Pod Save the World - BONUS POD: North Korea summit

Episode Date: March 1, 2019

Tommy and Ben explain why Trump's second North Korea summit was a total disaster. Then they discuss escalating tensions between India and Pakistan, Justin Trudeau's troubles in Canada, a can't-miss rant about Jared Kushner and Netanyahu's indictment.

Welcome to the post-North Korea summit bonus Pots Day of the World. Ben and I, we didn't want to wait until next week to talk through the glory, the pageantry, the historic success of Trump's North Korea summit. And then we woke up this morning and realized it was a total disaster. But you know what you guys deserve to know why? So we're recording anyway. And frankly, there's a lot of bigger stuff happening in like India-Paxed in Canada and Saudi Arabia. So we're going to forge through one quick how to do that.

So on Wednesday's episode, I talked with a woman named Jessica Stern from Outright International, which is a great organization that's doing this amazing work, fighting for LGBT rights around the world. And I heard from her today that a whole bunch of listeners had reached out with donations to offer like pro bono legal work. And I just wanted to say, thank you to the listeners. You guys are really good people. And it means a lot that you would do that. Cool. Nobody reaches out to help me.

Yeah, well, give Ben some pro bono legal work. I'm fine. I'm fine. Actually, I already have our friend Mike Gottlieb is my pro bono. That's a very good lawyer. For all my Republican investives. Very good pro bono lawyer. Okay. So as we started, let's start with North Korea. The second North Korea summit was just a dud. Trump and Kim Jong-gun literally abruptly stopped the meeting in the middle after failing to agree on any steps towards denuclearization. I guess. Kim insisted that all sanctions be lifted before he would begin dismantling the Yang-Bion and enrichment facility, which is their most well-known enrichment site, but likely not the only one, which Trump basically said at the press conference. When asked what happened, Trump said, sometimes you have to walk away, apparently thinking he was haggling over a used car.

And then he tried to sort of gloss over it all by saying he and Kim are going to be good friends someday. So that's a relief, I guess. Him and Robin. But I guess everything Trump does is graded on this curve. Some people are saying, well, it's better to walk away than sign a bad deal. Yes, obviously. I don't know. Ben, were you surprised that this didn't work? Yeah, I mean, here's the good news, I guess. At least it does sound like they were trying to

negotiate the nuclear issues. Yes. So what we had been worried about was that Trump would settle for something outside of the nuclear space, something symbolic and try to make it a win. You know, I think it's actually good that they were trying to at least address part of the program and like important we should stress here young beyond is not the entire nuclear program it'd be like dealing with one Iranian facility and saying you've solved the Iranian program which is obviously a trap we didn't want to fall on too um so that's the good news the the bad news is it's almost it's baffling that they could find themselves sitting at the table as heads of state this far apart I mean it's one of the things we talked about is that they don't prepare it seemed like they didn't

seemed to even know what the outlines of the deal were before the two leaders just kind of got in the room. Totally. And why would Trump be surprised that North Korea is trying to get sanctions relief, you know? So the problem that this exposes is that they should never have had this summit in the first place, you know? Yes. I mean, that's my key takeaway is, yeah, sure, you want to walk away instead of getting a bad deal, but why are you even having the President of the United States in the room with the leader of North Korea. It feels to me like Trump liked all the positive accolades he got for the first summit, which I think were somewhat premature, and wanted this kind of splashy summit again and probably forced the summit before the work had been done. And so you have this painfully obvious

difference that's going to merge, where they want sanctions relief and we want them to do certain things on the nuclear program. And so of course they didn't get a deal. And why Trump felt like if he just flattered Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-un would give away his nuclear program. Of course that's not going to happen. So the worry here is that where do we go next? Yeah, every major defector, anyone who knows the program, and they knew he wasn't going to do this. I mean, like two major problems as I see it. One is Trump has not gotten a commitment from Kim to freeze his program. Kim is not testing nuclear weapons. He's not launching missiles, but they're still enriching. So he's added, Kim is adding to his stockpile as these negotiations are ongoing, which gives him

more leverage. The other thing, it's just, we forget about this because, like, our president, you know, tweets on the toilet until 11 a.m. every day, but, like, time is your most important resource as president. And he just wasted a couple days going to Hanoi to do nothing. Yeah, and I also think, you know, we cannot overstate how much of a gift it is to Kim Jong-un that he's been elevated so relentlessly by Trump over the course of the last. year. You know, there they are in Vietnam. First of all, just an aside, in a socialist country that Trump is praising, meeting with the socialist leader that Trump is praising. So this whole anti-socialism vibe on Venezuela is a bit out of the ordinary. But, you know, every picture of Kim

sitting next to Trump, every picture of the North Green flag next to the American flag is legitimizing this pariah state that is a pariah state for a reason, you know, because they brutalized our people, because they pursue nuclear weapons, because they've murdered, you know, Kim Younglin's brother on an... In a Malaysian airport. You know, he's normalizing Kim and elevating Kim among the leaders of the world to this kind of equal footing with the President of the United States for nothing in return. You know, so Kim is getting something. As you say, he's getting time. So as time goes by, they're advancing their nuclear program, even if they're not testing, they're able to do additional research.

He's getting legitimization. and what is Trump able to show that he's gotten for this? Nothing. There's been no movement in the nuclear program. There are reports before this summit that we're not even trying to get the inventory of what their program even is, which I think would be necessary

to map out a rollback strategy. So he's giving way his own time. He's giving away all this legitimacy to Kim and he hasn't got anything in return. So the other question I had for you is, I don't really know at this point what sanctions are left on North Korea, but do you think you can,

can make an argument to China and other key countries to keep sanctioning the North or to not sell them coal or whatever as we want them to do when when Trump has been tweeting the problem is solved when he says on the record he's in no rush and we'll all be friends someday. Isn't that like a indicator that we don't care as much about sanctions? Yeah, I mean there are two aspects of this. One is just the legal regime of the sanctions being in place, which makes it harder for the North to obviously operate in the global economy. But because there's such a small economy, because it's such a distorted, you know, mismanaged command and control sanctioned economy, a lot of what they do is kind of illicit anyway. It's across the border with China. When people hear

about, we want the Chinese to enforce these sanctions, it's that there's a kind of illicit economy that has grown up over the years of trade across the Chinese-North-green border. And there's also a lot of trade that the North does kind of under the radar, different ports and different places around the world. So it's not just having the sanctions in place. It's having other countries enforce the sanctions to prevent those things from happening. And so even though the sanctions are still there, I have to think that all of this love for Kim and all of this, you know, tweeting about solving the problem, you know, that sends a message to the Chinese, well, why would we break our backs to go down to our border and try to enforce, you know,

shutting down this cross-border economic lifeline to the north? And so I think you have to assume that there's been a fraying of that sanctions regime that is taking place, even though, we haven't formally lifted it. Yeah, it's really troubling. Honestly, okay, so the most disgraceful, troubling part of this whole spectacle, in my mind, occurred at the post-Sumet press conference. So Trump basically absolved Kim Jong-un of any responsibility

for the death of an American student named Otto Worm Beer. He said Kim told him that he didn't know about it, meaning Wombeer's death or captivity, I guess, and he will take him at his word. So a reminder that Otto Worm Beer was studying abroad in Hong Kong, he went and he visited North Korea on a trip, I guess, in 2016, and he got thrown in prison and convicted of stealing a North Korean propaganda poster. So fast forward, 17 months the kid spends in captivity.

He gets returned to the U.S. in a coma and he subsequently dies. And so clearly they did something to him in captivity to kill him. Obviously, Kim knew Wormbeer was being held. Even Rick Santorum, a right-wing lunatic who's now on CNN, called his comments, disgraceful. So like, I don't know. I wonder what your reaction was to this moment, but also to the pattern of absolving Muhammad bin Salman for killing General Gersheng, Kim Jong-un, Putin. I mean, he loves to believe dictators. Well, the first thing about Otto I'm here first is that Trump knew all about this. Remember, Trump had the family at the state of the union. Yes. He, when he was,

you know, going after Kim, this was a big part of his rhetoric, you know, that, that we need to stand up for Otto and his family, kind of used his family as, you know, guests in the state of union box. So Trump knows the story, and anybody knows that Kim Jong-un is somebody who's had people murdered for, like, kind of not looking in the right direction in North Korea. The idea that Kim Jong-un wouldn't know how this person is being treated is insane. It's crazy. I mean, if you know anything about that system, you would know that the North Korean leader is certainly aware of an American intention and would be aware if they're roughing him up and if he's put in a coma. So it just, what Trump said belies belief. Like nobody thinks that's possible. The second thing is,

yes, there's a very clear pattern. In Russia, you know, standing next to Putin in Helsinki, he says, you know, well, Putin's denials of interfering in our election were very strong. So he sides with Putin over our intelligence community. With MBS, even after it came out that there was a report that we thought MBS was responsible, he says, well, MBS denied it very strong. strongly, you know, and so he agrees with him. So this is now the third time that Trump has taken a murderous dictator at their word about something that they did involving an American or the American people or a U.S. person, right? Because with Russia, it was interfering in her election, with Jamal Khashoggi, that's a U.S. resident, writes for an American newspaper,

and now with an American who was killed. And this is chilling. And frankly, I think every Democrat running for president, I mean, this has to be a core of your argument against Trump. that he's taken the word of these murderous dictators over the word of American intelligence community or common sense at the same time that he scorns our allies. This is a clear pattern. It also dramatically undercuts him when he goes after Maduro for being a murderous dictator. Why are you taking the word of all these other murderous dictators and then asking us to believe you when you're going after this other one?

So it's really disturbing. It was disgraceful. I mean, either he's just forgotten what was probably in his PDB for, for weeks and weeks and weeks or he's just lying to us. We're forgotten meeting with the family of this guy. I mean, that's part of what's so disgusting to me about it is that, like, he wrapped this family in an embrace and then the flag, and now basically throws them under the bus in order to be friendly with Kim Jong-un.

Which you don't need to do, by the way. You know, like, you can negotiate with somebody and not take them at their word. Right. I mean, put it this way. If what Trump said is true, why would you take Kim Jong-un at his word anything. Are you going to take him out his word about the nuclear program, too? I mean, you know, there has to be some, you know, the art of the deal here seems to be that if you're sitting across a table from a murderous dictator, you believe anything they say. If you're

sitting across the table from an ally, you know, you trash them. You trash them, exactly. Well, great summit. Huge success. Congrats to everybody involved. Well, also, there's a diminishing return to these summits, too. Like, how many, you know, the first time you got all the tension, the second time a little bit less, like, how many times he's going to sit down with Kinyon? It's crazy. Yeah, he's going to give him another six months to set the thing up and let him just keep enriching the whole time. I mean, it is, it is, time is not on our side here. No, and it does show you that the foreign policy, we've talked about this before, it takes time for the consequences to become apparent. So what we're beginning to see now, or these initiatives that Trump has been

working on for a year or two, no progress on North Korea, no progress on whatever they're trying to do with Iran. And Iran's still in the nuclear deal with the European. Europeans. Maduro's still there. All these things that they've done have not accomplished any of the objectives that they've set out and they've managed to really hurt U.S. credibility in the process. Don't hold your breath for that Nobel Peace Prize, buddy. So also since we talked on Monday, I mean, things between India and Pakistan have ratcheted up, unfortunately. Again, the conflict started earlier in the week when the Indian military bombed what they said was a terrorist training camp inside Pakistan. Then on Wednesday, after we had recorded,

Pakistan retaliated and shot down two Indian planes that were allegedly in Pakistani airspace. One of those pilots was actually captured by Pakistani forces. But just today, luckily, the Pakistani government said they'll release the captured pilot. I think they put out a video of him like drinking tea being okay. So that's good. Hopefully that ratchets down tensions a bit. But, you know, again, we hoped on Tuesday that tensions would get ratcheted down and it didn't. So I guess what I thought might be interesting was to try to imagine what we might have done if this had happened under Obama's watch.

How would the United States, under the best circumstances, mediate between two allies and prevent nuclear-armed nations from going to war? Well, first of all, they don't even have an ambassador in place in Pakistan. How was that possible? Which is astonishing. It's one of the most important countries for U.S. national security. But first thing we would do, I think, is have like a high-level envoy. You know, somebody, you know, would probably be the Secretary of State or, you know, a presidential envoy. who would just go there, and part of what you want to do is be shuttling back and forth,

engaging in diplomacy, to prevent them from escalating. Because sometimes it's hard for these countries to do things when you've got, you know, like bomb, you know, for India to bomb Pakistan, if you've got a senior American sitting there. The VP is sitting in your office. Seriously. So, like, a big part of this is just to lower the temperature, to have senior diplomats on the ground engaging in kind of shuttle diplomacy. You know, that's a starting process point.

That person would then also probably be trying to, identify some way of setting up a dialogue between Indian Pakistan so that there's a channel of communication set up that maybe a third party can help in initiating that. Maybe we'd be trying to identify for the Indians some non-military way of responding. So, for instance, do they want to try to take action multilaterally to crack down on this terrorist group that carried out the initial attack that killed 40 Indian troops? Do we want to be sanctioning them? do you want to be kind of blacklisting them at the UN,

try to find ways to channel the Indian desire for a response to something other than bombing Pakistan, while then also working with Pakistan to roll up some of these guys, and we may have intelligence, right? So you'd be trying to structure essentially the off-ramp of the highway to conflict. And, you know, I'm sure the administration must be,

Trump administration engaged behind the scenes, but, again, they don't even have an ambassador there. There hasn't been a really high-profile U.S. push. By the way, Pompeo has been sitting in Vietnam at this stupid spectacle of a summit when he probably should be sitting in, you know, India and Pakistan trying to deal with this. So you also see the opportunity and cost of getting focused on this thing. And we don't have a real, we don't have a real Secretary of Defense. Yeah.

Mike Pence is sitting in Colombia. You would try to foment a revolution. Absolutely. And so an important point here is that the Indian, sorry, the Pakistani military calls a lot of these shots outside of civilian government. You'll recall, Tommy, when we. we were in office, we didn't want to have Obama calling the head of the military. You want to have to engage the prime minister, the civilian leader. So we would have the secretary of defense calling the head of the Pakistani military. And so, yeah, we're hurt by not having people

in these people in these people in these places. Yeah, the people you would think that should be, like, deep in these mediation efforts or the secretary of state, the head of the CIA. Yeah. Is someone who probably would have a pretty close relationship with the Pakistanis, or at least frenemies. Yeah, the ISI, the ISI, as awful as they are. The chairman of the Joint chiefs. I'm just, you're not hearing about any of these people doing shuttle diplomacy. Yeah, yeah. It's unnerving. Well, let's like just step back a minute and go through the history a bit because India and Pakistan have gone to war four times since they won their independence from Britain in 1947. There's, you know, all these years later, they're still wrestling over

Kashmir, which is disputed region in between. Can you just remind us, like, what's Kashmir? Why has this been a flashpoint for so long? And how did the British screw up everything for? for everyone decades ago. Yeah, so it starts with the end of colonialism, right? So the British governed all this territory as India, right? So these were not separate countries. The British Raj kind of governed what is today, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and even Burma, from one place.

And so at the end of the British Empire, when things started to break apart, there was an initial objective to try to hold all this together in one country, not Burma, but India and Pakistan. But the Muslim leadership decided that they wanted an independent Pakistan, an independent country. And in fact, Bangladesh was originally part of Pakistan. So you had this kind of strange arrangement where India was going to be here, and then you'd have Pakistan in the east and west. And partition, people may remember reading about this, but essentially you had this partition where essentially a border was established between what is today India and what is today Pakistan. And you have this mass migration of Muslims into Pakistan from India and Hindus into India from what is now Pakistan.

Hundreds of thousands of people were killed because there was all this intercommunal violence taking place as there was this mass shift of population. Now, Kashmir in the north was claimed by both. So both the Indians and Pakistanis claimed that this should be a part of what would become their countries. And so this border dispute was never resolved. It's the one piece of the breakup of Indian Pakistan that was not resolved at the time. And what ended up happening is India de facto controls a portion of Kashmir and Pakistan de facto controls another portion. And they fought some wars about this, you know, right away. And then things kind of settled into what is now called the line of control. So there's this line essentially that separates what the

Indians control and what the Pakistanis control. Now, the Pakistanis, like, don't recognize that, for instance. They believe that the parts of Kashmir that India control should be part of Pakistan. Part of the reason this is really interesting and important is it goes to the national identity of both countries. Pakistan believes it should be the homeland for all the Muslim majority provinces there. So Kashmir is the Muslim majority. So in their view, if these people had self-determination, if you had a referendum, they would argue that they would most like likely want to be a part of Pakistan, and we should govern all of the Muslim majority areas. The Indians actually like to think of themselves as a diverse country, and it's actually kind of

important to their national identity, not just that they don't surrender to Pakistan and give up this piece of territory, but that there be a part of India that is Muslim majority. It sounds strange, but you can kind of understand it. If they want to send a message, if we're not just a Hindu homeland, we have a huge Muslim minority here, they want to kind of show that they have a right to govern these diverse places. The problem is ever since this line of control was established, there have been these border skirmishes constantly. And usually it's devolved into kind of asymmetric warfare

where the Pakistanis have these militant groups who go into Kashmir and might engage in attacks. The unions crack down with a heavy hand. That radicalizes parts of the population, and you have this kind of ongoing low-boil conflict. what has been so strange, not strange, but unusual about the recent clashes is it looks more like a conventional war. So it's not like just a terrorist attack. You have airplanes flying missions from India into Pakistan dropping bombs.

Like it starts to take on the flavor of a conventional war. And again, as we talked about when there are two nuclear armed nations, you don't want that to escalate. Yeah. That's a hell of a little brief history lesson to have on the top of your head, my friend. Well, I got... When did you go deep on this? I went deep on this a long time ago. The last...

There was one of the times, like, right after 9-11, when it felt like who knew what was going to happen. There were some of these border skirmishes, and they're usually up in the mountains. Like, so high up, or 12,000, 13,000 feet, like wild elevations. There are these troops that way up in wild elevations, shooting each other. And there was, at the same time,

that was after the AQ Khan thing, the network that had helped bring the nuclear weapon to Pakistan. And there was a very interesting, peace movement in both Indian Pakistan that emerged to try to deal with this because people were afraid of this. And so I got interested. There's actually some great documentaries about

this if you want to check it out about the anti-nuclear movement in India Pakistan and the peace movement there. Unfortunately, what you've had since, like everything in the post-911 era, is an increasing sense of nationalism and religious identity. So India has become more

Hindu in its politics. Pakistan has become more Islamist and its politics and that's made solving this harder. Fascinating and unnerving. This next story brings me no joy, but it appears that our friend, Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau of Canada, is in some trouble. So the former Canadian Justice Minister said that Trudeau and some members of his team used political interference and veiled threats to get her to drop a criminal case against a major corporation. The company is a Montreal-based construction engineering company that was accused of paying bribes to Gaddafi's go back when he was still in charge of Libya.

No go. That's not a good thing to do. If the company has found guilty of these charges, it would mean that they couldn't do business with the government of Canada for a decade. So it's obviously a huge impact, and it would hurt potentially 52,000 of the company's employees globally. So this doesn't sound great. How much trouble do you think Trudeau could be in here? I want to just start by saying I'm not that objective. I love Justin Trudeau.

Yeah, I mean, he's a good job. And actually I've gotten to know him personally I was up in Canada recently saw him. But that said, I think this is a pretty big problem. You know, what basically happened is you had a relatively new attorney general in place, who also was the first indigenous woman to hold that office, and so she carried, you know, there was a lot of pride in that appointment. This case has been moving its way to the Canadian justice system. if they are prosecuted and found guilty,

it sounds like they will, as you say, not be able to do business in Canada because there's a law that says if you violate certain laws, you can't do business here. They employ about 10,000 people in Montreal. And so what it sounds like is that Trudeau and his aides were kind of going to the AG and saying, they weren't directing her to, you know,

cease all prosecution. They were kind of saying, hey, can we figure out a way to work this out that doesn't involve these job losses? And I think there's some other legal arrangements that could be made where the company's held accountable, but there's some deferred action or there's some other form of punishment

separate from them being cut off and being misdiscounted. So it sounded like Trudeau's team was trying to find a way not to totally scuttle the prosecution, but is there some other way of resolving this they won't just shut down a major Canadian company and unemployed 10,000 people in Montreal, which also happens to be kind of Trudeau's, you know,

where he's from is kind of based politically. So this AG got very uncomfortable with that and said, I'm not going to do that. There was a cabinet reshuffle where she was moved out of that job and then she this leaked and then she resigned. Right. And now she's essentially blowing the whistle. Right.

You know, it sounds like you could see what Trudeau's impulse was here. Like, I don't want to, you know, have 10,000 people lose their jobs because of something that was really, you know, stupid and potentially criminal that was done a while ago. Is there some way we can, again, punish them without having that be the case? You know, the thing is, there's an election coming up. And so the conservative has said, Trudeau has resigned. He said he won't resign. I think Trudeau's answer, and again, recognizing my own bias here, but does make sense, which is, look, this is all coming out. their hearings, this woman just testified,

she basically gave the worst version of events, there'll be more testimony, and people will vote, and they will choose a new government, and because there was election in a few months, let's just have it be decided by the voters. That makes sense to me. I think, you know, again, it's done Trudeau

because it undercuts his image as somebody who cares about institutions and the rule of law and democracy. But to be clear, like the right wing in Canada is a pretty far right party, and, you know, I think they're being a bit cynical. And these are people who've gone out of their way to try to, you know, combat efforts to fight climate change

and Western Canada because they want to save jobs there, you know. And so, you know, I think they're being a little sanctimonious in some of the criticisms they're lobbying. It does remind me a lot of Obama. I mean, when you campaign and hold yourself to a higher standard, you get roughed up around that standard. And then if you're Trump and you're a shameless, lying corrupt hack.

No one came to take you for anything. To be fair, like, yes, this is a huge scandal. This woman testified on the same day Michael Cohen did, right? So she testifies, and she said, by the way, that she didn't feel like a law was broken. She didn't think that Trudeau had crossed the line and violating the law. She didn't even feel that she was

being directed to kill this prosecution. She felt she was being unduly pressured, right? The same day, Michael Cohen is basically testifying that the President of the United States sat down and wrote him a fucking check for 25,000, thousand dollars to break a law and pay a hush money payment to a porn star right so the the discordance to an american canadian politics is kind of on display because trudeau's engulfed in this huge

scandal their calls from resign for doing something that is not nearly as extreme and illegal as what we all learned trump had done in the united states the same day yeah like i am you know you can't see how this happened you're in government you start to hear this major company it's like one of the biggest canadian companies you start to hear like oh shit this whole company could be put out of business? Like, that's a huge fucking problem. Can we call over and just say, like, is there some way that we cannot put this company out of business? Like,

I, on the one end, while I totally see that there's this error of impropriety of intervening in the justice system, you can also see how human beings could be like, isn't there just some other way that this doesn't have to shut down a major Canadian company and put 10,000 people out of work? I think that's an argument,

like, if I was advising Trudeau, just own it. You know, just say, like, yeah, you know what? Like, I just, I was worried about all these Canadians being put out of work and what that would do to their families. If you've got 10,000 jobs, that's probably many tens of thousands of people would be effective by this. And it's my job as Prime Minister Canada to try to avoid that thing from happening. You know, I think he should just own what he did and explain why and not look like he's being caught at something, but make his case and let the voters decide. Yeah, I'm with you. I need to learn more about this. But, you know, meanwhile, Trump's about to catch a RICO case.

So, you know, it's all about perspective. So I brought us down. I'm going to bring us back up. Because I want to yell about Jared for a second. First, Jared, I think yesterday, was in Saudi Arabia, pitching his ridiculous, never going to happen made-up Middle East plan. So I just want to flag how morally bankrupt it is to go sit down with Muhammad bin Salman after he ordered the execution of a journalist and had him dismembered and this paid no price for it.

So it's disgusting. Can we just talk about yesterday? Because talking about a snapshot, you got Donald Trump with Kim Jong-un sitting there praising him and, you know, absolving him for killing an American. You've got Jared sitting there praising MBS, palling around with him after he killed Jamal Khashoggi. You got Michael Cohen, like showing up with receipts of Donald Trump's crimes in front of Congress. You've got, like, racist Republican House members screaming and fulminating and, and, you've got. doing anything they can to defend. I mean, if you were to take one snapshot of the Trump presidency, like yesterday might be the day. It was quite a day. So when we sat down at this table,

you got a breaking news alert that I wouldn't let you read because I wanted you to react in real time. So as we sat down to this, I haven't read the full story yet. The New York Times reported that President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant Jared a top secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence official and the White House's top lawyer. I mean, that is, that is a, that should be an administration. ending scandal. Yeah, yeah. To, it's not just the, like, sensitive.

He gets the most sensitive intelligence in the world. Yes. And he has had an air of seeming corrupted from the very beginning because of the cutteries buying out his buildings and his friends in the Saudi Arabia. Like, it is appalling. It's so fucking appalling on so many levels. And I'll allow myself the one thing of, like, can you imagine if Obama had to give Malia fucking security clearance?

But, okay, first of all, like, the MBS thing is relevant here because the reason why he probably wasn't getting clearance is that the intelligence when he thought he was susceptible to blackmail because of these dirty deals he'd been doing with foreign investors. You're seeing the fucking worry that they have, right? Which is that this guy, this fucking neophyte, New York observer owning, New Jersey fucking dirty ass real estate developer, prep school. hack is sitting over there talking to a murderous dictator for Saudi Arabia and he knows all the intelligence. He knows all the covert operations. He's like, oh, here's how we

hack you. And he can tell MBS. He can say to MBS hey, here's everything I know about what we're doing in the Middle East. Here are all the covert operations we got going on in the Middle East, MBS. That's exactly what they're trying to prevent. So like we see yesterday in these pictures of him palling around with his murderer exactly the scenario

that these guys were worried about. That's the first point. The second point is, Jared fucking Kushner doesn't have to work in government. Like, we shouldn't start from, I mean, let's roll back the tape to write off the election. I think people were shocked. I remember the first story came out that Jared and Ivanka were even getting security clearances and people like, well, that's crazy. Because why would they work in government?

What qualification do they have to work in government? Ivanka Trump makes a bunch of shitty fucking handbags that you can only sell because they're getting trademarks from China because they're corrupt, okay? So these fucking people come into government, right, when they don't. even need to be there. It's not like this is some essential guy. It's not like this is like General Patton on the on the fucking eve of the DDA invasion. We're like, okay, Patton has a bad temper. He wouldn't get a security clearance. But General Isaacs and Howard says we really need him to fucking storm the beaches. So we'll waive the rules for this. We're waiving the rules

for mediocrity in this administration. We're waiving the rules for like outright nepotism and corruption. And it's just like staring at you right in the face. And the fact that the the president of the United States is doing this. And then they've got some fucking asshole sitting in the executive office building, I know if people follow this story, the whistleblower, who's probably the reason we know about this, is a dwarf. And a lovely woman. Okay, like, I interacted with her. Like, by the way, like, she's not a political person. He put the files about this out of her reach. Literally. I mean, how cruel is that? Like, her job is to read files. You are a horrible person. If you do that, you say, oh, okay, you're only, you know, three or four feet tall. So I'm going to put the fucking files up here. Now you won't be able to do your job. Yeah. Like, these are all the worst people. The worst people in the world. I mean, I think it was just a reminder that he,

Kushner had this meeting with Sergei Kislyak way back in the day and tried to create a special secret channel via their embassy. Like, the sirens have been flashing reds since the first day. Do you remember the secure communications line? Yeah, the secure communication show. Oh, man, I'm so glad that I didn't let you read that story because that was exactly what I wanted to see. So our team here looks a little freaked out.

I'm sorry, guys. We're good. We have a really good team that puts us all together. Yeah. And they, I could sense, I don't know if there was a discomfort there. I was loving it. You guys are okay? You're good?

You're good? Cool. Good. So a final quick update out of Israel again. So last episode we talked about how BB Netanyahu, the prime minister, was cutting deals with these really extreme Israeli right-wing political parties. They've been compared to Nazism. That's how extreme they are.

By rabbis. By rabbis. To protect himself politically. Well, today we know why. Israel's attorney general announced that he's going to file charges again. B, B, B, and not one, not two, but three different charges. Those charges are bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. So to give you a little more specifics, he's accused of offering regulatory help to a media

company exchange for good press coverage. He's accused of accepting thousands of dollars, actually hundreds of thousands of dollars of gifts from a billionaire friends, stuff like cigars and champagne and stuff. He's also accused of offering help to a major newspaper in return for good coverage. If the case goes forward, he will be the first sitting prime minister to be indicted. Also, he's up for re-election in 40 days. I should note that there's like a whole bunch of other allegations out there that get even crazier. I did an episode on February 23rd of 2018 with Natan Gutman from the forward,

where he walked me through all these things. They're all like case 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. One of them involves submarines. It is wild, man. Wild stuff. So, like, this sounds pretty bad. Yeah, yeah. It does because it's, um,

it's crimes and it's corruption, but also it intersects with what has gone wrong in Israeli politics. So like the media stuff, for instance, is all about him trying to essentially co-op the media to leverage certain financial relationships and his ability to license media in order to have like a friendly media, right? So it's both kind of garden variety corruption,

like BB-winning, I guess, a bunch of cigars and shemps. campaign and stuff. Dazzar. But also him wanting to kind of rig their system in a corrupt way in order to lock in favorable media coverage. So in that way, it's actually, you know, it's almost, it's not just a personal corruption scandal, it's a political corruption scandal. And some of these other things bring in, like, defense contracts and, and, and look,

I think the two points here are one, like all these chickens are coming home to Roos for all these guys, like B, B, Trump, you know, it's like they thought they'd get away with this that they would never face the consequences. And these things have been hanging around BB for a while. And what you see now is, like, no, these actions catch up to you. And, you know, yesterday for Trump, it was Michael Cohen testimony today for BBC's indictments. And, like, he's clearly, you know, I mean, not to, well, yeah, I will prejudge it. I mean, he's guilty of something.

I mean, I think they have recordings of them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, they got him dead to rights. For the attorney general that he appointed, right, to take, or in his cabinet to take the step of indicting him, like, it seems like they have him dead to rights. And the writing is on the wall, and this question of can he somehow get reelected and kind of fight this out in the political space here.

Again, not like Trudeau, who is not accused of a crime here. This is a guy who's accused of committing multiple crimes and has been indicted for them. I think the second thing, it kind of also shows that, like, being in power for a really long time is corrupting. That's a good point. There's like the ultimate, you know, the old saying, like, you know, absolute power corrupts. Like this is now advertisement for term moments. Like, BB's just been around forever. You know, he's been prime minister now.

It's the second time, and he's been there for 10 years. He's been making deals the whole time. He's been building financial relationships. And I think the BB, not that he was like some great guy in 2009, but like, I think he begins to think that the rules don't apply to him, right? That he can get away with everything. And usually because there's delayed consequences, it feels like you're getting away with it. And then you do more and more of it, right?

And so I also think there's a way. warning here that, you know, there's a danger when one man is dominant in a political system for so long. That's what corruption gravitates towards. And, you know, BBS has this come up and, you know, what we'll see is the opposition, you know,

which we haven't talked about, they've all coalesced. So basically all the anti-BBB parties have basically said, we're just going to get behind Benny Gans, this one guy who's kind of a centrist, you know, and just see if we can dislodge this guy. I mean, like, that's the main.

project of the opposition now and there's an election coming up and and my hope is you in the past before elections BBs come to the US to get a boost so I think he's going to APEC yeah so in 2015 it's when he came to the US gave that speech excruiting a bomb in front of Congress went to APEC got a giant wet kiss and that was weeks for his election he went back and he barely eaked it out after doing a bunch of fear-mongering about Arabs now he's got an election coming a few weeks he's going to come to the US let's see how he's received you know I think Americans have a say in this, because Bibi, part of his message back home is I know how to deal with the Americans.

The Americans love me. And I think if people don't like this, then they shouldn't go along with that. And if APEC is really concerned about this kind of Jewish power, fascist party in his coalition, then you don't have to give him the platform. You don't have to let him speak. You don't have to give him standing ovation. That's what he wants. And if he gets it, you're just helping him. So why we should no longer, whether it's Trump or Bibi or any of these guys, be aiding and abetting this level of corruption?

option. I agree. We should all, one other, can I read, did you see the UN report on Gaza? Yes. So 100, you know, basically finding potential war crimes, including 35 children, I think, were killed. Two journalists were killed. And the UN found that there were easy ways for the Israeli snipers to know. The journalists were wearing their journalist vests. The children were children and could be seen through the kind of, technology that the Israelis were using. I'm curious where this goes because we all watched on the day that Trump moved the embassy, all these people being shot in Gaza, and that was one of the days it was investigated. I just don't know, even if you think that Hamas is to blame for incitement, obviously to blame for rockets, even if you can mount an argument that Israel has to defend its

border and you've got a bunch of people coming and Hamas is jending that up. 35 children is a lot of children to kill. And, you know, I do hope that there's at least a sincere effort to reckon with that. Yeah. And what unfortunately happens often when these types of reports come out is the Israelis rightly point out that the UN and the Human Rights Council at a lot of the institutions at the UN unfairly single out Israel over and over and over again. Yes, which is true, which is true. Absolutely 100% true. But what the side effect of that is, unfortunately, then we don't end up.

debating the substance of the report. They're making changes or doing internal fact-finding to actually suss out wrongdoing. It can both be true that the UN has been one-sided and too often singles at Israel and doesn't put enough scrutiny on groups like Kamaas and that Israel needs to look at, well, how did this many children get killed and what were, you know, at a minimum not violent attack, you know, these children weren't violently attacking Israel. Well, that's all I got for this bonus. No, it's a good bonus.

What a North Korea summit? What a summit, man? Let's hope this time on Tuesday when we record that there isn't like escalation in the past. It feels like foreign policy, though, is going to be with us for the next two years. It ain't hard filling the show every week. There's a lot going on. And it's getting more and more. I mean, again, you're seeing Trump move more and more in this direction because he's not constrained here like he's at home.

So, you know, we may think that the election is going to be about Medicare for All, Green New Deal. It may very well end up being about Venezuela, Illinois. Korea, Iran, you know, and these other things. Yeah. Stay tuned. Stay tuned, guys. And great stuff on Jessica Stern. That was a great interview, by the way. Thanks. She's really smart and, like, doing incredible work with 20 people. So, yeah.

Thanks again, everybody. Thanks. Have a great week.