Pod Save the World - 21-year-old Pentagon leaker exposed

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

Tommy and Ben talk about the latest news about the Pentagon leaks and leaker, and what it tells us about the effectiveness of the security clearance process. Then Ben and Tommy discuss Chinese agents harassing dissidents in the US, the war in Sudan, extrajudicial violence in India on live television, Lula’s message about the rise of far-right extremists, Trump’s interview on Tucker Carlson, and a shakeup in the South Korean government stemming from K-pop and Lady Gaga. Then Tommy interviews Washington Post reporter Shane Harris about his reporting on the leaked documents and what it could mean for national security going forward. 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 back to Pots Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Dan Rhodes. Ben, so I just don't want to sugarcoat it. It's been a tough week for us. It's been a tough week for the audience. In case you haven't heard, failed former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race. How are you holding up? I mean, I just think of all the content that we're going to be denied in the coming months. I think of the several people across this country who are devastated.

Tens of people, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think of those illustrious Madison dinners at the State Department where he was using taxpayer resources to build the donor base and all that effort just to come to this moment of complete and utter failure and humiliation. And that, you know, anticipating the kind of pathetic groveling that, to do to get back into Trump's favor. It's, you know, it's a sad day all around. That's a really good point. We should do an over-underbed on that of how many days it takes him to pop up in Mara Lago

for some ass kissing. Yeah, yeah. I give it, you know, we'll be hearing like probably stories about Mike Pompeo helping with debate prep before too long. Just a great, illustrious, sycophantic career cut down in the prime of life, you know. Yeah, it's really sad stories. Speaking of content denied, Ben, the Dominion Fox News lawsuit was just settled for a whopping $787 million. That means I don't think we'll get any sort of public apology from Rupert Murdoch or Fox hosts who lied on air about the 2020 election or Benghazi or Acorn or like how many, how back

do you want to go in the grievance file? But pour one out again for those of us who wanted to see that happen. Yeah, I mean, it's a good, like it's a good day for vengeance here. I do have to say, you know, seeing them pay this amount of money and kind of teepidly admit that they had been lying, not nearly as full-throatively an apology as we'd want. It does make me think that God bless the lawyers for Dominion. But, I mean, this is hardly. the first lie they've told. And as someone who's been on the receiving end of those lies, as I know you have too, you know, it does make you think that this settlement is not just for that. It's for just the avalanche of bullshit that is emanated from Fox News for the last decade or two. You know, I remember,

you know, you have Lizette now keeping you awake at night. I do remember when my wife was pregnant with our first child, a Fox News camera crew camping out on the stoop of our apartment building on 21st Street in D.C. to scream at me as I went to get my dry cleaning about Benghazi. Oh, good. Yeah. I mean, just that these people are horrible, horrible people, you know, and they knowingly lie every night about all manner of things. They just happened to, you know, have in Dominion people that were able to apply resources to hold them into account. But I just think we need to recall, whether it's the rich family, Seth Riches family that they besmirched, whether it's insanity like

Benghazi or whether it's the election. This is not like a bug in the Fox model. This is a feature. And it'll be interesting to see whether they continue to lie with impunity. They probably will. Start up decades of racial grievance. Well, we got some great content for all you, all you out there today. We're going to talk about all the latest news about the national security leaker. The FBI arrested two Chinese agents accused of harassing democracy advocates in the United States. A war broke out in Sudan. State sanctioned extrajudicial violence in India. Brazilian President Lula de Silva's message to progressives. Trump talks foreign policy on Fox. Lindsay Graham now loves the Saudis. Some updates from France and Ireland. Former Defense Secretary Bob Gates just

decided to trigger Ben in the Washington Post. And then K-pop appears to have caused a rift between the U.S. and Korea, Ben. And then I talk with Shane Harris from the Washington Post. He is just a really good guy, a really great national security reporter who has been part of the team reporting on the Pentagon League. And it was super interesting to hear from him about their reporting process, how they're deciding which of these documents are newsworthy, how many documents there might be out there. He's heard rumors of up to a thousand documents. The number that's been reported has been 300. So stick around for that.

I mean, it's just cool to hear, you know, it's funny, Ben. working with these guys when you're in government can be, there can be a lot of friction there, but sort of hearing, admiring them and their abilities in the process from afar is very cool. Yeah. No, I really look forward to that because the scale of this thing, it's one of these things that takes a while to absorb the scale of it. And he's among the very smartest people that's been sifting through it. So that's great. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so there's been a ton of news about these leaked documents, the Pentagon documents, as we last recorded. We now know that the person who leaked them to a random Discord server is a 21-year-old member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard named

Jack Tashara. DeShera was arrested last week in charge with two counts of unauthorized handling of classified materials, and he could get up to 15 years in prison. DeSherra was an IT specialist, and it seems like he was able to use the special permissions that come with that job to gain access to these documents. Basically, he could hop on something called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communication System or the J. Wick system. Ben and I both use that in government for top secret files.

And you can kind of scroll through what are basically internal intelligence community websites, intranet websites filled with intel reports. That kind of helps answer the question of how this low-level Air National Guard member could have access to all these documents. But still, I mean, nearly 10 years after Edward Snowden used his job as an IT guy at the NSA to get similarly sensitive documents, it's so shocking to me that they haven't figured out a system to monitor or prevent this. So, Ben, I know, you know, DOJ in the Pentagon are reportedly looking into whether Tashira had any other foreign ties or motivations to leak this information. But if this kid was really just kind of showing off for friends, usually teenage friends and shit posting for his buddies on Discord, it really raises some big questions about the efficacy of the background check and vetting process and how on earth you screen for this kind of scenario. I mean, nothing you and I were asked kind of would touch on anything he did.

Yeah. And look, I want to say I was wrong about something last week. You know, because I had thought, you know, when people were talking about curtailing the need to know, and, you know, I had made the point last week that a lot of people need to know a lot of information. And what I had in mind is kind of the hundreds of people who work around the joint staff, you know. Yeah, me too. Me too. Senior military officers and their staff basically. in the Pentagon. And I am flabbergasted that a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman had this access,

whether or not he was an IT guy. That's a problem. That's insane. That shouldn't happen. And look, you made the point last week that is the right one, which is how many times, if the U.S. government actually wants to protect these secrets, how many times do there need to be leaks? They always act like this is the big leak that will cause them to fix things. And yet, you know, they have to just assume that in today's information environment, this is going to continue to happen. And therefore, they either need to restrict access on certain things or they just need a presumption that these documents are not quite as secret as they think they are. You know, that's the first thing. The second thing is, I'm really glad you made this point about the

background checks because part of what's so offensive is the background checks were designed in the kind of Cold War, right? They're so antiquated. It's like, are you gay? I'm sorry, that means I'm going to Lee classified information? Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah. Even the therapy? What? That's right. Like, so, you know, I've written about this. Like, I was denied my interim security clearance in, uh, I learned, I don't know if I

ever told this story at the time. It was like the day before election night in Grand Park is when I heard. I think I've told this. Oh my God. Yeah, yeah. But they, they, on the basis of drug use, on the basis of marijuana use. God bless her soul again, Cassandra butts, uh, the, you know, deceased tragically. a former Obama friend, ambassador nominee, an official.

She said, like, don't worry, I'm going to work on this. And I had my clearance by inauguration after exhaustive, you know, interviewing people, making sure I wasn't some, you know, drug deal or something. But I'm one of the rare people. There are people that are denied jobs in the federal government because they used marijuana. Including the Biden administration. Exactly. And I pick marijuana not just because it impacted me personally,

but because it's illustrative of how absurd this is, that like a, you know, a 40-year-old who is legally used marijuana in states where it's legal could still be denied a security clearance, but a 21-year-old can somehow be able to access this. The whole notion of who we look at and what we look for in hiring people is clearly antiquated, needs to be completely overhauled and be thought. We're looking for the wrong things here in terms of like red flags around, certain people. And then the other thing I'd say that kind of connects the two is, you know, and again, flirting with like the deep stay point, there is something to the idea that in some of these agencies, in this case the military, in some cases it's intelligence agencies, they have

pretty broad definitions of what their people can see. Like in the White House, this kind of material would have been really restricted, you know? I know. It's crazy. And so it's kind of interesting to me that like political appointees who are in charge of kind of like running agencies are kind of scrupulously in a need to know principle. But I guess in the military, if you're a 21-year-old IT guy, once you impress your gamer friends on Discord channel, like you can get the crown jewels of the military's intelligence. So this does need to be looked at. That's a really good point because it matters in a couple ways. I mean, if you're in the intelligence community proper, like in the CIA or in the NSA, I think you have access to way more stuff than any sort of political

pointee is because we're viewed as kind of transient and they're permanent. But the place that where this really, I think, manifests as a problem is the people who are in charge of declassification of a lot of U.S. secrets kind of are like, no, this is my turf. You know, they sit on their block and they refuse to declassified things that obviously should be declassified. And they create this massive backlog, which will never, ever get through. And we'll have, you know, historians and archivists just having zero window into national security thinking because it's almost impossible to get declassified the information they need. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, that lack of declassification is sometimes like the motivation for some of these people,

whether they're whistleblowers or leakers or people impressing other people like this. There needs to be, I mean, most of the information that the government classifies should not be classified. You know, I mean, like they just stamp stuff on it, you know, from confidential to secret to top secret to compartmented top secret information. And the vast majority of that information really doesn't need to be classified. And we're producing. I mean, the other thing we're missing is with the information.

revolution and the collection of intelligence growing with technology, I mean, I don't have the numbers because they're classified. But like, we are probably classifying as many documents in a year now as the entire length of the Cold War or something when people were like writing this stuff up. So whole system needs an overhaul. The only other thing I add that's interesting here to explore, you know, kind of put a pin in it is the whole like sub-community of gamers and, you know, some of these were like fans of like a Filipino YouTuber that subculture has kind of produced

some interesting conspiracy theories leakers Russian propaganda Steve Bannon acolytes like no offense to there's some wonderful gamers out there but like there's a young male issue like in terms of like

where these subcultures are leading to kind of strange and dark places that is kind of staring us in the face and yes This is not the last time we're going to hear. Yeah, over and over again. This is not the last time we're going to hear of like a troubled young man seeking to impress his friends doing something pretty damaging.

Yeah. So here are a few new things that have been reported about it. It was in these documents themselves since we last talk. There was a report on how the United States has spied on the UN Secretary General. Those detail some of his complaints about travel concern. He was too willing to accommodate Russian interests. Ben, I'm pretty sure. That surprised no one, mostly the Secretary General himself.

The defense intelligence agency doesn't anticipate that the war in Ukraine will end in 2023. I would argue, again, no surprise there if you've been reading the newspaper. There was an interesting analysis of Russian propaganda that found Russian operators, or I think they collected on Russian troll operators, a bot account operators, saying they're only detected by social media networks 1% of the time. Now, that could be an exaggeration, but it does suggest that Russia is getting better at information operations while companies like that. like Twitter are getting worse at detecting it. Who knows for those who are tied?

There's a document from mid-February that had more insight into the Chinese spy balloon. I guess the U.S. is aware of four such balloons, and we name them after notorious criminals, like one is named after Whitey Bulger, which is just, that's fun. It's a fun anecdote. And then one document said Taiwan is unlikely to be able to handle China's military air superiority if they got into a war. I don't know. That didn't surprise me.

I'm not sure about you. one talks about Russia going after the Starlink satellite network in Ukraine. So, Ben, lots of interesting details in specifics in these reports. But like, I don't know, the Russia-Ukraine stuff, it sort of tracked with what I already thought. Anything like jump out at you or that you found surprising or notable in this latest tranche? I mean, substantively no. Like, part of what's so interesting is, again, just as there's more intelligence collection, like we know more about what's happening around the world than we have in the past. Like there's this real-time reporting. There's people uploading social media from all over, you know, conflict zones like Ukraine.

Commercial satellite imagery. Commercial satellite. Exactly. So like, again, if you've been following events closely, I mean, and I used to think this, by the way, you know, what's, what's interesting as an intelligence consumer, when I would get the PDB, and I used to talk about this with, with other people, like towards the end of the administration, like the headline issues, right? So for us at the time, the headline issues might have been Ukraine or Syria or what have you. Usually, like, the Intel wasn't giving you that much greater an understanding as like a very careful reader of like the, you know, the New York Times and the economists would have. Where you did get stuff is on the issues that people weren't following that closely, you know, like the political developments

in X country or this trend that we're seeing in Y region. So weirdly, the higher profile of the issue the less revelatory U.S. intelligences because there's so much attention on it. And for the war in Ukraine, which has been the feature of this, I literally have not read anything that is surprising. And it's about like the war is something of a stalemate. The Ukrainians have greater problems and they talk about publicly. The Russians have greater problems than they talk about publicly. But like we've all kind of known that. I think it's an interesting window into what the priorities of the U.S. government are. Like I don't, when I was there, again, not revealing what I was consuming.

Like, let's just say, I'm glad that we're tracking what, like, the Russians think about how many of their social media profiles are caught because that's not the kind of information that, you know, the U.S. government would have been tracking a few years ago. And so what this does is it reveals the overwhelming focus on Ukraine and Russia and China as is U.S. intelligence priorities relative to the other documents that have come out. And the other documents are more revelatory. So, for instance, the one that we talked about last week, the Egypt one. Yeah.

You see the follow up on that? I did, right? So there's this huge revelation of, like, the Egyptians are going to sell rockets to the Russians. That's a huge issue. Well, then what comes out, not surprisingly, is the U.S. got this intelligence and then leaned on the Egyptians to not do that. Now, okay, I'm glad we did that, but we shouldn't be arming them in the first place if that's something they wanted to do, you know?

Yeah. So that jumped out. But across the board, I think this is kind of. I haven't seen anything that kind of knocked my socks off. You know, I don't know. Yeah. I would say that Egypt story. That was really interesting that we managed to completely flip them and convince Egypt,

not just to not sell these rockets to Russia, but in fact to sell ammunition to the U.S. to then transfer to Ukraine. So look, credit Joe Biden. Big diplomatic win there. Shout out to, you know, Jake Sullivan, that team. A great, you know, use of intelligence by the intelligence community. But I agree. It's pretty damning.

the Egyptian government would have done this if we hadn't busted them. It's worth noting, Ben, that there, you know, I think you and I kind of both sort of thought that somebody left like General Millie's briefing book around. If this was some kid trolling around Jaywicks, it does suggest that there is far more sensitive, more closely held stuff that's going to just the top officials, the president, et cetera. So, you know, there might be even more intelligence out there that's even better that, you know, isn't in these reports. No, that's right. And again, I think that the stuff that is, it's interesting, given how much of the volume has focused on Ukraine and to some extent China, because those are the biggest priorities of the U.S.

Intelligence community, to me, the biggest stories we've seen thus far are the ones about South Korea that we talked about last week, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, right, the Emirates. Again, like the stuff that is usually not front burner is where intelligence is more revelatory just because we're not, you know, people generally are not tracking it as closely as the US intelligence community is. And, and yeah, I think there are probably some other shoes to drop. It is interesting to think about, you know, there was a story that the Ukrainians aren't necessarily upset by the extent to which this intelligence has revealed some of their problems. I think that the imperative communications-wise for both the Ukrainian government and to some

extent the U.S. is to buck up the Ukrainians, you know, and to emphasize the problem. are making and emphasize, you know, Russia's losses and not Ukraine's. However, the problem with that is it's raised expectations that the Ukrainians are on the verge of like overrunning the Russians and winning the war this year. Definitely. And it's kind of useful to have like a baseline assessment out there that's like, actually, no, this thing is much tougher slog. The Ukrainians have suffered grave losses, again, not to diminish the Ukrainian like legitimacy at all, but rather to just, you know, set expectations. You know, I think weirdly this leak is going to improve the discourse around what can be expected in the near term in terms of Ukrainian in advances. So sometimes the

publication, this shouldn't have happened the way he did, but like sometimes kind of these more candid assessments are useful because the administration itself can't go out and say, actually, you know, the Ukrainians have had some real losses that we have to take into account here. The U.S. accidentally sent an AOLIM to the Ukrainians that they meant to send to their friend about the Ukrainians shit-talking them and now they've got to work it out. In more espionage news, Ben, so the FBI arrested two alleged Chinese agents and charged dozens more who are not in the U.S., who are based in China, for trying to harass and silence Chinese dissidents in the U.S.

So there's a CNN report on this that said these, the two men who were actually in New York were charged with operating what was called an undeclared police station in New York City. This facility, you know, they claimed the facility was to help Chinese nationals do like paperwork and stuff like that. But actually it was a hub for these harassment campaigns and include breaking into the cars of pro-democracy activists, for example. So the charges against the guys in China mostly revolve around online propaganda and harassment they will probably never set foot in the U.S. or a courtroom.

And there's another case where an executive at Zoom was charged with conspiring with Chinese agents to disrupt video calls about Tiananmen Square, the Tiananmen Square massacre. So, then, stepping back, like last year, there was an organization in Spain called Safeguard Defenders, and they published a report that said China had set up more than 100 of these so-called foreign police stations to track and harass dissidents abroad.

Were you surprised that there was one of these stations sitting in New York City and how aggressive the Chinese have been in the U.S. itself? Not particularly. I mean, we've seen a lot of reporting on the Chinese doing this in other countries. There have been some like press reporting about like I'm in New York now, right? There's a large Chinese diaspora in like Queens, right? And there have been reports in the past of like Chinese affiliate either government or government affiliate to people, you know, intimidating people. I think what it does show is I don't think that would have happened a decade ago. And just as Russia has gotten much, much more aggressive in the things that they do in third countries,

this does demonstrate that China sees itself in a new era where they can flex a little bit more outside their own borders, including in the United States. And that's just an issue that we're going to have to track because the free speech and the free assembly that we have in this country, like, that's something we can't compromise at all. This isn't just spying on us. This is, like, infringing upon the right of people in this country to say what they think. I do think, you know, Trump focused on, like, the Chinese foreign students, which I think

was the wrong way to focus. What you should focus on is, like, where is the government actually reaching in here? And not like Stephen Miller's fever dream of kicking out all Chinese students, like the enormous majority of whom are just here to get an education. But rather, you know, yeah, trying to devote a lot of counterintelligence resources to disrupting their ability to do this in the U.S. and then really like blowing the whistle on it because publicizing this aggressively is one way of like, hey, you guys thought you were going to stifle a zoom on Tiananmen Square?

Well, we're going to talk a lot about what are you so afraid of that you don't even want people to zoom about Tiananmen Square. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I think we had cracked down hard on this. I mean, you heard some, you know, Max Fisher was telling me he did some reporting on harassment in the U.S. and how they would often get calls from sort of an unknown Chinese number of being like, hey, I'm sitting here with your aunt. And she says you better shut up or it's

going to end really badly for her. Like that is some scary dark stuff that I think the U.S. government should push back on. Yeah, people are interested in that too. Like the Human Rights Watch has done some great reporting on this, but basically, you know, like somebody in Virginia Uighur will like speak up and then suddenly half their families in a camp. You know, it's pretty gross. Now, we can't control what they do in China. We just can't. But we, we, we can at least try to control what they do physically here in the United States. With Trex, you get the most of everything, the most wood-inspired, the most eco-friendly, the most decking and railing designs, the most trusted.

Trex, performance engineered for your life outdoors. Visit Trex.com today. Then there's some very serious and bad news out of Sudan. We're fighting broke out Saturday between the Sudanese military and a paramilitary group called the Rapid Support Force or RSF. The leaders of these two organizations actually joined forces, as recently as 2021, to stage a coup. But now Army General Abdel Fata Albanum and his deputy, the leader of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan de Gallo, are fighting for control of the country.

So these guys had a major disagreement on how the RSF would or would not be integrated into the military and who would be in charge and that exploded into this all-out war. The RSF, this paramilitary force, was built from what used to be called the Janjaweed, these militias, which were responsible for horrible atrocities in Darfur. The UN says that at least 1885 people have been killed and 1,800 injured in just three days of fighting. So this is a full-blown diplomatic crisis right now. You've got tens of thousands of troops fighting all out in Khartoum, this densely packed city of 5 million people as well as in other places across the country that have, you know, we have less visibility. into, but you're seeing like literal airstrikes in a city. Complicating matters is the fact that the members of the Egyptian military were in Sudan doing a training mission. They got captured by the

RSF and there's a concern that Egypt might, you know, send in the troops to do something about it. A U.S. diplomatic convoy came under attack on Monday. Luckily, those diplomats are okay, but several aid workers have been killed in the fighting so far. There are some reports today of, uh, maybe a 24-hour humanitarian ceasefire. Then there's other reports that that has already been broken. So just stepping back, Ben, I mean, you and I spent a lot of time working on Sudan and South Sudan policy at the White House. Any thoughts on what the U.S. can or should do to try to get a lid on the fighting in

the very near term? Yeah, I mean, first of all, to roll back the tape on this thing. I mean, part of what is so tragic about this is you had that kind of democratic civil society-led uprising a few years ago against the war criminal. Bashir, Omar Bashir, who governed as a dictator for decades. Part of what happened is after he was ousted, you know, there was supposed to be kind of a roadmap to some form of democracy and a civilian-led government. And that got whittled down to nothing, essentially, in part because like the Saudis, the Emirates, the Egyptians, all our friends there, they're not exactly keen to

see a democracy in Sudan. So they were kind of backing. the military and kind of maintaining control and quote-unquote stability. But in empowering the military, you then make it a kind of zero-sum game about who's going to be the next dictator and who's going to be the top of that food chain. And clearly what's happened here is a split among, you know, generals about who gets to be the person that, from their perspective, might be running Sudan for 10 or 20 years. And so it's kind of this zero-sum all-or-nothing fight. In terms of what can be done in the short term, you do want to just stop the fighting because we've, these things, spiral. And Sudan is much more, you know, has much more of a developed economy and institutions

in South Sudan. But we have seen in South Sudan basically two leaders fighting each other for most of independence in ways that have decimated the country. And in Sudan itself, there's a history, obviously, civil war, including the John Deweed committing genocide in Darfur. And so even if you're not fixing the underlying political dynamic in the country, just getting a ceasefire in place so that this thing doesn't get its own momentum and just become the the kind of civil war that could take tens of thousands of lies and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. You just want to start. So you want to get all the parties in the region, including some of these people that I think have not been good actors, to be leaning on these leaders to just stop the fighting and then try to create some process of dialogue around power sharing.

And that's the only play you have right now. Yeah, it does seem that's like that's what Tony's Blinken's been trying to do. I've seen like the Arab League is mad. I think maybe the African Union might have met such push them on it. But yeah, I mean, it feels pretty dire right now. And people are locked down in their houses. They can't leave. It's the end of Ramadan.

Like, swords are closed. They don't have food. They don't have fuel or water. I mean, it's very, it's dire. Yeah, yeah. And you just want to stop that dynamic and just you're not going to fix everything. But if you can just stop the escalation of events, like you have a hope to avoid something really, really, really tragic. Something worse.

Stick on the theme of political violence has turned to India. So here's a quick version of the backstory to this story. So police in Uttar Pradesh, which is the largest state in India, decided to crack down on this Muslim politician slash mobster and his associates. This guy's a really bad guy, but neither here nor there. So they conducted three police raids. During those raids, the authorities killed four people, including this former politician, Atik Ahmed's son. Ahmed was already serving a life sentence in jail. So that brings us up to Saturday night, Ben.

when this politician, Attica Ahmed, along with his brother, was taken from the police station where he's being held to the hospital for what the cops or authorities called a routine checkup. Somehow there was a live TV broadcast of these guys getting basically perp walked from the police station to the hospital, during which three gunmen pop out of nowhere and murder them by shooting them at point blank range, despite there being like 17 literally police officers surrounding these two politicians or these two men. What makes this more than just a random act of violence is the fact that after this initial, those deadly police raids I mentioned, those were cheered on by hardline Hindu nationalist leaders and sort of Hindu nationalist media. And the attack on Ahmed and his brother happened after lots of public discussion about why he had gotten off easy. You know, why wasn't he kind of taken care of too? Then all of a sudden he's murdered in cold blood on live TV like this. This incident spotlights a growing trend of extrajudicial violence by Indian authorities, which is often openly supported by leaders in the governing BJP party, especially when that

violence targets Muslims or political opponents. So Ben, a couple weeks ago, we talked about how the leader of the Congress Party, the major opposition party of the BJP, just received, I think it was a two-year prison sentence for defamation of Prime Minister Modi. Howard French, who's been on the show before, a great writer, wrote a piece. for foreign policy.com about how it's notable that you hear all this concern and talk about Washington, about protecting Taiwan's democracy, but almost no one seems to be talking about these very serious threats to India's democracy, both in terms of arresting opponents and extraditional

violence. Curious why you think that is and whether, I don't know, is Biden pressing them behind the scenes because he thinks that'll work better with Modi? Like, what do you think's happening here? Well, I think, again, first of all, it cannot be emphasized enough how much India is following the tried and true pathway into kind of this ethno-nationalist or religious nationalist, I should say, authoritarian state. And what Modi has is he has a kind of apparatus. He's sitting on top of the BJP party, which is the Hindu Nationalist Party. The BJP also has a long history of having kind of its own civil society, right, its own extremist infrastructure. The RSS is the organization that is at the heart of that. These are the people that go all the way

back to the assassination of Mahamagandhi, right? So this is, we're talking about like some real extremists in this tent. As Modi's gotten more and more empowered, it's hard to determine when he is like directing something or when there's just this kind of massive mobilization on social media, on traditional media in communities of violence against Muslims, violence against political opponents of Modi. And so what you see is a state sponsored effort to, to, to, to, to, you know, kind of consolidate power around Modi and a Hindu nationalist kind of single party state and things like the arrest of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress party leader can be seen in that prism. But also this kind of unleashed these forces of sectarian violence and anti-Muslim violence and, you know,

stigmatization of minorities or political opponents of Modi. It's just a very dark picture. Now, why is it why do we not hear about it? I think it's because of like India's geopolitical importance. And and so any U.S. strategy to counter China's rise, you know, that doesn't include India is a much weaker one. India and the U.S. share kind of a common concern about a more aggressive China. You know, as we talked about, India's fought these border conflicts of China over the years. The U.S. has literally renamed a region like what used to be called the Asia Pacific when you and I were in government is now called the Indo-Pacific region. That's by design because it's meant to kind of hug India into Asia and say, okay, it's not just

the U.S. and Japan and South Korea and Australia. It's also India now. And they're coming into this quad infrastructure where they meet with the United States and Japan and Australia as part of this member of a quad. And that is clearly a part of the kind of infrastructure. US wants to build. The problem with this is the U.S. describes this consistently as kind of part of the democracy versus autocracy thing. And, you know, India, a country of over a billion people, the world's largest democracy, is moving pretty quickly in the other direction. And so I don't

think they're doing enough. I understand their impulse to try to do this quietly or privately because picking fights with Modi, you know, can be counterproductive if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's, if it's concerns, um, if we continue to see this direction. This is going to be one of, one of the most challenging and complicated U.S. foreign policy issues the next five years is, is how do you both advance your geopolitical partnership with India while continuing to, to urge democratic values within India itself? Yeah, I think I saw a clip earlier today of some sort of cabinet-level U.S. officials in India praising Modi as all this is happening. And I get it, you know, maybe they didn't know about this.

What's happened. Maybe they're not directly tying these incidents to Modi, but you're right. The trajectory is very bad. And I think there's a lot of kid gloves around him, in part because I think he lashes out. There are. But I mean, I think part of the reason he lashes out is because it has a chilling effect. And so we self-censor. I think you have to just normalize, you know what?

hey, we're just going to talk about this stuff. If we, you know, like, and we're not in like a scolding colonial way, you know, like, but when we see extreme acts of repression or violence, like the U.S. is just going to, we're going to deal with it. We're going to be hurt on it. And what is he going to do? And this is where you kind of have to challenge the presumption. Like, what, is he going to go over to the China camp? No.

Like, Modi has his own reasons for wanting to be a part of a group of countries that is concerned about Chinese assertiveness in his neighborhood. He's not doing it as a favor to us. He's doing it because it's in his own interests. And so we have probably more room than we think. You know, we're not going to drive Modi into China's arms because that's just not a place he wants to be anyway. Yeah. A couple quicker things. So there's some reports that during private meetings with progressive lawmakers and labor leaders in Washington, Brazilian president, Lula de Silva, warned of a global web of right-wing forces that continue to threaten political freedom and prop up right-wing down. demagogues like Trump and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Lula called on the left in these meetings to build its own transnational network to champion our values and fight crises like economic inequality and climate change, to which I say, Lula, buddy, we're with you. Come on, Pottae of the World. We've been with you for a long time. This was reported out by Alex Burns at Politico. He noted in his piece that Bernie Sanders

gave a big speech about these sort of same arguments in 2018. I guess my question, Ben, is, how do you think this works? You know, because it talks about your, Progressives are going to take a codel to Brazil, and that's great. You know, they'll build relationships or whatever. But Republicans have CPAC, the conferences that are now happening in Brazil and Hungary and all these places. They have the right-wing media. Tucker Carlson's interviewing Victor Orban. I wonder what the progressive architecture could or should look like, because I'm not sure I see it yet. Yeah. This is a big question. I mean, first of all, just on the Lula piece of this, you know, I think it's a very welcome thing. And I think that just because Lula is not going to be where the U.S. is on some foreign policy thing, so for instance, on the war in Ukraine, he's been a little more like Putin adjacent. You know, he opposes kind of U.S. foreign policy. More in the China camp, yeah. Yeah, he reflexively opposes U.S. foreign policy as kind of a Latin American leftist. That should not cause us to not work with. him on other things. You know, we're just talking about, like, we're working with Modi, who's fundamentally acting in an anti-democratic way. Lula is not anti-democratic. He's just anti-U.S. foreign policy on some things. And, okay, so what do you want to do is you want to carve out the spaces

where we can work with Lula. And so, for instance, combating far-right ideologies, far-right disinformation, far-right, collaboration across borders, like, that's the kind of thing where what you want to set up is a capacity, like, okay, people in Brazil are dealing with the same disinformation campaigns, sometimes funded and backed by the same people as we are in the United States, we should be comparing notes. You know, like in addition to Kodals, we should have a process set up to be sharing information about what we're seeing and ultimately what is working and pushing back against that.

Now, in the broader question, I've been involved in some of this over the years, and the organization that I started with Jake Sullivan, that, you know, National Redaction, has kind of been a part of some of this efforts to try to get. get better collaboration among progressives and nationally. There is just not the same kind of evolved infrastructure. I think there's a couple of ways to do it. One is to find like issues where progressives can cooperate and go on offense against autocrats. And so on anti-cleptocracy and anti-corruption, I think there has been increased cooperation. And some of this is like their organizations like transparency and rational. Some of it is like passing similar laws in different countries. So the

U.S. passed a law. This angle was Bernie's 2018 speech, right? Yeah. Exactly. Right. So the U.S. passed the law a couple years ago outlawing beneficial ownership, essentially shell companies that kleptocrats use to hide their money. And other nations are doing similar things. And that's a part of like a collaboration across borders and trying to whack them all kleptocratic funding. So there's some progress being made there. But the bigger thing that needs to happen is I do think there needs to be more political party collaboration across borders. You know, that Democratic Party has a stake in the success of Lula's party in Brazil or the labor party in the UK or, you know, basically left to center parties in other places. And I don't think we do enough to support each

other and in the same way that the far right does. And there you do need to develop an infrastructure where there's an exchange, there's travel, they're convening, they're people sharing ideas, hey, what worked in your campaign, what's working here? There's some of that that happens. And I go to some those meetings and, you know, but like it's not nearly evolved enough. Yeah, they're really good at it. Speaking of, you know, far right coordination, so Trump went on Tucker Carlson's show for a hard-hitting foreign policy discussion. Let's hear some excerpts. President Xi is a brilliant man. If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn't find, but there's nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing. He had an incredible, I'm not allowed to

it because it's very impolite and very politically incorrect. A beautiful female interpreter. She was very beautiful. First of all, she's not going to fuck you, bro. And also, is there an easier mark in the history of Intel marks than just, like, putting an attractive interpreter in front of this creep? He's just, it's terrible. Yeah, you're the easiest mark in the world.

Like, who, I mean, like, it is just flabbergasting that, like, the Republican Party is basically built this whole anti-CCP ethos, and the leader of that movement has like a gigantic, sorry I shouldn't say gigantic, but has a, a hard-on of a certain dimension for, for fucking Xi Jinping. It's really weird. It's really weird. And just to be clear, like, this isn't just a guy saying something nice about people he used to work with because he would never say a nice word about Angela Merkel or Emmanuel

McCrone or even fucking Boris Johnson. Like, like, this is only reserved for autocrats, right? In the same clip, he's praising, you know, Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping. Oh, we want to hear the rest of it? Yeah, we got some more from Russia. Right. Top of the line, right? Top of the line.

Putin, very smart. Now, he's had, and probably a bad year, don't forget, that whole thing is not, if he took over all of Ukraine. And what are we going to do? Because Biden is so committed to Ukraine. You know, they say, I was so nice to Russia, right? I killed the pipeline. I sadly killed a lot of Russian.

soldiers. How smart is Kim Jong-un? Top of the line. It started rough, remember, with, you know, Rocket Man, a little Rocket Man. And he said, I have a button on my desk, a red button. I said, I have a red button of my desk, too. Mine's bigger and mine works. Yours doesn't. I can't tell if you really love those guys or if those are just his only stories he's got left. But the scary thing is, I actually believe that story. Like, I actually believe that his approach to diplomacy with Kim Jong-un was to be like, I got a big red button on my desk. Like, like, Like, the world is like a much more dangerous place today than it was like when Trump took office and like, you know, do we need more evidence of why? I mean, it is just this kind of this insane affinity for autocrats is something that people around the world see. We talked last week about Macron going to China, right? And he got a lot of criticism for like walking into kind of the protocol trap of giving Xi Jinping kind of a foot rub. But like, you want to know why a manual. Macron's doing that because of interviews like this because, you know, he thinks there's probably a

50% chance that Donald Trump could be president again and he better have his own relationship with Xi Jinping, you know? Yep. And so this has real world consequences right now because everyone around the world is going to hedge because they think that this kind of weirdo who thinks Kim Jong-un is top of the line. And, you know, the only top-line thing Kim Jong-un did is like completely bait and switch Donald Trump, like into having a bunch of diplomacy and doing nothing to give up his nuclear program. Bought a bunch of time to make more nukes. I will say, like, Like, what the, like, why would there be an actor? Like, this, this, this, this fixation on like, like, like, like, like he's casting about for someone to play Xi Jinping in a movie is kind of weird to me.

It's just his weird, bizarre angle into complimenting people. Like, oh, Hollywood couldn't, like, like, he's not some handsome guy. He's just a normal dude. He's not. He's actually, like, a ponchy, overweight, like, Chinese leader with, like, good hair. Like, there's, there's actually a lot of people that could play. And I'm not trying to even put Xi Jinping down. It actually wouldn't be that hard to find someone to play Xi Jinping.

You could probably find them pretty easily. By the way, you mentioned French president, Emil Macron. He just got back from his trip to China. Just in time to sign into law his wildly unpopular proposals her raise the French retirement age from 62 to 64. The unions, French unions, are still calling for more strikes. There might be one on May 1st, which is International Workers Day. Macron's approval rating has dropped to the lowest level in four years. Ben, I just can't help but think that.

in a couple of years, if we're talking about how the far-right National Rally Party has done even better in elections and, God forbid, Marine Le Pen is the president, we might look back at this day and think, okay, that was probably why. Yeah, I mean, the bottom line of what Macron's done is, right, he claimed this kind of center, this kind of neolib center when he, like, you know, thankfully won the election in 2017 against Le Pen. But what he's kind of done with it is driven everybody to the left or the far right, you know. And so he's setting up a dynamic where the center is being discredited by policies like this. And yeah, I mean, what comes after him is pretty unpredictable right now and, you know, pretty

worrying in a way because he's kind of radicalizing his own population. Yeah, the entire. Yeah. All retirees. Speaking of loving of autocrats. So South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham has fallen back in love with Saudi Arabia. So here's a clip from 2018. This is from ABC News.

can never do business with Saudi Arabia again until we get this behind us. Right. And what does that mean? That means I'm not going back to Saudi Arabia as long as this guy's in charge. The Crown Prince is a wrecking ball. I think the behavior before the Khashoggi murder was beyond disturbing. And I cannot see him being a reliable partner to the United States. Graham just got back from a trip to Saudi Arabia where he sat down with Crown Prince, Mohammed and Salman. Graham says things are changing in Saudi Arabia for the better that he's been talking with the Biden administration about building on the Abraham

Accords and normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. And oh, by the way, the Saudis bought $36 billion worth of Boeing jets that are made in South Carolina. So there it is Ben. Once again, the Saudis can buy their way out of any problem with cash and by sort of flirting with restoring relations with Israel. This is one of those bits that kind of completely confirms our priors, Tommy. But like, I do just want to send another message to every Sunday show host or Booker or cable host. Like, Lindsay Graham will say anything in the moment to, you know, be on the right side of like whatever her mentality exists in the kind of blob DC National Security establishment, like, you know, outrage of the week, right? So when everybody was competing to demonstrate their outrage over Khashoggi through like performative television appearances, Lindsay Graham raised. his hand. He's full of shit, people.

Always. He's been pissing on your leg for decades now. And you just kind of keep this guy on the revolving door every Sunday. There's something in the news. Let's find out what old Lindsay thinks. He thinks that whatever is going to get him on television is what he's going to say to you.

But then what he's going to do is suck up to people like Trump and MBS. If that's what he thinks is going to make him actually relevant. Whoever's in power, yep. And like he's not relevant. Like the thing is, this is always described. Like, I've seen something more thoughtful coming here. Well, Lindsay wants to be relevant. what's relevant about being the latest person to kiss Muhammad bin Salman's ass? Like there's plenty of people that are for sale to Mohammed bin Salman.

And to just put the fucking cherry on top of the Sunday right here. For him to use the Abraham Accords as his talking point for why he can go over there and kiss the robe of MBS is just, it's too perfect, right? Does anybody think that Lindsey Graham is there to like make some peace deal? No. He's there to kind of be in the good graces, get back in the good graces, probably grovel before MBS because that's the wind that he sees blowing. Yeah, he is the absolute worst.

Ben, speaking of getting back from trips, President Biden is back from Ireland and the UK. It was clear from the coverage that he had a blast. I didn't know he was going to come back. I thought he might become the T-Shok as well. Yeah, he gave this speech. It looked like a, you know, the Coachella set, you know, like laser lights in the world. He looked awesome. Yeah, it looked really great.

He had this incredibly moving kind of surprise encounter with the priest who administered his son, Beau's last rights at Walter Reed eight years ago. This guy happened to be working at the church he was visiting. Biden also managed to piss off all of the most insufferable, insecure voices in the right-wing British media ecosystem for sins like having the presidential limo fly the Irish flag in Ireland, but not the Union Jack while in Belfast. Oh, how dare he? Oh, come. Here's a fun headline for you, Ben. Joe Biden's woke conquest of Ireland. The president is using his Irish identity to bully Brexit, Britain. I forget what paper that was.

So I don't know. My takeaway was like mission accomplished, man. Like you pissed off all the right people. Yeah. I mean, like he's an Irish American. Like what the fuck do you think is going to happen here? And first of all, like those visits matter. Like there's going to be like a huge amount of goodwill in Ireland to Joe Biden

in his presidency for like the rest of history because of this. And like if anybody's shot, shock that Joe Biden has an affinity for Ireland that he might not have for the UK. Like, just read up on both Irish history and Joe Biden's history. It doesn't mean he doesn't have an affinity for the UK. It's just he has a very special relationship with Ireland. And even the Jerry Adams, you didn't mention, you know, like you took this selfie with Jerry Adams, like former IRA commander.

Look, I mean, I understand the emotions that that triggers. But the reality is they just celebrated the Good Friday Accords, right? They just... 25th, 30th anniversary? Yeah, 25th anniversary in Belfast, right? and Jerry Adams is a politician Ireland, obviously, like, critical to that agreement getting done. That's not an endorsement of everything Jerry Adams has done in his life. That's an endorsement of, like, moving forward with the Good Friday Agreement. So on this one, I just think the, you know, the tiers of the British right wing, come on. I mean, what do you expect here?

Pretty tasty. Two more things for the interview. So former Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates, outlined some thoughts on strategic communications in an op-ed in the Washington. Post. Bob Gates is worried that the U.S. has, quote, seriously neglected other instruments of power that were fundamental to winning the Cold War, telling our story to the world, telling the truth the populations of countries ruled by authoritarian governments, and exposing disinformation spread by those same governments. Good points. Makes more good points there. He says the U.S. needs more strategic communications resources and that the Senate should quickly confirm Liz Allen, who is up to be under Secretary of State for public diplomacy. Absolutely right. One of the very best friends of the pod.

Yeah. Great human being. We'll be great at the job. There are some sort of questionable claims, Ben. Like he says, the U.S. needs to more aggressively breach the digital communications firewalls that allow China and Russia to propagate false narratives within their borders unchecked by independent views. Two thoughts there.

One, good luck doing that in China. Two, pretty sure before the war, Russians could go on like NYTimes.com and get all the news they wanted. They just didn't necessarily want. So I don't know. Then there was just this stuff that pissed me off. So Gates said, quote, Biden should appoint a senior national security council official with a responsibility and authority to ensure that strategic communications are an integral part of every NSC decision-making process. This is the guy who flipped out when communication staff attended NSC meetings. Remember he wigged out when like Gibbs or Axelrod went to some meetings?

But to me, Ben, the most absurd part of this op-ed was what it did not say, which was any recognition that the wars Bob Gates, Oversaw might have been part of the reason our standing in the world was harmed. Like while we were spending $3 trillion in Iraq, China was spending that on Delt and Road initiatives. But I don't know, do you think he pitched this op-ed just to piss you off? Because it didn't seem to narrowly targeted. I actually, like, so the thing that I actually agree with most of the things that Bob Gates said in that op-ed. I'll come to what triggered was triggering about it. but like he's correct that there's been a deprioritization.

Like Trump gutted this, right? Trump, like, which is actually kind of weird because you would have think that Trump might have wanted to have like a megaphone internationally. But like Trump didn't give a shit about who is in that position of undersecretary of state for public diplomacy at the State Department. He eliminated in the, as you remember in the Obama, NSC, like there was a, the NSC press directorate like that you ran.

But then there was a global engagement directorate. did public diplomacy programs. They don't have that anymore. And they don't, like, they have an, the directorate at the Biden administration, there's a good directorate, but it's like basically does what the, we're getting in the weeds here, but public engagement. They do like domestic public engagement. There's not actually a coordinating mechanism in the NSC for global strategic communications

and public diplomacy. I think there needs to be. And we can have probably a longer conversation that's interesting about how the U.S. doesn't need to make better use of its various tools of public diplomacy. Yeah. International broadcasting, like coordination of messaging, like counter-distance information, all that stuff. And Gates talks about a bunch of that.

But part of what is frustrating to me, Tommy, about it, is when he was Secretary of Defense, one of the reasons that this is not right-sized in the U.S. government is that there are these massive budgets within the Pentagon for, like the combatant commanders, for instance, to have all the strategic communications at their disposal. And he's talking about the State Department should be doing this. Well, like, part of the problem over the years has been that the Pentagon husbanded all those resources, right? And so as you point out, not only were the war is part of the problem, but the wars all and the funding for the global war on terror distorted U.S. public diplomacy. So that the only thing we were talking to foreign public's about was counterterrorism and not about anything that people actually cared about in these other countries.

Never mind the fact that he'd get pissed if the White House tried to message anything on. those wars and it wasn't done by the Pentagon. Like true strategic communications demands interagency coordination, not Pentagon lead on these things. So I do think there's something we can come back to. I noticed that Gates op-ed came shortly after David Ignatius op-ed that I flagged for you. We talked about how the U.S. needs to tell its story better and people like, and I don't mean there is something to this. I don't fault the Biden people, though, it's because sometimes it's like, oh, we just have a communications problem. I think there's- That's what triggered me. Exactly. There are two issues here, though. Like, one is the mechanisms that the U.S. has to have

communications of public diplomacy strategy where they do need to make improvements. And then the other is I do think, like, it's hard to cut through. It's hard to cut through. Like, you could tell your story in the best way and you'd still not really reach every audience in this environment. I do think that there's a conversation that we should be having inside the administration and outside, too, about what is the story, as we consider a 2024 election as we're living with the war in Ukraine about the U.S. because as the India example points out, the democracy, autocracy frame that is usually the story, has some flaws that need to be addressed. So this is something we can put a pin in and come back to. Yeah, just two quick thoughts on this. I mean, it just, it pisses me

off when policy people decide that policy problems or communications problems. They're like, oh, how are we not selling this better? It's like, well, you're asking me to sell a piece of shit. And two, I think there's a sort of an elite disconnect between how the war in Ukraine is going and how it's perceived by people. Like you hear this, I bet, from big brains in Washington. They're like, look, we're chewing up the Russian military, right? Like it's an amazing ROI on that spend. And normal people are like, all I hear about is death and destruction and mayhem and gas prices are up. And nothing about this seems good to me.

So they're like, oh, we've got to be telling this story about engagement in Ukraine. and people are just like, I don't know, I hear about getting nuked all the time. It seems scary. Well, that's the other thing. I'm so glad you made this point in time because this is what was also missing from the Gates' up at and missing, I think, from his perspective when he was very distrustful of people like us in government. Yeah.

Is it he's thinking of a story for elites generally. Because you need a story about Ukraine that Americans understand, Americans who don't, like, you know, subscribe to foreign affairs. But by the way, the same is true in other countries. We need to reach foreign publics who don't attend the Munich Security Conference. You know, that's a true public diplomacy strategy. And that requires messaging that is not just designed for elites, which is usually the trap that the foreign policy people fall into. That's exactly right.

Final story. So there was an interesting kind of odd report, Ben, that K-pop might be tangentially responsible for a shake-up within the South Korean national security roles. So this is from the Korean Herald. quote, according to reports, U.S. First Lady Jill Biden, who has an interest in Korean culture, suggested a joint performance by K-pop girl group Black Pink and American pop star Lady Gaga for a state dinner during the Korea-U.S. summit. However, it appears the proposal was not properly communicated to President Yun, resulting in the U.S. government, reportedly demanding a response from the South Korean government on several occasions due to a lack of feedback from the presidential office.

end of quote, that led to the Korean National Security Advisor of resigning. So I don't, yeah, like wild story. Like don't mess with K-pop, I guess. Don't mess with Jill Biden. I don't know what's happening here. This is a, this was a weird one. I mean, this is like, first of all, you know, props to Jill Biden, except do you think that was like her own idea? You know, like, it'd be kind of funny if it was.

I kind of hope it was, you know. I do, yeah. I don't know this is supposed to be a lot of black thing, you know. But it's a lot of black thing. it does just show like the kind of, there's this kind of shame. Like if they, like this is like a protocol snafu like, like, uh, like somebody didn't get back to the social office or something. And yet like, like there's like senior heads rolling in the system. Like it seems very fixable. It's okay to have a mistake. Like it's okay to like have not returned the email. Like, like,

you're, you know, like I just, I feel bad for this person like, you know, uh, maybe he's taking the fall for other things that are going wrong, but, uh, just seems a little extreme, you know? seems a little extreme. Yeah, if you work in the U.S. government, if you work for Jill Biden, if you're a part of the deep state, email us. I'd love to know what really happened. It's a great idea, but yeah, I'd love to do what happened, but I love the idea of Gaga and Cape—I mean, that would make for a better-than-usual-than-usual-dinner entertainment. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, we're going to take a quick break when we come back. You'll hear my conversation with Washington Post, Intelligence and National Security reporter

Shane Harris. We talk all about the Pentagon leaks, how they're covering them. It's really fascinating for me being on sort of this side of a leak reporting process. So stick around for that. I'm very excited. Welcome to the show, a Washington Post intelligence and national security reporter Shane Harris. Shane, it is great to talk with you. Thanks. It's good to be here, Tommy. I'm glad to be. Usually I'm the one asking you questions back from your old days. Man, you know, I talked to some folks just like off the record on the NSC over the last couple weeks, and I'm glad I'm not in that job anymore. Let me tell you that. John Kirby, man. He's doing a, that whole team's doing a great job.

Heroic work. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, you, you. You've been part of this team reporting on this massive leak of Pentagon documents for the Washington Post. There have been a lot of national security leaks over the last decade or two. I feel like it's safe to say this one might be the weirdest, starting with the fact that I can't really get my handle on how big it is. I've seen reports that 300 documents were leaked. Do you know if that's accurate? Does that mean 300 documents were tossed into a discord at some point? Or does that mean 300 documents are in the possession now of some journalists?

Like, what should I make of this? Well, we have reviewed at the Washington Post more than 300 documents, and we continue reporting on things that we've reviewed and that we've seen. So I think that it's safe to say that the full kind of universe, at least that we are aware of at the Washington Post, is about that number. I think it's also safe to say that, you know, according to sources we've talked to who were in this Discord server where this guy, Jack Tashara, this National Guard'sman, alleged to have shared documents. then it was probably many more than that, possibly upwards of even a thousand. It's hard to tell. But I think that, like, we should not assume that what we're seeing and reporting on is all that he ever shared. Wow, that's amazing.

And do we think that he was downloading these documents from the J. Wick server, that's the sort of top secret national security server? Or was he, like, digging through a burn bag and pulling up hard documents? What do you think? We really don't know is the answer. And I've heard people speculate to both those things. One thing we have confirmed with a U.S. official is that Tashira did have access to J.Wix, which, as you said, is this kind of like internal Pentagon secret network where these documents, he could have accessed them that way. But whether he took them out of the trash, whether it took them out of a burn bag, whether they were printed out and he snagged them in the office, we still don't really know that. What we do know is that he brought them home. And we can tell that because he made photographs of them. And then there were other instances where he was actually. typing up documents that he either brought home or brought home transcribed copies of from the office. But it was clear to the people he was talking to that this was stuff that he was getting

at work. Interesting. So, you know, I've found sort of the broad outlines of what I believe was in these documents from your reporting and others on the war in Ukraine to be pretty consistent with the reporting that you guys and others have previously done on Ukraine. I mean, it's a tough slog. You know, they're running out of ammunition in Ukraine, et cetera, et cetera. I'm curious if you agree. And then in non-Ukraine news, there have been a lot of interesting details and kind of troubling anecdotes, right? I mean, the report that you guys had, I think that Egypt was planning to sell rockets to Russia was surprising and worrisome or that the UAE might be conspiring with Russian intelligence. But I'm curious from your perspective, having read so many more of these things, did anything in these

intelligence reports really jump out at you or surprise you? Yeah, I mean, I think on the broader point, I think you're right about Ukraine. The contours of it really do match up with what we understand from reporting. If anything, the reports are maybe a bit more candid and kind of franker. I think that, you know, privately when you talk to U.S. officials or European officials, they'll kind of say, like, you know, the spring offensive is coming. You know, they're probably not going to take back a lot of territory, but we're going to give them kind of one more turn at the handle.

The documents make that a little bit starker, I think, for policymakers. But nothing, like, hugely surprising. The stuff that actually is more surprising are things like, you mentioned the Egypt. One is a great example where, you know, the Egyptian government was planning on selling rockets to Russia and then the United States kind of swoops in and flips them and gets them to make them and sell them to Ukraine instead. That was really interesting. You know, there's a document in there that talks about the likelihood that China has actually started a hypersonic drone program. And you're like, oh, geez, okay, great. Yeah, I'm glad to know that's happening.

maybe those are the UFOs we see flying around. So it's kind of like it's peppered throughout with these really interesting little nuggets. But a lot of it does actually reinforce, particularly on Ukraine, kind of reporting, you know, things that we've been tracking on. You know, there was, you know, there was a little item I just came across the other day

in a document that actually confirmed some information I heard about Russian activity in Spain, of all places, that I'd heard from a source. And was like, oh, yeah, I've been meaning to confirm that. we'll hear it is kind of in the document. But I think that what's also really striking about them is that you just see, you know, the volume of reporting that there is on a daily basis that is going to policymakers and presumably people on the hill. And you kind of get a sense for the fact that the intelligence community is, you know, it's cranking out a lot of products and a lot of writing on a pretty daily basis. And I think that's been interesting to kind of put yourself in the position of the policymaker who's seeing all this kind of incoming each day. And imagining what that's like for them is that's been a kind of an interesting turn to the tables, I guess. Yeah. And this question is sort of when you're intel reporting on war versus public pronouncements of war is such an interesting debate.

Because again, there's the Pentagon Papers example where the U.S. was just lying about lots of things. And then there was this internal review about the true history of the war that was incredibly stark when compared to that public record. But then, you know, you guys had a big series called the Afghanistan Papers, which compared sort of internal assessment. of how the war in Afghanistan was going compared to sort of public statements by military officials or lawmakers, et cetera. And, you know, I remember thinking there was definitely some daylight between the two. And I think some readers viewed that as a lie. I viewed it more as like, well, yeah, Intel products are stark and, you know, kind of there's no flourishes. Lawmakers and, you know, can-do military officials kind of have a can-do attitude and put some spin on the ball.

But I'm just curious how you think about that daylight and what the line is between kind of spin and lying or something else. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, as I was reminding colleagues, too, as we were going through these, because I cover the intelligence community on a regular basis. But, you know, you got to remember that this is information that's going to policymakers to help them make a decision, right? So it's not like, you know, they are, you know, sometimes they're forecasts, but they're just kind of like the facts. And they're not, they're not telling the policymaker what to do, right? I mean, you know this from your previous work in the government. It's there to inform their judgments and their decision-making. And part of the judgments that they have to make is how to talk about this stuff and how to message on it, if you want to use that phrasing.

I haven't found any, like, big gap between what it appears in, you know, intelligence officers and analysts are telling policymakers in these reports versus what they're saying publicly. I mean, you don't hear people, I think, going out and putting, you know, a big rosy glow. on the prospects for Ukraine, for instance, retaking all of the territory that Russia stole from them in 2014. So that kind of marries up and matches up. There's stuff in the documents that is, for sure, levels of detail that we have not seen reported before about activity in Ukraine.

And we have some stories that will be coming out soon about that. And those are things that, you know, there'd be no reason for policymakers to talk about that publicly because it's, you know, it's clandestine or it's just they're trying to keep it kind of quiet. But by and large, I mean, I have not seen a lot of, you know, huge daylight or gaps or contradictions, you know, in terms of the war in Ukraine. It's just more stuff that, like, they may not be telling you everything, but I feel like what policymakers and elected officials are saying is, you know, is backed up by what they appear to be reading. Interesting. Yeah. And look, when I talk to sort of people in government on background or off the record, like, they're pretty honest with me that it's, you know, challenging to say the least. Oh, yeah. I'm curious about your reporting sort of editorial process with these leaks. I would imagine, again, like any reporter who got his or her hands on the Pentagon papers would say, we got to run this story.

This is in the public interest. People were willing to go to jail over it. Other leaks have been more complicated with WikiLeaks. There was the helicopter gunship video that suppressed essentially the U.S. military firing on members of the media, and that that was, you know, hidden from public view. but then there were just sort of cables that were diplomats doing their job on a regular day. And a number of news outlets were willing to work with us when I was in government over redactions or withholding certain information. In this case, with this tranche leaks, I haven't heard many allegations or any allegations really of government wrongdoing. The leakers' friends say he was not a whistleblower.

So I'm just curious, like, how are you guys thinking about what is or isn't in the public interest when you report on these? I think, you know, our first question is, we could. kind of look at it and we say, is it newsworthy? Right. And then what we've been doing on each of these documents as we report them out is, you know, having conversations not just with our sources, but also with government officials and with, you know, spokespersons to make sure that we're doing it in a responsible way. And I mean, I'll just say that I think we've been very responsive to a lot of people in government's concerns about, you know, publishing certain slides in intact. You know, maybe there's revealing satellite imagery that doesn't have to go with the story.

I mean, I know there have been conversations about, you know, just making sure that we are in touch with the Pentagon, with the White House, et cetera, as we do each of these, which is what we would do anyway. I mean, our process always here, and this has always been the rule that I follow as a reporter, is that when you're getting ready to write a story, you know, you reach out to the agency, you know, whose information it is so that, first of all, they're not, you know, blindsided by it. But also that you're having a conversation of saying, look, is there something in here that if we report this, it's too sensitive, you know, to report. Or do you want to make the argument that we shouldn't publish it? And, you know, we're hearing them out every time we write a

story about this. So it's just that, you know, we're not used to doing this, you know, eight times a week. Right. Right. The volume of it's gone up, but the process hasn't changed. That makes sense. I personally was shocked that post Snowden, there wasn't more oversight and tracking of access to these kinds of documents. I mean, I realize that, like, you know, to share was an IT guy that maybe gave him special access. But again, like, how was there not some government oversight of sort of a random IT guy at the Massachusetts Air National Guard is on J. Wicks pulling down hundreds of documents? Is the Pentagon saying anything about that failure? Yeah, they're not saying anything yet, except I note that we're talking on a Tuesday, and it was just announced, I think,

today there's going to be an inspector general investigation, I believe, of the base where he worked. Interesting. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that kind of tells you that, you know, the powers that have some significant questions about how this particular facility was being managed and how it was working there. Because you're right. I mean, yes, I mean, he had, he was a network administrator tech kind of type. You have to have, those people have to have access to the systems and be able to support them and service them, you know, for people to use them. That does not mean he had a need to know any of this. And presumably he did not have a need to know almost all of it. He's not an analyst. I mean, if you were preparing briefing books, okay, maybe, but your job is to put them in a book and then move them on.

You know, so I think that there's going to be just a huge number of questions. And we've just begun to kind of poke into that ourselves to understand, all right, I get that, you know, in this kind of post-9-11 environment where it's all about the need to share and to collaborate, people have to have access. But who is watching this guy and tracking what he's printing? Maybe he had a perfectly legitimate reason. to do it. I think those are the questions that the Pentagon is trying to get answered now. And I think the short answers, I don't think they know yet. A lot of stories note that Tashara was a gun enthusiast. They note that he made anti-Semitic and racist comments in Discord. Are those details getting reported because they were just kind of like early facts we learned about this individual? Or is there a suggestion that they might be part of the motivation for the leak itself? So far, I mean, and we reported some of this, too, and the story we wrote about him first, which was, you know, we felt that that was some relevant information to share with people. If for nothing else, then, there was just so much of it going on.

I mean, racist memes and anti-Semitic jokes were such a feature of this Discord server that they were in that, you know, it would have, I mean, I don't know if that had anything to do with the motivation. I can't see that it necessarily that it did. I have no evidence of that. But it was such a feature of the room. And also the kind of the gun culture and the gun military fanboy stuff is what brought a lot of these people together. They were actually fans of a YouTuber called Oxide who posts a ton of gun reviews and equipment reviews. And they were kind of like nerds for it. So that felt very relevant to us insofar that this was kind of like the hobby or the mutual interest that brought them all together in the first place. But I didn't see anything in our reporting that's. suggested that because of those views, that's why Jack DeShera was sharing this. He seemed to kind of have this leader mentality that these mostly teenage boys in his group needed to be brought in the loop and kind of like kept wise about the world. And he had a fairly, I mean, I think it's safe to say conspiratorial view about the government. I mean, some of the stuff that he believed was

really out there and thought that he was kind of enlightening them and kind of making them strong and aware mentally and by making and by kind of letting them into what the government knew that ordinary people didn't that seems to be much more the motivation for for the you know pretty astonishing amount of classified stuff that he shared with them man i'm just thinking back to like my background check it's like did you do drugs do you owe anybody money name all your landlords even if it's your mother which it was for me in a couple cases like do you have a proclivity to to shit post and brag to teens is that going to be on future that's of 86 is i mean i kind of wondering the same thing. Like, how do you screen for this, right? And, you know, and is it like, you know, do you need to divulge all of your social media presence and your handles? And, you know, I mean, it raises all kinds of questions about how the background check process works, I think, because, all right, let's say it did surface in his SF86. Like, oh, he runs a Discord channel where they're sharing all kinds of vile stuff. He's super into guns. He's filming himself yelling, rages remarks while he's shooting a rifle. I don't know.

Maybe we don't give him a security clearance. What do you think? Yeah, seems like that would be a good idea. Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Snowden leaks, has said that news outlets, I think he named the Post and the Times, that helps report out to share his identity were doing the FBI's bidding by finding him and are hypocrites for then deeming the documents newsworthy and reporting on them. What do you say to that? I don't, I disagree, obviously. Maybe not obviously. I disagree respectfully with Glenn on that one.

You know, look, I mean, we were reporting on a massive disclosure of classified information that was clearly, you know, unauthorized, that was having diplomatic ripple effects. We were reporting on that, you know, days before we ever went out to try to understand who did this and who disclosed the information. I do understand, you know, the critique of, you know, if there is somebody who is leaking this information, why are we going out there trying to identify it and possibly doing law enforcement's job? I don't think, first of all, we were doing their job. If you read the affidavit filed by an FBI agent to Shera's case, it seems pretty clear to me that they got the information about him from Discord. I mean, the FBI served a subpoena on the company. They handed over the account information.

It matched up with his physical address. and they went and they got him. It is newsworthy when these things are leaked and trying to understand how it happened is important. You know, also, I mean, it's important to note, I mean, Jack Tashara was not our source. I'm not aware that he was a source to any journalist. We protect our sources. You know, as a rule, we don't have it that we don't report on other people who might be leaking classified information. I mean, the leak was sort of distinct from reporting on the documents, particularly in the beginning, because the document.

because the documents were all available publicly. I mean, they were just on the internet. So this was not a situation as it was, for instance, with Edward Snowden, where he privately provided those documents to reporters who then protected him as a source. That's just not how this played out. Yeah. I did notice that the New York Times hired Eric Toller from Bellingcat as a freelancer or sort of stringer to work on the story. Toller broke the story up to share his identity.

Then the Times took a victory lap about their. big scoop. Is that a bit like the Golden State Warriors picking up LeBron James for game seven of the NBA finals? What do you think? You want to take the bait on that one? I mean, I'm not a basketball fan. I think I know what you mean. And I'm going to say like, yeah, maybe it is. But, you know, I don't know basketball, man. So, I mean, your analogy may have gone over my head. What do you, what do you know? How can we get you to take the bait here? I mean, look, I think that Eric did very good work on open source intelligence. I will say that our story came out first. It did not name Jack Tashara, but it gave a lot of information about, and I should say, too, it's because we did not know his identity.

I mean, we print that in the story that our sources did not divulge his identity. So I don't want to take away from anything that Eric did by finding his ID. But I think that if you read our story, what it paints for you is the picture of the culture, of, you know, who this individual was, if not by name, then by the hold he had over these kids, frankly, what he was doing, how long. he was doing it, why he was doing it. We identified him by his kind of internal nickname, which was OG, talked about the fact that he worked on a military base. I mean, these were all, you know, if I'm just doing my, like, you know, my team spirit here for the post, I mean, we had all that first. Yeah. So, yeah. That was a hell of a story. It was truly fascinating. Also, you got, like, when you guys, everyone called him OG and then the kid was 21. I was like,

oh my God, these are like babies talking about this kid. That was kind of weird for me, too. I mean, some of them, you know, this one person we talked to at length and who we interviewed on camera for our story, you know, he was around. He was a young teenager when he met him. And so I'm thinking like, you know, I guess when I'm that age, I see somebody who's, you know, over 16 or 17, I guess they seem like an adult. It's weird now, you know, is a 40-something person. But when you're that age, I think anybody, you know, who can, like, is old enough to drive kind of seems like, you know, a god or something. Yeah, no, especially someone with cool information and guns and whatever else.

Last question for you. You can be spending a little more time on Discord going forward? Like, how does this change your job? You know, it's such an interesting thing. I wonder now does like Discord become a place where we're all going, just sort of hanging out and trying to find, you know, people who are sharing this kind of stuff? You know, I think that for us as reporters, I mean, I think we're just trying to constantly be aware of where information is. and where it might show up. I mean, you know, you know, to Eric Toller's credit,

you know, he was the first person who understood the server where this stuff had originated, you know, where the documents at first posted. And I think that speaks a lot to the power of just reporting in the open source and kind of being on these platforms now. I mean, it's like, you know, Twitter, you know, sure, we hang out on Twitter as journalists a lot,

but there appears to be much more interesting stuff happening in these other places. And that's, I think, something a lot of us taking note of now. Yeah, it's a really good point. Twitter is where we all can find the same group think. But yeah, it probably helped to be fluent in Discord and 4chan and all these other places where Eric Toller found this person's identity. Listen, Jane, thank you so much for doing the show. You guys are doing amazing work over there at the Washington Post, so everyone should subscribe. Thank you very much. And yes,

please do. Yes, I would appreciate that. I've been a subscriber for many years and it's excellent. Thank you. Thanks, thanks, Tommy. All right, good to talk to you. Thanks again to Shane Harris for joining the show. Thanks again to Mike Pompeo for several days on the trail. I don't even know how long he was running for. Yeah, I mean, and for buying so many copies of your own book that was supposed to propel you into this successful presidential campaign, to be like not even capable of attracting the degree of oxygen that like Nikki Haley, I mean, Nikki Haley has defeated Mike Pompeo in the primary to be. Oh, destroyed him. Just destroyed. Just destroyed. Just absolutely destroyed by,

Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, all the other also-rans. Like Mike Pompeo couldn't even get to their level. Yeah, the contest to take sixth in Iowa, they just smoked him. Just smoked him. Didn't even make it to the starting line. Sorry, Mike. Well, there's always 2028, I guess. There's always like a weekend, daytime Fox News contributor role for you, Mike.

Just sitting right there for you. That's probably better for him. Yeah. Stick with that. Maybe newsmax. Okay, that's it for us today. Talk to you guys next week. POTSave the World is a crooked media production.

Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Mewes. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seaglin, Charlotte Landis, and DeCilius are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, D.B Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week

and check out the POTSave the World YouTube account. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.