean, this could crater his economy. This could cause unrest at home. There could be thousands of Russian casualties that could create a backlash at home

too. He's taking a significant amount of risk here for reasons that clearly go beyond the practical benefits you're talking about. And that's why I think he believes his role in history is to restore Russia to its rightful place as a superpower. And that to him is more valuable than whatever wheat fields and oil and energy advantages he gets from this. Well, and that's not Putin's psychology at this point. He just said that in the speech. There was a lot of debate leading up to the speech about like to what extent was

this just about nato expansion and putin being concerned about nato expansion but then in the speech today he's basically like oh yeah i'm pissed that the soviet union fell apart and i'm and and uh and all these and i'm trying to reassemble it like he was just very i thought he was like very explicit on the historic point during the speech. Is that right? That's right. Was there anything new or else notable in the speech on Monday night? No, and the thing is, look, he's been saying this forever. You know, I was always struck, John, as a speechwriter.

He gave a very powerful speech in 2004 after a terrorist attack in Beslan. You may remember a bunch of kids were taken hostage. The Russian security forces stormed the school where the Chechen terrorists had taken these kids hostage. Hundreds of people were killed. Horrific. He gave a speech not about that terrorist attack. He gave a speech about the collapse of the Soviet Union and what a catastrophe it was. And he talked about how this used to be a great country and now we're besieged on all sides and nobody respects our borders. And he said, we were weak and the weaker beaten. And to me, that's who Vladimir Putin is. And that's what this is all about. Is there any concern that Putin's ambitions go even beyond the former Soviet states, like into Eastern European countries that were never part of the Soviet Union? Well, I think you have to start with the former Soviet Union, right?

Which is concern enough. And so a country that you guys probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about, but Moldova. There's another little piece of Moldova that Russia de facto controls, and he could try to use that as a pretext to move into that former Soviet Republic. I have a lot of friends, and we had the prime minister of Estonia on Pod Save the World recently. The Baltic countries have Russian-speaking populations, and they've been worried for some time that even though they're members of NATO and even though we're committed to defend them, that they could be next too. And so this is another reason for, you know, why should Americans care about this? We don't have an obligation to go to war over

Ukraine, and we're not going to. Biden's made that clear. But if he feels like this is working, it could lead him to move into NATO countries like that and could bring about an actual war that involves the United States. So let's talk more about the Biden administration. What have they been trying to do about this so far? And this invasion moves forward, we're recording this on Monday night, what options do they have? So what they've been trying to do is communicate to Vladimir Putin that we see what you're doing

and that you're going to face these enormous consequences from sanctions if you do this. And he was like, cool, whatever. Exactly. Unfortunately. He's like, message delivered. I don't fucking care.

Obviously, that's what, you think I didn't think that would be happening? That's part of my, I expect that completely. You do the sanctions. That's the problem, right? He knows we're not going to go to war over Ukraine. So what do we have? We have sanctions. And we've talked about cutting off through export controls certain technologies that they need for everything from their defense sector to their tech sector to their smartphones. that they need for everything from their defense sector to their tech sector to their smartphones. They've talked about sanctioning Russian banks, essentially cutting them off from the global financial system so they cannot conduct transactions in dollars. They cannot access their own money. You've talked about really going after his inner circle. They have a lot of wealth in places like London and New York and just kind of taking that away from the oligarchs and cronies who surround Putin. One thing that's been very strange about that particular threat is it seems there's a bunch of Western leaders who are like, listen, we know exactly where all this illegal Russian

money is in New York and all over the world and all these big cities. And if you do this, then we're going to enforce the law and stop you from doing that. Why is that not policy already? Why is it already not the policy that we stop illegal Russian money from flowing into being laundered into cities in Europe and the US and around the world? If you look at London, John, it's a big part of the economy there. They're top dollar for real estate. The guy who owns the Chelsea Football Club is a Russian oligarch. They're big donors to the Conservative party, as some of my labor friends have been pointing out recently. So these are steps that would involve economic

disruption and pain for Western countries, right? And look, the reality is, you're right, he's completely ignored this. What the Biden team has been able to do by foreshadowing this invasion is to kind of line up Europe behind these sanctions and kind of have what they were going to do the day after the invasion ready before. That's what it's bought them. But clearly it's not impacting what he's thinking. The challenge they're going to face is, okay, we impose these sanctions. That's going to bring about economic disruptions for us. So market disruptions, higher energy prices, potentially Russia can disrupt supply chains because they have a lot of raw materials that feed into supply chains. It's a big country. If you look at it on the map, a lot of stuff comes out of Russia, but also cyber attacks on the

United States, cyber attacks on US businesses, more, you know, disinformation campaigns in our politics. You know, they could decide Russia to kind of escalate the types of things that they've been doing in ways that could be really disruptive to some Americans. Yeah. I was going to ask, to what extent do you think we can make these sanctions surgical in hurting Russia and not the rest of the world? Or to what extent is the Biden administration trying to figure that out? Can they? And then do we have the capabilities to stop some of these cyber attacks if we know that they're probably going to start targeting our financial sector if we target theirs?

Here's the challenge. They've kind of set a bar where the strength of the sanctions is like the test of what they're doing in response, which is understandable. But if you listen to them, they're clearly not focused on surgical sanctions. Surgical sanctions would be, for instance, going after like that group of cronies around Putin. Instead, they've talked about offsetting the pain of the sanctions. So, for instance, there may be significant disruptions to global energy markets because Russia is an enormous energy producer into Europe. So they've talked about, oh, can we get the Gulf countries, can we get countries like Qatar to produce more oil and gas that they can then provide to the Europeans? That's a strategy that is not surgical. That's a strategy that acknowledges

that we're pursuing sanctions that are going to be disruptive to the global economy. acknowledges that we're pursuing sanctions that are going to be disruptive to the global economy. We're just going to try to offset those disruptions in other ways. But that's not possible entirely, right? There's going to be a hit here to the global economy. There's going to be inflationary pressure. And they're going to be kind of hustling to try to offset that instead of making decisions to pursue a more surgical sanctions regime. And how do the Europeans feel about this who are already paying even higher energy prices than we are right now? Not great, John. If you look at the diplomacy, Macron, who's up for re-election, has been the most

adamant in trying to pursue a diplomatic solution, including trying to broker the summit between Putin and Biden. Scholz, the new German chancellor, literally the guy just stepped into office. This is the first thing he's dealing with. You know, Germany is the most dependent on Russian energy. Clearly, he didn't want this conflict. And so, you know, it's going to be a situation where Putin hopes that over time, the unity that we're all watching on display at like the Munich Security Conference, right?

Something that's never been uttered on Paz of America before that unity might fray six months, nine months, a year from now when the Russians are in Ukraine or Eastern Ukraine and the European economy and the global economy is taking this massive hit. And it's like, well, what are these sanctions really getting us?

That's the, the, the, that's the scenario Putin's counting on. Stepping back for a second, going back to the Biden administration's case, I've been struck by how much work has gone into making a case to the world that Putin's actions are nothing but unprovoked aggression, imperialism, that he's just looking for a pretext for war. Who might that have not been obvious to? What was the audience for that case?

And was it ever realistic to think that any of this would somehow deter Putin from doing what he's doing right now? I don't think so. You know, this is, you know, it's interesting. I've lived through the 2014 annexation of Crimea and initial movement of Russia and eastern Ukraine, then the 2016 election. And there were fair and I think good criticisms of like, could you guys have shared more information about what Russia was doing? And I think we could have,

but I don't think it would have made any difference. I don't think Russia would have stopped hacking the DNC just because we said that we saw- Hey, they're hacking the DNC. Yeah, exactly. He's like, yeah, I am. Yeah. He does not give a shit. And look, something you and I have talked about, like his central insight is that he doesn't care if he's caught lying or breaking the rules. He's a shameless thug. We just had one as president.

Yeah. That's what these autocrats are. He poisoned his chief opponent, right? And then threw him in prison on trumped up charges. He doesn't care that we all pointed that out, right? Yeah. trumped up charges. He doesn't care that we all pointed that out, right? And so I do think that the Biden strategy of declassifying information and essentially calling the play that Putin was running was never going to deter Putin. Again, I think what it got them was the capacity to

make clear to the rest of the world, right, that Putin's the aggressor here, that whatever he tells you about whatever pretext it was, don't listen to him because this is what he's going to do. And he's gone ahead and done it. And then use that time to try to get the Europeans on board with sanctions and strengthening NATO and the rest of it. I think what is most interesting to me about this is he's done literally exactly the things they said. It's almost like he wants us to know how little of a shit he gives about this play they've run because he could have come up with a different pretext. The Biden team said, oh, the pretext is going to be that he says there's ethnic cleansing

of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, and then he'll have to move in there and recognize these republics and move troops in. He could have been like, okay, I'll come up with a different pretext because you caught me on this pretext. The fact that he's just did what the Biden team has been saying he was going to do shows how much, it's almost like he wants us to know he doesn't care. There's an aspect of what all the officials of the Biden administration going out and basically saying, here's what we know. We think an attack is imminent. This is what we think it's going to look like. This is going to be the cause. It does make them observers of what is unfolding. And they keep referring to the need for, people want diplomacy, they want a diplomatic solution.

But like, there's not a criticism of them. It's a strange term for the kinds of talks that are going on because it's not some long simmering intractable conflict between two sides for which there's no obvious. intractable conflict between two sides for which there's no obvious end. This is a concerted effort by one side, by Putin himself, to kind of stage and launch an intervention into Ukraine because he views it as being in his own interest. What were ever the best case scenarios for any kind of diplomatic outcome here? It may be the case that there were never any hopes. I guess you could say Putin put on the table, look, I want a commitment that Ukraine will never join NATO and that NATO will pull back all these forces from Eastern Europe. And the US response was,

we won't ever do that, but we'll be transparent with you about how many troops we have in Eastern Europe and what our military exercises are. Which we already are, basically. Yeah. You could have said, let's have a big Helsinki, Yalta-style conversation in which we're willing to put on the table things like whether or not Ukraine is in NATO and test whether or not that would cause Putin to rethink his desire to invade, right? I'm not saying that would work necessarily, because I'm not sure it would. I think Putin was going to do what he's going to do. But, you know, we were having two completely separate diplomatic conversations. The Russians are talking about these really big foundational issues around NATO and Ukraine

sovereignty. We're talking about, like, you know, arms control, essentially. And so those two conversations never connected. Now that Putin has ordered troops into this region as a what he's calling a peacekeeping mission, doesn't seem like that's what it is. Yeah. Is the hope for a Putin-Biden summit or even, that's gone now, right? That's gone now. And I think the question, I'm curious what you think about this, John, to draw on our experience, right? We fell into this trap to some extent during the Arab Spring where we were narrating events that were far beyond our control. And it's tough when you're in the White House, what do you do when you can't control what

Putin's going to do? You can control what you do. So we can control sanctions and the reassurance and reinforcements we send to NATO countries and the offsetting of the consequences of sanctions. But I think they're going to face a significant challenge in the weeks and months to come about whether or not Biden is out there talking about this all the time, whether he's going to meet with European leaders all the time about something that he fundamentally can't control. You know? Yeah. I mean, I think I think once you impose sanctions, I don't know what else you can do. I mean, I don't know what else you should do publicly as a U.S. president.

Right. I mean, I don't know what else you should do publicly as a U.S. president, right? Like, obviously, the State Department, the Defense Department, everyone's going to be said, when America stands for principles and all of the things that we hold dear, it requires sometimes for us to put ourselves out there in a way that will maybe incur some cost. In this situation, that may relate to energy costs, for example. I was like, so if most Americans are not quite paying attention to this, they're going to now. Yeah. Or they're going to when energy prices go up and you know this from our time in the way it's like here's the oftentimes sad reality of u.s domestic politics when the voters start really caring about foreign policy yeah or conflicts that are growing in the world like one when it puts american lives or american livelihoods in jeopardy to when it puts American troops

in jeopardy if they're deployed. Yeah. And there's a third one, which is there's so much chaos around the world. And it seems like the U.S. government and U.S. leaders can't do anything about it. Right. Everything just seems out of control. And I do think on this one, like, you know, Biden has said we're not deploying U.S. troops no matter what. It doesn't seem like American lives directly are in any jeopardy right now. But certainly if energy costs go up as we're all dealing with inflation right now and there's risk to the global economy, that could really get some people nervous about the sanctions. yeah right depending on how tough they are and how many how and to what extent they have economic consequences that affect the u.s yeah and so i do wonder about that and again the media is covering

this right so whether joe biden wants to talk about this or not this is like all over the news now as usual the media covers conflict you know for a given amount of time before their board move on to the next story we saw that happen in in Afghanistan. Yeah. So that maybe the media will move on. But I do wonder if the whole thing then feeds into this sense that there's chaos everywhere, not just in the United States, but all around the world. And is the U.S. and is the U.S. government and is Joe Biden sort of, as Lovett was saying, a narrator of these events rather than a shaper of these events? Not saying that I don't know what Biden could do otherwise, right? Like we were talking about how this strategy may not have been effective of telling the whole world what Vladimir Putin

was doing. I still think it was good that they did it. Yeah, so it gave me the right thing to do and still not work. It was the right thing to do to make the case, absolutely. But I'm just wondering what comes of any of this. Let me take a moment to play an isolationist, but not in the kind of right-wing Tucker Carlson. He's just worried about NATO expansion mode, but just as kind of a left-wing isolationist. Who is pained by what may be about to happen to the people. Yes, who's not, obviously feels like, who doesn't want there to be war in the world, but doesn't understand what America's interest is in it. And to the point you made earlier, this is a, outside of some kind of geopolitical egotism, a dangerous and risky thing to do. There'll be incredible costs to Putin and to Russia for doing this. The Russian stock market

dropped precipitously when it looked like this was going to happen. There have been protests in Russia. There have been leading Russian intellectuals desperately arguing against this course of action, right? So that is clear to everyone. There's no scenario in which this works in anything other than a kind of political sense of it not being pushed back, not being beaten back. There's pain and cost coming to that country. We will do some form of sanctions. Why on earth would we then in the US put ourselves in a position to make gas more expensive, to make heating people's homes more expensive, to make life in America worse for the purposes of making life in Russia worse because of a conflict over a region that we weren't talking

about two months ago and we won't be talking about two months from now? Yeah. I do think, just from a practical standpoint, it seems like the energy sanctions are the ones where they are not putting their foot on the gas, to use the pun here. For this reason. For that reason. But there'll still be knock-on effects from sanctioning Russian banks and trying to tank the Russian economy.

Here's one way to think about this. Putin clearly knows our politics, right? That's part of why he did this timing, right? He knows- Why he meddled in the 2016 election. And if you look at the timing of this invasion, it's our midterm election year. He can see the inflationary pressure. He can see the polarization in the United States. He can see that the French president's up for reelection. He can see that Angela Merkel's gone and there's a new guy there.

He can see Boris Johnson under a lot of pressure at home. All these things, we look kind of like we don't have it together to really deal with this. And we had it together just so recently, and we're probably gonna have it together again so soon. Here's the thing. If this is all about Ukraine, we don't have a lot of levers to pull to determine the future of Ukraine like Putin does, right? He has an asymmetry of force here that he can bring to bear.

And so you risk getting caught in the middle where you're way out there and making demands about what should happen in Ukraine that are not going to be met. So you can either pull back and essentially acknowledge reality that there's not that much we can do, but we have to impose a cost because he's violated international law and all these principles. And if he doesn't face a cost here, he could face a cost later. I guess the way you could lean into this is America generally, we're way on our back foot. Democracy is on its back foot. The concept of freedom doesn't really even mean much anymore in the discourse because it's either been expropriated by people that use it really cynically, or as we talked about last time I was here, people on the left can kind of roll their eyes at what sounds like Cold War language.

I guess there's an argument where leaning in to the broader contrast between the kind of world that the U.S. represents and that Joe Biden wants to see contrasted with the kind of world that Vladimir Putin represents. And by the way, so do a lot of Republicans in this country represent. Right. And so you're making And so you make the argument even bigger than Putin's making it, right? Like you're not arguing about Luhansk and Donetsk or Ukraine, you're arguing about democracy and freedom versus autocracy. And yes, it sounds like a Cold War frame and it is, but that's something that Americans do know intuitively, right? And I guess the question is, does Biden have the capacity and is it even possible in this day and age to kind of make this about a core principle that we know is not going to be resolved maybe even during the Biden – almost certainly not during the Biden presidency, but that it's time for us to stand for these things again.

You know, that's – for me, like – and I'm the worldo here, like that's the kind of argument that I would want to make. I honestly don't know if that's politically viable in this day and age. No, I think that's the I think that's the challenge. I mean, as much as I just talked about the gas prices as the, you know, as a domestic political hack, I also think to myself, like the argument about the global struggle between autocracy and democracy that Biden has referenced many times in his presidency and in his campaign is not theoretical and it's not pining for some cold war history it is real it's real it's happening all around the world and it's happening here in the united states and we've seen it and the consequences could potentially be devastating not just for like what theoretical

kind of government you support right but like people's lives everywhere all over the world. You have a bunch of autocrats with nuclear weapons all over the world. It's fucking terrifying. Yeah. That's true. Now, what can we do? I mean, I guess like, what is the ideal scenario if we impose tough sanctions? That Putin stops at Ukraine, the sanctions take a toll on the Russian economy.

He says, all right, I got Ukraine. Maybe I'm going to just chill out now because my economy's hurting pretty bad and then we all move on. Yeah. Actually, this is the right question because look, here's the worst scenario and the best scenario. The worst scenario is left unchecked, this kind of brand of nationalism and autocracy, it always leads to bigger and bigger conflicts, right? It leads to World War I, it leads to World War II. Things that you couldn't imagine happening can happen in five or 10 years, right? And we can lose our democracy here or we could end up in big wars abroad, whether it's with China or Russia or both of them, right? We have to expand our imagination to these worst case scenarios. I think the best

case scenario is if we can regroup and kind of revitalize democracy globally, right? Like starting with our own team, essentially, what we used to call the free world. And we stand up and we impose these consequences on him and it weakens him at home and it exposes the kind of shallow autocrat that he is that we could be having a conversation in 10 years from now where Vladimir Putin is no longer governing Russia,

not because we inflicted regime change, but because the Russian people got rid of this guy. And suddenly the pendulum is swinging back against this autocracy nationalism. And I guess the argument you could mount is that we have to take the stand here, even if it is difficult, even if it is politically disadvantageous, because like we if we don't, the pendulum will never swing back. Because like we if we don't, that pendulum will never swing back. There's one more point I want to talk about here, which is about domestic political politics. There's a notable split within the Republican Party over Russia right now. Most Republican members of Congress have attacked Biden's Ukraine policy is too weak on Russia, which is something you expect from Republicans.

But their bosses in the right wing media, most notably Tucker Carlson, have attacked Biden for being too tough on Russia and too friendly towards Ukraine. This is a position shared by some of the more extremist Republican candidates like Eric Greitens in Missouri, J.D. Vance in Ohio, and some of the most Trumpy members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley, whose Tucker Carlson interviews have been used as propaganda on Russian state TV. What do you guys make of this split? And how do you see it shaping the politics of how the Biden administration handles this conflict? Look, we've talked about this before. The Republican Party is now traditional cons, neocons, and fasc cons. The fasc cons are very pro-Putin for a lot of the reasons Ben outlined,

this kind of leader of an ethno-nationalism, of an authoritarianism. I think the more traditional and even neoconservative Republicans see this as a way to attack Biden for being weak, tying it into Afghanistan. It doesn't really matter which one prevails because ultimately this will be something, if we are talking about this in the months to come, it will be because there are knock on facts, the United States, at which point, whatever rationale they choose, Biden's failures in foreign policy led to X, Y and Z is all that will ultimately matter. One of the things that they did back in 2014, 15 is that they simultaneously the Republicans attacked Obama for being weak, for not stopping what Putin did in Crimea. And never mind that I don't think any of the Republicans had ever really heard of the Crimean Peninsula before.

While also kind of expressing admiration for Putin, like he's a stronger leader than Obama and blah, blah, blah. And so they tried to have it both ways like that. But what that kind of tells on themselves for is that the admiration that they have for Putin and even the criticism they're making Obama was not values-based. It was what they admired was someone who broke the rules. Someone who was comfortable using that power in that way. Somebody who was cynical enough to not give a shit if he was criticized. And the same way that Republicans don't want to ever look at

America's excesses because they think that's the point. They think America should be able to commit excesses in its foreign policy. And so again, I think to make the discussion bigger, to me, it exposes that the coalition of people who actually care about democratic values, liberal values, is a much smaller subset of the American political spectrum than it was most of our lives. It's basically some Democrats and, you know, maybe some of the, you know, the never-Trumper types, I guess. But like, you know, the Republicans who are criticizing him for being weak, some of them are doing that from a position that is very Putin-lite. You know, it's basically like he's weak because he's not acting like Putin.

He's not violating norms. He's not, you know, ignoring, he's not lying with abandon. He's not doing what Trump does, you know? Yeah. No, I do think, and love it to your point, no matter which side you're on, there's an easy way to,

you don't have to be consistent in your criticism of Joe Biden we've seen. Yeah. Like we saw this in Afghanistan. There were a bunch of Republicans. We're abandoning our Afghan allies. We were abandoning our Afghan allies, even though there were a bunch of Republicans, including the last president,

who wanted to get out of there. And didn't want to let any Afghan allies in the country. And you know how they handled all these inconsistencies and hypocrisies? They didn't. They just papered over them and said, this is a disaster and it's your fault because you were in charge. And there really is like a... The way they're doing it, right? Especially like the Tucker

Carlson's word. They're not just saying this is not in America's interest. They are fully absorbing Russian propaganda and talking points to make their argument. There's no there's no like tradition. There's there's very little anyway, like American interest style isolationism. What is happening in Ukraine does not directly affect the United States. It is not in our interest. The best way we can serve democracy, the best way we can serve the United States is by making sure America's economy is strong, making sure we are demonstrating what democracy can do, as opposed to needing to defend it by spending and incurring these big costs. J.D. Vance got closest to that, which I thought

was interesting because he basically know, he basically said to some interviewer, I got to be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other. I do care about the fact that in my community right now,

the leading cause of death among 18 to 45 year olds is Mexican fentanyl that's coming from the southern border. Lovely. I'm sick of Joe Biden focusing on the border

of a country I don't care about while he lets the border of his own country become a total war zone. That's one where you, like, if the Republican Party had like that consistent message it would be of course gross for a number of reasons including the the mexican fentanyl stuff but you could see that being potentially more effective politically yeah i think what's one

of the things that's kind of awkward about this whole thing is that you, when did it become a test of America's leadership in the world that Ukraine be in NATO? Like as recently, you know, at the end of the Cold War, I don't think anyone would have thought that that would happen. You know, the Berlin Wall fell and we thought that was great. And that was the end of the story. And we kind of raised the bar on ourselves. And a lot has happened in the Bush years that we could just kind of control everything in the world. And we set like tests for ourselves that we were never going to meet, right? The flip side of it is that doesn't justify Putin invading a country and killing a lot of people, right? And this is, I think, what makes it so difficult for like, I think an ordinary person at home watching this being like, on the one hand, I don't know why we're supposed to, you know, be spending all this time making sure that Ukraine can someday join NATO.

But on the other hand, I don't like to live in a world where, like, a sovereign country of almost 50 million people can just be invaded by another country. And that's the tension. And even more direct, like, that autocracy can reign all over the world and potentially in my country. I want to be able to select my own leaders. I want to be able to say what I want. I like the freedoms that we enjoy in the United States. So I'm hoping that doesn't happen here. I mean, that's sort of the best case for that.

And I think there's a sort of, it's also, I think, part of this dynamic that goes mostly unsaid, which is why do all these countries prefer to join NATO, prefer to join NATO? The US is by no means a perfect country. We've done terrible things. We've made terrible decisions. We have inflicted our will and control on other countries. But there is a reason that these countries wanted to be part of NATO versus want to be part of Russia's sphere of influence and feel threatened by Russian aggression. That is an old reality that is also underlying all of this. There is a reason that NATO expansion was seen as a safeguard for a lot of these countries. Yeah. You can understand why too, because these Baltic countries are like, we're here today because we were able to join NATO and they're not necessarily wrong about that. I think though that we have to kind of look inward, right? One thing that I think progressives can bring to this discussion is,

on the one hand, the United States says it wants Ukraine to be able to make choices about its future. On the other hand, we're so wedded to our brand of unregulated capitalism that we want cheap Russian energy. We want Russians to pay top dollar for those luxury apartments in Manhattan. We don't want to do the difficult work of cutting off all this dirty money that flows to our economies. And part of getting democracy in order is saying, hey, we do care about that. We're not going to let these guys, this kleptocracy that we enable. We built the

financial system that facilitates Vladimir Putin's having a $600 billion rainy day fund, because he does. He's put that much money away to weather sanctions. It's time to stop that. And those are steps that I think are necessary to deal with our own excesses, but also ultimately make it a lot harder for the Putins of the world to run these corrupt kleptocracies that facilitate things like invasions of Ukraine. Great segue into our next segment, which is going to be about Donald Trump. We have Leah Lippman from Strict Scrutiny, who will be talking to us after the break. All right.

We spent some time today on autocrats abroad, but of course we have our own to deal with here at home. Donald Trump. It's just a segue I've been working on. Don't worry about it. Donald Trump is dealing with some new legal troubles that even he may not be able to escape. Last week, his longtime accountants quit, saying they could no longer stand behind the last 10 years of the former president's financial statements. A judge ruled that Donald Trump, Don Jr., and Ivanka must sit for depositions in New York's civil suit against the Trump organization. And a different judge ruled that the civil lawsuits brought against Trump by 11 members of Congress and two Capitol Police officers for his role in the January 6th attacks are allowed to go forward. for his role in the January 6th attacks, are allowed to go forward.

Joining us to help break all this down is Leah Lippman, a University of Michigan law professor and co-host of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, which is joining the Crooked Media family. We're very excited about it. Go listen and subscribe today. Leah, welcome back to the pod. Thanks so much for having me. So is this it? Are we finally going to get him? I think we should never underestimate the ability for a corrupt white male autocrat to evade legal responsibility. And in some ways it is shocking that we are still seeing efforts to hold Trump accountable for his various misdeeds. So I'm not holding my breath.

I think that's a good rule of thumb, though. There are certainly a lot of irons in the fire this time. What was your reaction to that letter from Mazars? I think that's a good rule of thumb, although there are certainly a lot of irons in the fire his children. Trump said that Mazar's letter indicating that people could no longer rely on the misstatements was actually proof that the New York AG's lawsuit against the Trump organization was totally moot because Mazar said they followed standard accounting practices. And so nothing to see here. And the judge who said these depositions could go forward was like, this is Orwellian. This is alternative facts. You can't say Mazar is basically hanging you out to dry, you know, exonerated you.

Well, just in case people don't understand, like, what do you think caused them to not only sever ties with Trump, but to release that statement? What were they trying to do there? It's difficult to know, you know, what exactly motivated them. But they said they did so in part because of filings by the New York AG office. liability if they continue to kind of prop up his financial misstatements, given all of the evidence that the New York attorney general seems to have about, you know, financial misdealings. There's a little of these, they're shocked to find gambling in this casino going on from these accountants, like Trump's books, like, come on, like he's been a serial

exaggerator for a very long time. They were complicit in that. So it's a little bit of covering their own asses, especially when Trump just before, I think a week or two before this came out, he said something really noticeable that we actually talked about on Posse of America at the time because it was strange and it stood out when he was defending himself against these civil charges. He said, we relied on major law firms, accounting firms and other professionals to do this work. And to the best of my knowledge, they did it well. And there was a strange aspect of him throwing that into a fucking stump speech that felt

to me a little bit like one of the things they were talking to, what he was talking to his lawyers about is, I worked with licensed professionals, my lawyers, my accountants. I did as I was told. They were supposed to be following the rules there. They have certain fiduciary obligations, and that's going to be the end of that. And I imagine that it's a very terrifying prospect for an accounting firm that has been Donald Trump's proof point for the for the better part of a decade. Yeah, they might have seen that he was about to throw them under the bus,

along with, you know, anyone else who has ever worked for him in his life. And they were like, we're going to throw him under the bus first. I took the statement just mean like they were. Yeah, they were presented with evidence by the New York attorney general. And they were just like, hey, to the best of our knowledge, we did everything on the up and up. But I would not take anything that he says seriously anymore. This is what's so silly about that.

Trump claimed, for example, that his apartment in New York was worth $300 million. That is something that they asserted. His own representative is now correcting that to say, maybe we overstated it by $200 million or so. There are a lot of people that were involved in purveying the lies of Donald Trump. And it is good that the people that were directly involved are turning on him, even if they're claiming it is because, oh, they've just discovered all these discrepancies. I'm still waiting for Sean Spicer to correct his statement about the crowd size, and I will keep waiting. One of these days. So Trump's lawyers have suggested that they plan to advise him to exercise his Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination

during his deposition. If he and his family do that, like, can the prosecutors, to what extent does this change the prosecutor's strategy in these depositions? Like, can they still get a bunch of useful information or what happens then? They're not going to get a bunch of useful information from the Trumps. I mean, Eric Trump has already been deposed. I think the judge in the New York case joked that he had asserted his right not to incriminate himself something like 500 times. So I don't think anyone really expects them to answer any questions in the civil lawsuit. You know, it could be that the AG and the investigators find information another way. But it still is worth it to try to question them because, I mean, these people are not the brightest crayons in the box. Like,

who knows whether they will have some impulse to start spouting off the sort of lies and garbage that they often do. And so it's probably still worth trying to depose them, even if you think they are going to, you know, assert their right not to incriminate themselves for the most part. And pleading the fifth isn't supposed to have any consequences for you in a criminal trial, but it can have consequences in a civil lawsuit, right? Yeah. So one of the arguments that Trump made as to why the AG can't depose him is he was concerned there was a risk that because he is facing both criminal charges and civil charges in the state of New York, that the state of New York would try to use the information uncovered

in the civil investigation in the criminal case against him. Now, those are technically being handled by two different offices. And there are limits on the extent to which you can introduce any evidence uncovered during a civil investigation in a criminal proceeding. And in particular, if Trump says, you know, I am asserting my right not to testify, that can't be used in his criminal trial. Although, again, there are some exceptions and it's hard to know whether those exceptions might be implicated before, you know, the case actually unfolds. One of the things that I also feel people have this idea that like Trump being deposed

is Trump at the rally, that version of Trump being deposed. But I think people sometimes actually have even internalized to them, even as much as they don't recognize it, they've internalized the belief that that performance is really Donald Trump. When if you go back and look at like, do you remember when he was deposed around the inauguration of 2017 because Jose Andres pulled out of that restaurant and it led to a deposition? I remember at the time being stunned by just how careful he can be, how rigorous he can be, how thoughtful about what his lawyers have told him to say and not say during a deposition. It is a completely different person. I actually recommend people go and look at that deposition because you forget yourself just how much what we are seeing as a character and how singularly aware he is of some of the threats that he faces when he's actually under oath. Yeah. I mean, if there's

one thing he cares about, it's his money. And he's not going to jeopardize that by running off his mouth during a deposition, you know, in the civil case. Yeah. He's playing live ammo there. Yeah. So based on the public information that's come to light about New York's civil lawsuit against Trump, how strong of a case do you think the attorney general has here? I think the attorney general probably has a very strong case against the organization for fraud. And part of why I think that is this is an office that has obtained successful settlements against the Trump Foundation, against Trump University. I mean, basically every Trump organization has engaged in some form of

financial fraud. So why is this one going to be any different? The evidence certainly doesn't look any different. So based on that kind of pattern, as well as, you know, the accounting firm abandoning him and other statements by the attorney general, my guess is there's financial fraud going on at the organization. And it's only a matter of time before we know some additional details about its scope. On the January 6th lawsuit, how big of a deal is the ruling that these civil claims are allowed to go forward? It's a big deal because it allows the plaintiffs to get to the next stage in the litigation. And what happens after this initial stage, which is just saying you laid out like a plausible ground for your case to proceed, is the plaintiffs are entitled to what's called discovery, where they basically get to collect evidence from the other side. in the lawsuit. So they have the chance to basically ask for any communications between Donald Trump and some of the other defendants or people who were involved in inciting the riot at

the Capitol. And so they have the chance to basically collect evidence that could really tell us some more additional details about what happened on January 6th. Were you surprised at all by how explicit the ruling was and just sort of laying out what a potential, laying out the reasons for letting this go through, that it was such an explicit kind of description of what these crimes look like to this judge? On the one hand, I've seen analysts say, oh, this is just a step that allows this case to go forward. On the other hand, it was like a pretty extraordinary document, wasn't it? It was an extraordinary document. But I think the opinion itself kind of described why it was discussing all of this in

such great detail. That is, it understood how significant it was to basically say, you can sue the former president for inciting a riot that was designed to basically prevent federal officials from performing their duties. I mean, the former president was sued under a law that is known as the KKK Act, a law that was passed during Reconstruction in order to prevent basically Ku Klux Klan style mob violence that was intimidating federal officials from doing their jobs. And so the judge in saying this lawsuit could proceed, you know, at least against the former president for some claims, basically said, like, I understand this is a big deal, but what happened on January

6th was unprecedented. And so I'm going to lay out, you know, everything that led me to this conclusion. Based on that law, how difficult do you think it will be to prove that Trump was liable for January 6th? It's difficult to know how difficult it might be because there just aren't that many cases that rely on the KKK Act and say, here's what it takes to establish a civil conspiracy to intimidate or threaten federal officials from doing their jobs. So it's a little bit difficult to compare, you know, this set of facts to other sets of facts that have led to liability or sets of facts that have not. I think the facts that the judge laid out in the complaint are quite compelling. You know, as Judge Mehta, who was the district judge that said this lawsuit could proceed, said in the opinion, you know, all of the allegations and the communications between the former president and the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys have kind of a call and response style to them where the president would say something, they would say something in response, basically indicating they were in communication and coordination with what

is happening. And that is the very essence of a civil conspiracy. Like it's kind of rare that you would have the different defendants communicating over social media and publicly as the conspiracy is unfolding. So in some level, the evidence here is quite strong because they're doing it all out in the open. One thing that was interesting about, which I think actually relates to some of these questions about whether Trump himself will face legal jeopardy. It was interesting the way the judge took at face value that these were acts of incitement, even when there was some bit of deniability, right? Even when they were a little bit oblique. Were you surprised by that?

No. So I think Judge Mehta specifically noted in one statement that Trump made at the rally, he said something about like patriotically and peacefully going to the Capitol. And the judge basically said, look, if you read that statement or you heard that statement against a backdrop of months of stop the steal rallies, of months of the president asking people to take back their country, asking people to fight for their country, to take back their country, asking people to fight for their country, telling them to go to the Capitol. It's clear what he meant. You know, Judge Mehta is actually a former public defender. So he has a bunch of experience in criminal cases and he knows how to read, you know, a whole set of communications between people engaged in unlawful activities. So I think he kind of cut through the BS and sought for what it was.

Last question. Trump's also facing legal trouble in Georgia, where a judge granted the Fulton County District Attorney's request for a special grand jury to investigate Trump's attempts to overturn the election in that state. What's the significance of the grand jury and what's your overall take on that case? So the grand jury is going to be investigating whether Trump's request for Secretary of State Raffensperger to find those extra 11,000 votes, you know, violated Georgia law. It's significant because, you know, it is another indication that the president has done yet something else that exposes him to potential criminal liability. But in some ways, what is more significant to me is the former president's reaction to that announcement. So

after it became public that the DA was convening this grand jury, the president held a rally and he accused the prosecutors of all being racist and vicious, horrible people, and told his supporters that they should form the greatest protest we've ever seen if the prosecutors do something wrong or illegal. And in some ways, he's doing the same thing that he did in the lead up to January 6th, and he's doing it against these other prosecutors to such a point that the DA actually asked the local FBI office to conduct a security assessment of all of the various state buildings and state officers and see whether they were at risk of violence for doing their jobs. And that, to me, is in some ways the most troubling thing, that he's not stopping what he did

that caused January 6th. And so in some ways, his response to the impaneling of the grand jury is the most concerning thing to me. Leah Lipman, thank you so much for joining us. Everyone, go listen to Strict Scrutiny. Subscribe. It's a fantastic podcast. We're excited for you guys to be joining Cricket.

We're very excited. Thanks to Leah Lippman. Thanks to Ben Rhodes for a wonderful President's Day episode. Happy President's Day, however you celebrate. You're listening to this on Tuesday or later now. I hope you had a great President's Day. We did this on President's Day, so it's in our head. Hope you had a nice time.

We'll talk to you on Thursday. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Andy Gardner Bernstein. Our producer is Haley Muse, and Olivia Martinez is our associate producer. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somanator, Sandy Gerrard, Hallie Kiefer, Madison Hallman, and Justine Howe for production support.

And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montooth. Our episodes are uploaded as videos at youtube.com slash crookedmedia.