Pod Save the World - Bye Bye Bolton

Episode Date: September 11, 2019

Tommy and Ben bid farewell to Trump’s former National Security Advisor, John Bolton. Then they discuss Trump’s proposed sleepover party with the Taliban at Camp David and reports that the US had to extract a spy from Russia. After updates about Brexit and the Hong Kong protests, they dig into the upcoming Israeli elections and Trump’s new child Middle East peace negotiator. They end with the latest on Iran and thoughts about the death of Robert Mugabe and the 18th anniversary of 9/11. Then Senator and presidential candidate Michael Bennet joins to discuss how to protect our elections from Russian interference.

Welcome back to Potsave the World. This is Tommy Vitor. And I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, it's kind of a running joke that every week I like sincerely say that it's a packed show. But today was kind of a whole other level. And so I am so excited to get to record this conversation with you because wow. Yeah, we're in another dimension now. Yeah. So you're in D.C. right now. You're at the heart of the matter. Are you getting dinner with John Bolton tonight? Is that accurate? Well, you know, he was texting me to tell me that he resigned instead of. being fired. But that's about it. An important distinction. So of course, we're going to cover John Bolton's firing. We're going to talk about Trump's sleepover party with the Taliban at Camp David. We'll talk about some reports that the U.S. had to extract a spy out of Russia who have been put at risk, some Brexit updates, some Hong Kong updates. The Israeli elections are fast approaching and there's a lot happening there, including baby Jared Kushner, becoming the Middle East peace on voice. We'll unpack that brilliant idea. Some Iran updates. Robert Mugabe's death.

And then we'll go to my conversation with senator and presidential candidate Michael Bennett. And finally, at the end of the episode, this is coming out on 9-11. And I was hoping to reflect on the 18 years since that awful day. And then moreover, some of the national security decisions and, frankly, mistakes that have been made and what maybe we can learn from them. Because I think that's an important reflection, too. So like I said, pack show, buddy. Yeah. Buckle up, bordeaux.

Quick housekeeping notes. So there are really important elections coming up in Virginia this November. We can actually take control of Virginia's state legislature by flipping just a few seats, which would be unbelievably important right before the next round of congressional redistricting and also important for Virginia legislative reasons. So in other words, we have the chance to undo some of the terrible Republican gerrymandering and literally redraw the maps. Crooked Media, we've been working with our friends at Data for Progress to target and raise

money for 14 key races in Virginia where Democrats have the best chance of winning and where we figured out that your dollars will go the furthest. So we're about halfway towards our fundraising goal. If folks who are listening want to help and fight back against gerrymandering and support some great candidates in Virginia, go to vote saveamerica.com slash jerry spelled g-e-r-r-R-R-Y. That's vote saveamerica.com slash jerry. If you chip in five bucks for a state-level race like this, it can go a really long way. So that's all I got. All right. Let's talk about the news. First topic I got Ben is bye-bye John Bolton.

So, again, we do a lot of dark depressing news here on POTS of the World. This first topic is as good as it gets. On Tuesday, President Trump tweeted that he informed his national security advisor, John Bolton, that his services were no longer needed. And he added in the tweets that he disagreed with many of Bolton's suggestions. Trump was immediately fact-checked as we were all used to having happened. But in this case, he was fact-checked by John Bolton himself, who tweeted that I offer to resigned last night and President Trump said let's talk about it tomorrow. So that was weird.

Bolton was also texting Fox and Friends hosts to correct the record and say you resigned. You alluded to this earlier. Weirdly, Bolton was supposed to join Mike Pompeo at a White House briefing just hours after all this went down. So just stepping back here, like I feel like I can say pretty unequivocally that the world is a safer place with John Bolton gone. He is a right-wing ideologue. He's been known to cook intelligence and leak and run a terrible policy process. But we should also be honest that a lot of damage has been done. Bolton escalated tensions with Iran. He pulled us out of arms control treaties. He forced this dumb showdown with Venezuela that has really gone nowhere. The list really, it goes on and on. But you know what, Ben, today I'm going to be a little bit happy

that this creep is gone. And I guess someone I've never heard of named Charlie Cooperman is now the acting National Security Advisor. What are you doing to celebrate Bolton Independence Day, Ben? Well, you know, and perhaps the single best place to be when this news broke, I was in Ilhan Omar's office meeting with her, friend of the pod. So that was my initial celebration. I think, you know, you can breathe a sigh of some relief. Donald Trump is still the president, so it's moderated.

But it's hard to overstate the danger that this man posed to. the risk of war with Iran, the risk of war with Venezuela. I mean, he was just competent enough to be truly dangerous. I think, you know, we should note he leaves kind of a wrecking ball legacy. You know, when he came into that job, that's when the more belligerent elements of the Trump farm policy really took off. So the abandonment of the Iran deal and this kind of ramp up to conflict with Iran, the abandonment of all the arms control agreements that, you know, you and I have discussed, it's been a hobby horse of Bolton's for some time, these bizarre videos that he would tape about the impending collapse of the Maduro government that never materialized, you know,

obviously the adversarial approach to China that's escalated. You know, and basically, like, this guy was using the fact that his kind of Fox News foreign policy had sufficient overlap with Trump's to really make the world a more dangerous place and to get us like to the brink of war. I mean, you know, Trump almost bombing Iran had John Bolton's fingerprints all over it and it's clearly what he wanted. And, you know, we really are safer with him gone, albeit not nearly out of the woods, given who's still president, given the fact that he knew how to work the instruments of the U.S. government, you know, to get his agenda done. And because he had a, you know, disinterested and incompetent president, he had a lot of running room to get things done. And,

you know, so we're unequivocally better off without him, although it does speak to the kind of chaos and dysfunction in U.S. national security that I don't even know who this person is, who's now the national security adviser. Yeah. Nobody really knows who the Secretary of Defense is. He's a non-entity. You know, Mike Pompeo looms as this kind of dominant figure, and that doesn't make me feel particularly good. Yeah, I mean, right. Pompeo. was definitely ascendant. So real quick on Bolton, so, you know, there's been some reporting in the hour since this firing. The Washington Post reported that Trump has been frustrated with Bolton for a long time. They said that Bolton and Mike Pompeo's relationship has soured. But it sounds like the real

deal breaker was that recently Bolton has refused to go on television to defend Trump's foreign policy positions like on Russia or on Afghanistan. Maggie Haberman over the New York Times reported that Bolton had canceled appearances on Sunday shows. So, you know, Trump was. in getting what you really want out of a national security advisor, which is a good cable surrogate. You've got to be fucking kidding me. But like, you know, like Mike Pompeo has made this reputation for himself as a more reasonable person. He's a total right-wing ideologue. I hate that everyone's talking about him possibly getting elected to the Senate in Kansas. Everything he is touched in that White House has turned to shit. He might put a, you know, less obnoxious, less mustached

face on things when he goes on TV to defend it, but like he's just as much a hardliner on Iran, for example, as Bolton. Maybe it does sound like he was in favor of these peace talks with the Taliban, which we'll get to in a second. So it's a net benefit, I guess, with Bolton gone, but Pompeo still is scary. Yeah, I mean, one final word on Bolton, I mean, this could not have a more destructive legacy, right? One of the chief proponents of the Iraq War and the Bush administration, you know, this belligerence to arms control over decades, obviously the damage that he's done in the Trump administration. It seems to me, Tommy, like, apart from the lack of willingness to be a TV surrogate, not as if John Bolton was a particularly great TV surrogate, but put that aside, they're gearing

up for the UN General Assembly meetings. And, you know, the rumor out there is that, you know, on the one hand, Trump seems to really want a meeting with the Iranians. And, you know, Pompeo even today in this press event continually kept saying that. Trump was willing to meet. I mean, they seem to be chasing the Iranians for meeting because the Iranians haven't said that they want to meet. That's obviously something that Bolton would have objected to. At the same time, the French are trying to have the UN be a venue to kind of return to some Iran deal type situation where, you know, the Iranians are kind of returning to what they were already doing, which is complying with the Iran deal before Trump pulled out in exchange for some,

you know, relief from sanctions, also known as. Obama's Iran deal. But it speaks to the kind of utter incoherence of the Trump farm policy that they basically created this crisis with Iran by pulling out of the Iran deal and ramping up sanctions and belligerent rhetoric and threats. The Iranians responded by doing the same and resuming their nuclear program and now, lo and behold, recognizing they have no options, they're trying to chase around the Iranians for a meeting, right? The utter incoherence of the policy that Trump pursued that Bolton carried out has led them to this dead end. end where Trump doesn't really feel like getting into the war that his policies were getting us

into. But the only alternative is something like what Obama did, brokered by the Europeans who hated what Trump did and pulling out of the deal. And that's a great window into the worldview of people like Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump who want to have it both ways. They want to have all of the confrontation with Iran and the trolling of Obama. But then when they see the damage that's wrought, they're trying to climb out of that hole. And so it's really not a high water mark here. No, not at all. Okay, let's talk about Afghanistan because I do suspect this was also a big point of contention between Trump and Bolton and Bolton and Pompeo. So we are recording this on Tuesday, September 10th, is going to go out on September 11th, which is the 18th anniversary of

the 9-11 attacks. The war in Afghanistan began shortly after. The Trump administration, recently over the last year or so, has been holding peace talks in an effort to end that war, but they hit a bit of a roadblock over the weekend in the form of some Trump tweets. On Saturday, Trump tweeted that he was planning to meet with Ashraf Ghani, the president of Afghanistan, as well as members of the Taliban at Camp David this weekend to essentially ink a peace deal. He said he then canceled those talks via a follow-up tweet, blaming a recent Taliban attack that killed a U.S. service member in Kabul. I should just say, I don't buy that exploitation at all.

These peace talks have been going on for 10 months to a year. 16 Americans have been killed in combat in Afghanistan during that time. So subsequent reporting suggests that Trump canceled the meeting because he wanted to be framed as him bringing the parties together at Camp David to finalize a deal and being the great dealmaker. He didn't want to be seen as announcing a deal that had already been worked out, even though his team had already briefed the thing to the press. So I guess, Ben, in essence, he's perpetuating a war because he didn't like the rollout strategy for the peace talks, which is great.

It's also clear that he could. could care less about the Afghani, I mean, he's ready to force Ashraf Gandhi to come to the U.S. to announce a deal that no one in Afghanistan likes. And now he's called it off in this high-profile way right before Afghanistan has elections on September 28th, which are now more likely to be targeted by the Taliban for attack. So I'll pause there. I mean, Ben, what the hell, man? Yeah, I mean, there's so much wrong with this. I mean, nothing wrong with diplomacy with the Taliban. But, I mean, first of all, you know, having them to Camp David the week of 9-11 just so completely and utterly tone-deaf to start with. Second, it seems like, again, as you mentioned,

the Afghan government appears to be totally sidelined on this. This is a deal that should be about the future of Afghanistan, and, you know, it should be on Afghan soil, and it should be with the Afghan government front and center. By us dealing with the Taliban, we're almost kind of elevating them, And us dealing with the Taliban without kind of the full buy-in of the Afghan government, it gives the appearance, you know, of us essentially recognizing the Taliban in some fashion as the interlocutor and not this government that we've been supporting. The deal that really needs to happen is between the Afghan government and the Taliban about what the future of that country is. I'd also say to your point about the recklessness of Trump wanting to do this in the first place, he doesn't need to get in the room. You know, diplomacy can work without the president having to insert himself. or herself, hopefully.

And, you know, so you have this bizarre scenario where, you know, a deal was almost ready to be signed. And the only reason it's not happening is because Trump wanted this kind of bizarre photo op with the Taliban. Yeah, he wanted credit. Yeah. I mean, it shows you that he, like, took the reward incentive from the fawning coverage of his Kim Jong-un summits that, you know, we've detailed have yielded nothing, really, and just wanted

to play back that tape again by getting. the Taliban. And the fact that he, you know, pulled out of this is really dangerous. As you said, the Taliban is going to pick up attacks in response to this. Like, people will die, like, because gasoline has been poured on this fire. I mean, like, just because we have a petulant president. And this is a pattern that we've seen. You know, with North Korea, he wanted to be at the center of attention. So we had head of state summit before the diplomacy was done. Now at the Taliban, he wants to be in the center of attention. And so the whole thing blows up even though the deal was apparently done.

And the common threat here is it's not about America. It's not about American security. It's not about the Afghan people. It's just about Trump and just about the appearance that he wants to give. As if it's like some New York real estate deal where he looks like a smart guy, it's a freaking Taliban. This isn't like buying a skyscraper or something. And it's making Americans less safe. It's making the world more dangerous.

Yeah. There's just no reason to have these. goons of Camp David. It's just so absurd. You don't need to do it. It's a venue that's, you know, got a history of like the Camp David Accords and we hosted the G7 and the idea that you would take the kind of gold standard of an American welcome. You give a visit to Camp David to people who've kind of earned this privilege of coming to this hallowed ground just because you want to photo up with the Taliban as a part of your re-election campaign to draw down troops. Yeah. It's insane. If you want to draw down troops,

do it. If you want to deal with the Taliban, do it. Just don't make it all about yourself. Camp David is staffed by a bunch of active duty members of the military. Imagine being the Marine having to serve some fucking Taliban goon, his cheeseburger or something. Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, just because you want to satiate the ego of the president. It's just idiotic. I want to talk about peace talks in the politics around them for a second because there's a long history here. I mean, we could go all the way back to when we were actually funding the Taliban that we're now fighting in the late 70s and 80s, but we'll skip that part. But people should know that the Obama administration held secret peace negotiations with

the Taliban when he was president. It started, I think, in late 2010. For a while, this was like top secret, a really closely held process that started with just trying to figure out basic facts like, is the person we are talking to legit? Like, is this individual actually able to speak for the Taliban and deliver on promises? As the talks went on, each side figured out ways to take. test the other. They developed lists of demands. We wanted the Taliban to renounce terrorism,

express support for the Afghan constitution, and give us back a U.S. Army member named Bo Bergdahl, who had been taken captive. The Taliban wanted back five Gitmo detainees. They wanted to open an office outside of Afghanistan that they could use for negotiations. And the hope and the thinking was that if we can negotiate and deliver on these smaller things, it gives everyone more confidence in our ability to make a bigger deal. Now, ultimately, those talks under Obama blew up, because he, unlike the Trump team, actually cared what the Afghans thought. Hamid Karzai, who was then the president of Afghanistan, just blew the things up several times. He was a whole other problem, but that's a different conversation.

Several years later in 2014, Obama ended up doing just that prisoner swap that got Bo Bergdahl home and sent these five Taliban guys from Gitmo to Qatar, where they still live under house arrest. Now, a quick aside on that that gets me to the politics. I mean, at the time of that Bergdahl swap, you were still in the White House, I was out. everyone went ballistic. John McCain, who was in favor of a swap at one point, said that the Taliban five were the hardest of the hardcore Taliban members and that we're putting people at risk and they're going to go back to the battlefield. You should all know that those guys are now part of the team negotiating this deal with Trump. So presumably they were going to get to go hang out at Camp

David. So again, like, I'm glad Trump is talking to these guys. I'm glad he has the political space to try and make a deal. But it just infuriates me that the only reason he has that space to make peace is not because Republicans decided it's in our national security interest to end the war, or because the press stopped reflexively treating talking to adversaries like it's something that's weak, but because Republicans just do whatever Trump says, and the press tends to parrot their national security attacks against Democrats. Yeah. And you know, you gave a good summary there of the history of talks. And everybody's kind of known what the deal is on the table, which is at some version of a Taliban commitment to not have Afghanistan be a safe haven for terrorist attacks outside of Afghanistan

to cut all ties with al-Qaeda, which they've kind of gradually been doing. But then the sticking points became also what is the deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban? That's why we used to call it an Afghan-led process, that essentially, you know, how can this deal be in service of both the removal of U.S. troops, but also some measure of stability in Afghanistan, some measure protection for populations like the women and girls who've made gains in the last 18 years. And again, Trump seems to have tossed some of those concerns overboard. But to your political point, it totally undermines the credibility of the United States when it's so transparent that these issues are purely politicized and that people take positions clearly out of

convenience. I mean, the Republicans were literally lighting them on fire, of themselves on fire, just because we did the... the swap, this is a much more robust diplomatic engagement with the Taliban, including with the guys that were released in the swap that was going to be in Camp David, and it's nowhere near the firestorm that the Bo Bergdahl thing was. And this is not just me saying, like, oh, imagine if it was Obama and look at the hypocrisy. It's, what is the message that sends to the rest of the world about the seriousness with which our political leaders are able to deal with these issues, that they clearly take positions purely based on the political convenience.

of the day and not by actually giving a shit about what the best approach is and how to go about doing it, you know? And that to me is what's so grotesque here. And you actually saw this in real time as this thing unraveled because the same people in the Trump administration who were prepared to bring these people to Camp David, I'm thinking of Mike Pompeo here, he then gets deployed on the Sunday shows and starts bragging about how many Taliban they've killed in the last week or so. Like we're back in Vietnam. Like that matters. Yeah. Well, it's like the body can't, Did we learn nothing from history? Like the only metrics that people could use for success in Vietnam were how many people we'd killed.

You know, we've been killing Taliban for 18 years, has done nothing to defeat them or to eliminate the challenges in Afghanistan. But, you know, because Trump has now got a political problem because, you know, he decided to tweet about this and he blew it all up. Now we're back to boasting about killing these people. I mean, it just makes us look fundamentally unserious. Yeah. Here's some stats about Afghanistan. It has gone on longer than World War I. World War II and the Korean War combined.

2,400 U.S. servicemen, women have died in Afghanistan, as have approximately 1,000 NATO and coalition forces. The U.S. has spent more than $2 trillion on the conflict. And obviously, I have in front of me the coalition side. There have been innumerable casualties among the Afghan security forces, civilians, just like untold suffering. And so if you want to learn more about the war in Afghanistan and the Bobergdahl Swap and the history of peace talks, check out a book called American Cypher by our

reporter named Matt Farwell. He was a guest on the show a while back, but it's a hell of a good book that walks through all the ways, you know, that controversy was politicized and the ways Matt thinks the Obama administration screwed up. I thought I was an honest look at it. Yeah, no, and I, you know, I was, you know, skeptical way back when in 2009, when we did our surge in Afghanistan, you know, I think at a certain point, like, the evidence has been pretty clear here that we had a mission to carry out and, you know, taking out al-Qaeda, and on the 9-11 anniversary, it's worth pointing out, like, we did what Americans thought we went to Afghanistan to do, right? If someone told you a 9-11 that we were going to kill bin Laden and basically decimate al-Qaeda's

leadership in that part of the world, you'd think, okay, well, that's the mission, the fact that we're still there 18 years later and that there are these people at Lindsay Graham who can constantly justify just fighting this war in perpetuity for reasons that go well beyond anything that people thought we were signing it for at the beginning, you know, it's time to bring this to a close. and the fact that that that might be in any way delayed because of Trump's ego is completely outrageous. Yes, disgusting. All right. Let's close the book on that one for now and talk about a very weird story about a U.S. spy in Russia. CNN broke this story this week. They reported that in 2017, the U.S. had to extract one of its highest level covert sources in the Russian government because of security risks. CNN said that that decision was driven in part by a concern that Trump and his team had missed.

handled classified intelligence that could expose our source to the Russian government. Obviously, that would get that person killed. This exfiltration of the spy apparently happened right after the infamous May 2017 meeting when Trump blabbed about classified intelligence to the Russian foreign minister and the ambassador to the U.S. The New York Times and the Post did some follow on reporting today. And the Times piece particularly contradicted some of the CNN reporting. They said that there's no public evidence that Trump directly endangered this.

source or was the reason that the CIA had to pull this person out. Apparently, that said that media inquiries about this source led to a fear about this individual's safety and the need to extract them. It kind of rings true to me. I mean, you remember at the time there was all this reporting that, you know, we knew that Putin himself had ordered the election interference at some point. People within their intelligence services are going to try to figure out how we know that. And the Times also offered a lot more detail about this source. Apparently, the CIA recruited a mid-level Russian official literally decades ago, who ultimately, ultimately, ultimately rose through the ranks and had top-level access to Putin's inner circle.

That information was so critical to the understanding of this election interference. And now it just sounds like we are flying a little blind here. So, Ben, it's hard for you and I to know what's true here. Obviously, we wouldn't talk about it if we did. But two thoughts. One, like tough time to lose a good window into Putin's thinking. Two, the story is a great illustration of why agencies like the CIA sometimes freak out about protecting classified information and how,

challenging it is to declassify things as sensitive as the discussion around the 2016 election interference. I think you and I have talked a lot about how we think there's overclassification that sources and methods are named too much. But when you start talking about human intelligence, which is like individuals like this who are helping out the U.S. for a variety of reasons, like putting them at risk really is just unbelievably damaging. Yeah. And look, like you say, we don't know the full facts here. I think what is clear is, whether it was relevant to this particular decision or not. Like, Donald Trump is not a careful man. You know, I mean, there were the reports early in the administration that he had the meeting with

the farm minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov and Ambassador Kiesliak, the Russian ambassador in Washington, and revealed some highly sensitive information that might have compromised some sources and methods. I remember being with President Obama and myself getting all these briefings, and oftentimes you get information that, you know, you can't really describe it. when you're meeting with foreign interlocutors, because if you describe something a certain way, another government might be able to kind of reverse engineer and figure out, how would they know that? You know, and like, might it be a person? And this gets to your point about human intelligence, which is the whole way in which we gather information from other people around the world,

is that those people have confidence that, number one, if they come to us, they won't be burned, right? So they tell us something, we will protect their identities and how we use that information. in ways that will keep them safe. Also, frankly, they have to believe that they're serving like a greater cause. And like a lot of people, and again, I'm not talking about this Russian guy or woman, whoever it is. But like a lot of times the motivation is they believe that America is standing on the right side of things, right? And I think Trump has put both of those things at risk.

Like he's so demonstrably sloppy and how he talks about things. You know, he's been casual classified information on Twitter even that if you're a human source, you might be thinking like, I'm not sure I want to risk my life by sharing something the Americans. And he's also kind of taken away that moral standing that might attract people to want to work with us as well, right? And so it does speak to like their national security dimensions here to having someone who's so like temperamentally unfit to be in this position. Yes, agreed. All right, we're sorry. We'll keep monitoring this one. It does seem like this has now become one of those open secrets where like everyone knows who this individual's name is and they're

just withholding reporting on it. I certainly don't know. But man, I hope this like, as we know, the Russians. They've killed people. They've killed people in the United Kingdom and other places. Yeah, and they never stop chasing these people down. It's a lifelong message that gets sent. So it's very scary. Let's talk about our good friends in the United Kingdom. Last week, when we recorded, Prime Minister Boris Johnson had just initiated his big Brexit play, and it was just beginning to fall apart. Since then, it has gotten catastrophically worse for Boris. He has now lost two votes to force anewel. election, the opposition passed a law that will keep him from getting a no-deal Brexit. And because Johnson suspended Parliament until mid-October, which at the time seemed like an

effort to prevent parliament from blocking him and all his various machinations, he now appears to have united the opposition against himself and then drastically reduced his legislative options. So he's kind of boxed himself in. He also, you know, kicked 21 lawmakers out of his own party because they wanted to prevent a no-deal Brexit. His own brother, quit the government, so it's getting a bit Shakespearean. Ben, it's like kind of being written in hard news stories that this is the worst start ever for a prime minister. I don't really know the history of various prime ministers in the UK.

I guess so there still is this concern that even if Boris is bumbling along, if there's a new election, they might still see a vote in support of Brexit. So I'm not sure how good to feel yet. No, I mean, what's basically happened? And we had, you know, we set this up pretty well last week because we were talking about how You know, he might not even get this election that he wanted. But clearly what the labor is doing is trying to ensure that whatever election is held, and there's going to have to be an election at some point, that they can at least bank that there's not a no-deal Brexit on this deadline that Bors had pointed to, which is the October 31st one.

So that essentially, you know, you push the election back so that you can make sure that this legislation that passed the parliament saying that they're against a no-deal Brexit can't be somehow overturned by having an election. forward and then Boris trying to take them out. At the same time, to your point, like, yeah, this is a huge humiliation of Boris, a huge tactical blunder by Boris, like a huge self-owned by Boris. I would also point out that it's a test case in what Republicans have not done in the United States, right? There were, you know, Boris said, if you oppose me, I'm going to destroy your political career in the conservative party. I'm not going to let you run on the conservative list going forward, which is the same thing that Republicans are first. of, right, that I'll get primary, the Trump will tweet in support of my primary opponent. Well, you know what?

There were enough people with principles in the Conservative Party to stand up to that and say, well, I don't care. I'm happy to leave this party. I'm happy to suffer the repercussions. I think it was a massive bright spotlight shining on the cowardice of Republicans to not do the same thing. In terms of what happens now, though, you're right, there's going to have to be some election here to resolve this. The opposition is somewhat fractured here because the Labor Party hasn't coming out forthrightly, forcefully and said, we are against Brexit. That's our position. The Liberal Democratic Party, another party in the UK, has taken that position. So there might be a situation where there's some fracturing of the opposition here, you know, and Boris is just trying to consolidate

the kind of right-wing forces there who do want to Brexit. So we don't necessarily know what the outcome will be. We do know that a more unified opposition under a clear leadership would probably stand a better chance here. I think that the difficulty is right, how to does this all end? They're making a no-deal Brexit like as hard as they can for Boris to realize, unless somehow this election really swings in his favor. But still, is the question then, are we going to revisit the Brexit question in totality and say, do we need a new referendum here that wasn't to leave the European Union at all? Or do we have to negotiate essentially the softest possible Brexit, the only one that could perhaps be acceptable to people when they actually

look at the consequences? And there's still not answers to those questions. And that's because the original decision to leave in the first place was found out on a bunch of lies to the British people so that when they actually see what the deal is, they don't want to follow through with it. And you get this political paralysis here. And frankly, at least Boris Johnson is the right man to be left holding the bag. That's right. A quick personal plug. So when we were at the White House, there was a great reporter at the State Department and then covering the White House named Mark Landler, who was on the Obama beat and then did the Trump beat for a couple years. Landler just parachuted into the UK to be the London Bureau Chief and is now covering this Boris Johnson debacle. So it's

really fun to watch him go from covering one shit show to the next. So follow Mark on Twitter if you want some real-time updates from someone who's as shocked by all this shit as we are. A great place to be like a farm policy nerd. So fun. Yeah. A little more good news, Ben. So when we recorded last week, I was in a very dark place about the Hong Kong protests. I said to you that I didn't think there was any chance that China would offer any concessions. And I am now very happy to say that I was wrong. So let's just wind back the clock about three months to remind everybody the context. The protests in Hong Kong started because of a bill before the legislature that would have allowed individuals, including foreigners, I might add. So anyone who just happened to fly into

Hong Kong would have been subject to this law to be extradited to China and then thrown into their horrible, opaque criminal justice system that understandably terrified everyone. And so a bunch of protesters took to the street to push for this bill to be permanently withdrawn, and they haven't stopped protesting since. So last week, right after we recorded, Carrie Lamb, the chief executive of Hong Kong, agreed to fully withdraw the extradition bill. It was a big win for the protesters. And frankly, if she had done this like two months ago, three months ago, it might have ended the protest.

But now the protesters are more dug in. Their list of demands has grown to include direct elections, which it's hard to imagine trying to agreeing to. I think they all see this as, you know, their moment to push for as much freedom as they can get before it's too late. It's been interesting to watch the protests evolve over time. I noticed that protesters are now marching to the U.S. consulate and asking for the U.S. and Trump to stand with Hong Kong. I think they're specifically referring to legislation that would apply sanctions to officials in Hong Kong who are suppressing democracy and human rights. There's a bipartisan bill called the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act that I imagine

they're talking to. So I don't, Ben, like, it was, I was glad to see this concession. My longer-term concern about how this ends is still stands, but I'm glad it's trending that way. Yeah, no, and look, we can't overestimate or overstate the scale of this victory here, right? These people in Hong Kong stood up to the most powerful authoritarian government in the world, and they won, you know, at least it for the time being on this specific issue that prompted the protest. That is an enormous and inspiring achievement that is due to their resilience. And look, let's be very clear. This is not what the Chinese government or the Hong Kong authorities wanted, right? Because they tried every other way. You know, first they tried to defend the law,

then they tried to pull back half of it, then they pulled it back, but said that they wouldn't take it off the table. Now they're taking it off the table. So whenever you have any politicians anywhere who are forced to continue to, you know, move the goalpost in answer to public opinion, it's an achievement. When you're doing it with. with a government in Beijing that is designed to not operate in response to democratic protests and public opinion, it's an even greater achievement. And I think, look, across the board here, let's just take a look at what's happened. You've got in Brexit, you know, Boris Johnson being humiliated, trying to take them out potentially with the no deal. In Hong Kong, you have this reversal

on the extradition law. You've got Trump, like canning John Bolton, because in part, because of the complete incoherence of their belligerent policies. Like, it has not been a good week for this kind of authoritarian nationalist trend that you and I've talked about a lot. And that's great. I mean, it just shows you that their ideas don't work and that people are willing to fight back. And that's such a powerful and important message for people to be taking right now. Now, sure, the Chinese will try other approaches now going forward to squeeze them and to kind of snuff this out and to try to reestablish greater authority over Hong Kong. but, you know, we also see that this is going to be a resilient movement of people in Hong Kong.

And so we don't know what the end of the story is. But I think we've been reminded that mass mobilization in democratic protest still has very much a place in the world of 2019 at a time when much of the talk has been about the decline of democracy. I think that's exactly right. I really hope the lesson is that even against seemingly impossible odds, protests can work. It's something we should really take to heart here in the United States. It's one note before we move on. Last week, I said that protesters in Hong Kong were using liquid nitrogen to render tear gas inert. That was based on a video that was circulating on Twitter that apparently was false.

So I don't know. I just figured I should correct the record. I still think these protesters are brave and innovative and impressive, but that was inaccurate. So I wanted to correct it. So the Israeli, speaking of pseudo-authoritarians, the Israeli elections are coming up on September 17th. Didn't they just have elections, you ask? Yes, they did in April. but they needed a do-over because Bibi Netanyahu was unable to form a coalition government.

So a reminder that Israeli elections are very different from ours. It's not a one-on-one race. It's this big free-for-all where like 30-plus parties compete for seats in the 120-seat Knesset. A party needs to win around 3.2% of the vote to get a seat. And then whoever can build a coalition that controls 61 of the 120 seats gets to run the government. Seems rather complicated. The two key players that people should watch are prime minister. Mr. B. B. Netanyahu and the Likud Party, and then Benny Gantz from the Blue and White Party,

which is a relatively new party. He's a former general. We here at Posit of the World have been just watching with bated breath to see what last minute nonsense B.B. Netanyahu pulls before the election, and he did not disappoint. So two things. First, Netanyahu accused his opponents of trying to steal the election because the Likud Party was unable to pass a bill, allowing them to film inside polling stations. Like in the U.S., there is little to no evidence of voter fraud in Israel. But, you know, shove it. a camera in someone's face sure can be intimidating. In last April's elections,

like hoot activists secretly recorded voters and said they were there to prevent voter fraud, and then they later took credit for low Arab turnout. So you decide what the goal is. Second, and more importantly, Netanyahu gave a speech today where he again pledged to annex parts of the West Bank. Netanyahu said he was waiting to actually physically take control of the territory out of respect for Trump,

but he's either signaling that, like, Trump has tacitly okayed this, move wink wink but overtly saying that like only i have the diplomatic chops to get trump to to be okay with this i saw npr tweeted that the u.s was informed ahead of time the nettingiahoo would be announcing the annexation pledge and they said the administration does not think that it precludes the possibility of a political settlement in the future which is just fucking ridiculous so i don't know ben like you know this is another pretty big test for trump in terms of his allies doing well in the world it's obviously a huge test for netting yahoo it's a big test for nettingia who it's a big for Israel's democracy. So this is a huge election. Well, and it's worth pointing out that one of the

reasons why Prime Minister Nanyahu wants to win this election so desperately is he might go to prison if he doesn't. He's under indictment. And one of the reasons why they couldn't form a government is as like the first order of business for a new government, Nanyahu wants to pass a bill saying that you cannot indict the prime minister like here in the United States, right? So he's literally running for, you know, his personal freedom here. And let's be clear. Like, as with the report, Republican Party here, if your strategy is voter suppression, if your strategy is to keep people or to intimidate people from voting and then to attack anybody who's seeking to get out the vote on the other side as somehow undermining democracy, you are not a democratic leader, right? This guy, like Trump

and like a lot of these people we've talked about, you know, isn't interested in being in a democracy. He's interested in ruling, you know. The challenge for the Israeli center left has been, you know, the blue and white party is supposed to be this kind of coalescence of opposition to Netanyahu. Benny Gans, who's the leader of that effort, is not a natural politician, right? You know, comes out of a military background and has had trouble kind of energizing the other side of this. And so it's kind of this grinding campaign where there is a lot of fatigue with Netanyahu, and there is a sense of his corruption. And at the same time, though, there's not a lot of excitement about the alternative.

And Netanyahu is counting on that kind of apathy so that the other side doesn't turn out and that he can like sprinkle giveaways to the far right, like saying I'm to annex the West Bank to get his people to turn out. And let's be clear, this gets back to your point about Republicans being hypocritical, right, for attacking us on the Taliban and then embracing Trump. Let's just like show how much Netanyahu has been completely full of shit over the years, right? This is a man who used to talk about being for a two-state solution, who used to talk about, you know, his openness to direct talks to the Palestinians. And low and bold, here we are in 229, and he's talking about annexing the West Bank,

like something that would formalize the fact that there is an impossibility of a Palestinian state, and that Israel is going to exist as some kind of apartheid state here. This is a very dramatic moment. Do you ever feel like we need a better term than annexation? Isn't it like a weird euphemism? Like Putin annexed crime yet.

He took physical control of it. Annexing the West Bank means the Israeli government just takes control of a bunch of territory and no questions are asked, right? Yeah, no, the language is kind of anti-settlement, too, is a fairly anodyne way of describing people taking other people's land and building on it and living there, right? Yeah, Crimea was conquering, I don't know, stealing. I mean, they're taking away land that would be envisioned as part of any Palestinian state. To be clear, there are some settlements,

right, that people have long thought in a peace deal, those settlements could stay within the borders of an Israel. But when you're talking about the West Bank, you're talking about going deep into anything that anybody who's looked at this problem thinks would be a Palestinian state. And, you know, I know we've got, you know, Jared's, you know, coffee boy on this thing, but I'm not, you know, waiting with bated breath for the U.S. to come in and make this right. Yeah. Oh, we will get to Jared's coffee boy in one second. So I think things to watch, like, everyone has been waiting to see if Trump gives BB Netanyahu some big political gift before this election. I don't think it's happened yet. We'll see how he responds on annexation. There's some speculation that a former Israeli spy named Jonathan Pollard might show up in Israel one day to triumphant fan. I mean, there's also the question that you raised earlier of Trump wanting to meet with Iran's president, Rouhani. I imagine that BB will lay down. on the tracks to prevent that. And if Trump goes through with it, it will be seen as a pretty big screw you to the Israelis,

but I don't know what the likelihood is there. Because this is what's so fundamentally contradicted. When you have somebody like Trump, you know, who's just flailing around and never thinking past the next move, like, the longer he is president, I mean, part of what we're witnessing is the longer he is president, all of the internal contradictions of everything he says

start to become apparent, you know? Yeah, good point. You can't, like, because he has, there's no, it's totally incoherent. right. So he doesn't want to go to war with Iran, yet he does everything that would lead to a war. And then he's trying to find the off ramp. And in his mind, the off ramp has to have a meeting because he has to be at the center of attention. That's going to piss off the Israelis. So then he'll probably give the Israelis something around Jonathan Pollard showing up at a BB campaign rally and endorsing the annexation of the West Bank. Because if he's asked about it, I can't imagine he won't do it. And we talk about this like a reality show drama when, my God, like think if someone told you, you know, five, ten years ago, then Israeli prime minister would be discussing the formal annexation of the West Bank.

banquet the support of the U.S. President. Like that is like an unbelievably new reality that we're in. And sometimes you've got to step back in order to kind of see it. Yep. Quick plug real quick. Ben and I are going to do a live Pod Save the World at J.Streets, 2019 National Conference on October 26 in Washington, D.C. If you go to J.Street.org slash conference and use the code Podsave, you can get a

discounted ticket. That's jstreet.org slash conference, use the code Podsave. J Street is an awesome organization. All these funds are going to go to them because they are trying to push the Democratic Party or everyone in politics, really, towards, you know, putting diplomacy first and finding peaceful resolutions of problems. And it'll be a fascinating conversation and a lot of fun. So I hope a lot of people can make it. Well, I have a great idea for a guest, a guy named Avi Berkowitz. We have, if you haven't read, a new White House envoy for Middle East peace on the case. It's a 29-year-old named Avi Berkowitz. He's taken the reins from the older. but similarly unqualified Jason Greenblad, whose main resume bullet was being Trump's real estate lawyer for 20 years. Most recently, Avi Berkowitz was Jared Kushner's assistant. He graduated from law school in 2016. Ben, remember when people used to shit on us because we were young? Oh, man. Yeah. That was fun. Don't get me started, man. Former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks once described Berkowitz's job to Business Insider as, quote, primarily administrative and involved

assistant Kushner with daily logistics like getting coffee and coordinating meetings. Got it. This would be laughable if it wasn't actually an important job. I mean, per our previous discussion, I suspect the thinking here is that there's not actually going to be any meaningful peace process or negotiations. These guys may roll out some plan that gives Netanyahu kind of whatever he wants and tries to buy off the Palestinians with some financial incentives that never actually materialize and then call it a day. But, you know, I think B.B. Netanyahu's comments today back up that theory.

But, man, like, what a fucking joke. Tommy, like this guy, literally his job, right, was to sit there. and probably like order lunch for Jared Kushner and go pick it up at the mess. Or like enter in, you know, Tommy and I will remember the wave system in the White House is where you have to enter in someone's personal details so they can get in to the West Wing and then the assistant goes and meets that person, you know, at the front desk and escorts them up to the office. Not that like there weren't one of people who did those jobs, but those people didn't

become the Middle East peace envoy. Yeah, like, there are thousands of foreign service officers was one of them not available, right? Like this is like a willful insult to anybody who cares about the fact that there should be a peace agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians or two-state solution. It is unbelievably disrespectful to the enormity of this to just take this guy who like, you know, used to be like probably booking travel for like Jared's like getaways with Ivanka and his like off-the-record chats with journalists and now saying that this guy's like the Middle East peace envoy. I mean like we didn't get it done. but like George Mitchell, the former Senate Majority Leader who negotiated the peace agreement in Northern Ireland, that was our Middle East peace envoy, right? That was a good swing.

Yeah. Like, and look where we are now. Like, you know, look, I'm all for trying things in a different way and not being bound by history, but like these guys have just a disdain for history and institutional knowledge and actual like subject matter expertise. It's been true since Jared and Ivanka got West Wing jobs. They think they're new and young and hot shots and can fix things. And then just like having your.

little lackey takeover a job this big just shows you just you just don't care you have no respect for the people involved and uh you know they don't think anything it's it's what happens when you run your the entire united states government like you like a family business like a used car lot or something right like yeah and look at the other point i make here is it's also a part of their disdain for expertise look i was you know in my mid to late 30s when i was a cuban negotiator and everybody said i was too young to do that even though i'd worked for like 15 years in foreign policy But I'll tell you the other thing I did as soon as I got that job, I got this single best Cuba expert in the entire U.S. government, a guy named Ricardo Zuniga, a foreign service officer who'd been based in Cuba for several years, worked on Latin America for more than that. He was my wingman. So I had this like reservoir of expertise with me in those negotiations. That is clearly not the approach that they take either. So they've got this guy, essentially like Aaron Boy for Jared in this role. They disdain any expertise. And, you know, here we are. And the value you bring to these Cuban negotiations is they know through public reporting, intelligence, everything else, that you have a relationship with Obama and have for a long time.

They know that about Jared as well, too. They know that about Jason Greenblatt as well, too. This new guy is like Jared's assistant that he met playing hoops in 2011 at some fucking retreat some weekend who's now, I don't know, going to jump on a plane to Tel Aviv. It's a joke. Can you imagine me in Israeli or Palestinian? No. You know, Palestinian who's suffering under occupation or an Israeli who desperately wants peace and the message that is delivered to you by this appointment. No, it's terrible. Let's do a couple of Iran updates.

First, the New York Times did a long, a fascinating piece on the secret history of the push to strike Iran. It is too long to summarize here, but a big question that they examine is whether Israeli threats to bomb Iran's nuclear program actually pushed Obama into making the Iran deal that the Israelis ended up hating or if it's something he was already planning to do. The other thing I noticed was reports that the IAEA has found traces of uranium at what Netanyahu called a secret atomic warehouse in Tehran. So that's a big question. And I don't know the truth here, but it does speak to me to why it's good to have a bunch of nuclear inspectors in there, as you had during the Iran deal. Lastly, and this one is just truly bizarre. Brian Hook, who is a senior official at the State Department, emailed the captain of an Iranian oil tanker and offered this guy millions of dollars if he would drive the tanker somewhere. where the U.S. could then seize it.

These emails got leaked. Brian Hook then copped to it. I am at a loss for words about how that's legal. It makes me think back to all the pallets of cash nonsense about Iran. Ben, your thoughts on any of those things. Well, on the first one, I think that article dramatically overstated the impact of the Israeli interest and strike. Everybody knew that Naino was confrontational towards Iran.

The reality is, as early as 2007, in the Democratic primary campaign, You were there with me, Tommy. Barack Obama said he wanted to pursue diplomacy with Iran to reach an agreement over its nuclear program, right? Years before these anecdotes in the story that's allegedly compelled Obama to do a deal. Like, he came in office in 2009 pursuing diplomacy with Iran. So, yes, were we concerned about Israel potentially striking Iran and starting a war that could engulf the region? Yeah. But we also wanted to pursue diplomacy of Iran because we thought that was the best way to solve the problem of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

And lo and behold, here we are, and that continues to bear out. That's a better way than starting a war, right? On the Brian Hook thing, like, I, Tommy, like, imagine coming to work and firing up your computer, right? And being like, okay, I'm going to email the head of, like, the captain of some tanker and offer millions of dollars to buy, like, from some Iranian to buy this tanker? The State Department head of policy planning is going to do that. You couldn't have some CIA carve out do that shit. What are they doing here? Why is anybody doing that?

Just so that they can say that they like apprehended some tanker when in fact what they've done is used taxpayer dollars to buy it? And like, Tacomi started on the hypocrisy here. Like, I mean, we gave Iran some money. It was their money, right? They had purchased airplanes that we never delivered to them around the overthrow of the Shah for obvious reasons. and all kinds of international claims court said, this is Iran's money, has to be returned. We give them this cash.

And it was like a national freakout for weeks, just like the Bergdahl thing that you mentioned, too, by the way, right? And lo and behold, here we are the same people, the exact same people, because Brian Hook was lighting himself on fire about that when he wasn't in government, sitting down at their computer being like, I got a great idea.

I'm going to email the Iranian captain of some tanker and be like, good news. I've got millions of dollars for you that I'm just going to give you in cash. Like, I didn't even know under what account was that money coming out of. I don't know. This cries out for oversight, too. Like, these crazy stories kind of pass, like, literally tankers in the night.

And there's not follow-up. Like, this gets at the utter dysfunction that they have so little policy tools to deal with the Iranians that they're resorting to trying to buy a bunch of tankers. Yeah. When you're Iran policy boils down to sending, like, I'm a Nigerian prince, like, spam emails to random boat captains. It's probably not going well. Two more quick things here. So Robert Mugabe is dead. He ran Zimbabwe for almost 40 years, where he used violence to suppress political opponents and ultimately ran the country into the ground. When I interviewed the former Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Johnny Carson back in the day, he described Mugabe to me as the George Washington of Zimbabwe, which sort of gets to the complicated history here. So Mugabe ran this long guerrilla war to gain Zabwe's independence. Before that, he was jailed for resisting white colonial rule in Rhodesia. But when he actually got into power, what ultimately brought him down was corruption and embezzlement that led to subsequent land seizures from white farmers by the government

and then just general economic mismanagement. He was finally pushed out of office in 2017 in a military coup. Unfortunately, you know, he was pushed out, but the repressive authoritarian political system has continued. So, Ben, I should know if you had any farewell parting thoughts for Mr. Mugabe. Well, look, I mean, you know, as you point out, he's a He's this guy who was part of the liberation struggle that led to Zimbabwe's independence. But, man, if ever there was a man who frittered away his legacy because, you know, it wasn't just a land seizure from white farmers. It was, you know, the mass repression of any opposition in that country, people in prison, violence against people. Like, this guy became one of the worst autocratic leaders in not just Africa, but around the world.

And, you know, squandered essentially, you know, Zimbabwe's position. as one of the stronger economies in Africa and as a potential exemplar for the kind of post-liberation Africa. So, you know, the no warm feelings here. I mean, this guy, you know, had long since squandered what had been a good legacy. And frankly, I think he's a cautionary tale, right, that if Mandela was the exemplar of someone who recognized that the best way to be at George Washington is not just to lead your country to independence, but then to hand over power to somebody else, right? One of the problems that's happened in a lot of countries, including in Africa, are leaders who act like they're indispensable and refuse to leave power,

and people who once fought for democracy end up undermining it, right? And so I think he's kind of the anti-Mendella, whereas Mandela represents that commitment to not just independence, but democracy. You know, Mugabe is a guy who represents, you know, independence and service of my own agenda, which is not democratic. Yeah. All right. Last topic. So, you know, As again, we mentioned at the top, this is going to go out on the 18th anniversary of 9-11. So I did want to take a second just to reflect on that anniversary for a minute. I mean, Ben, I know you were in New York City at the time. I was, like, safely in rural Ohio.

But, you know, my dad worked at Marsh McClennon at that time. So, like, you know, I think I was pretty freaked up for a while. I think we all have a lot of reasons why that day will have a horrific place in our memories forever. And we should never forget the people we lost, how vulnerable and frightened we felt, how many ways we all, you know, as a country, could have prevented 9-11 from happening. But I also think it's valuable to take stock of and have a reckoning with all the ways that 9-11 and fear of terrorism have distorted our foreign policy thinking and decision-making and resource allocation in our politics generally over the last almost two decades. So I know this is something

that you've worked on a lot, thought about a lot, read a lot. So I just wanted to turn the floor over and see if you had anything you want to add. Yeah, no, look, I was a 24-year-old grad student on 9-11, handing out flyers. There was Election Day in New York. I was at a polling site with this kind of totally clear view of the World Trade Center. And so I saw the second plane hit because we were all staring at the one tower on fire, and I saw the second plane hit.

So then you know you're under attack. Cell service was down in New York, so no one had any idea what was going on because a lot of the cell towers ran through the World Trade Center. And then I saw that first tower fall. And I'm in New Yorker and I knew a bunch of people who worked down there. I had no idea how many people have been killed. And I just remember thinking that my whole entire life was going to change. I mean, I was, you know, as is notoriously commented by some of my fans in the Republican Party,

I was in creative writing graduate school. I was getting a fiction writing degree, working a political campaign, and I was teaching. And I just decided that day, like, I want to be a part of whatever happens after this. Let me down to D.C., end up working for the guy who's the co-chair of the 9-11 commission. So then, you know, got to kind of see firsthand this autopsy of the events that led up to 9-11 and the recommendations about what to do about it. And then being in foreign policy, I just wouldn't be sitting here today talking to you with the career I've had if it weren't for this event. Along the way, I met family members, a lot of family members of people who lost loved ones on 9-11. I had to, one of the things I had to do is kind of be a liaison to some of them through that process, some extraordinary people who tried to channel their grief into reform the government. But then I think, you You raise another really important point here, Tommy, which is we have to reckon with the fact that we got some things terribly wrong after 9-11. You know, we got some things right. Like, you know, and obviously the counterterrorism community that you and I got to meet, you know, prevents attacks, saves lives.

But, you know, we tortured people. We opened up this prison in Guantanamo Bay that is a symbol for extrajudicial action by the U.S. It is still open. We invaded the country of Iraq under false pretenses for reasons that seemed have nothing to do. with 9-11 in response to 9-11. And we had this politics emerge in the United States that increasingly stigmatized Muslims. It's striking to me that here we are 18 years after 9-11. And frankly, there's more aggressive political rhetoric, including from the President of the United States, again, demonizing Muslims than there was in the days after 9-11 when George Bush visited a mosque, right?

So something went badly wrong here in our actions and our prioritization and just the way in which I think we've learned that being at war for two decades can have profound unintended consequences and effects on a country's foreign policy and its own character because there's just something about the kind of, you know, there was some very noble things that came out of 9-11 in terms of the country coming together. But there was also this kind of jingoism that has gotten uglier and uglier with time. And I hope, you know, maybe with Trump's presidency and staring that in the face with the Muslim ban and some of his other policies, we can take this opportunity to say, you know, we need

to figure out a way to start a new chapter. And one of the ways perhaps to honor the memory of 9-11 is say, we don't need to be in a permanent war because of 9-11. We don't need to live in permanent fear because of 9-11. We certainly don't need to turn against each other because of 9-11, right? And so I hope in this campaign and if we can overcome Trump and have a new presidency, there's some opportunity to say, okay, like we're ending this period and moving a new new one. Agreed. Well said, when we leave it there, and when we come back, we'll have my interview with Senator Michael Bennett. I am thrilled to be joined by presidential candidate and Colorado Senator Michael Bennett, who recently published a new book titled Dividing America, How Russia Hacks Social

Media and Democracy. Senator, thank you so much for doing the show. Thanks, Tommy, for having me. I especially appreciate it because I believe you are coming directly from a dental visit, so presumably half your face is numb. I actually, uh, started my day having a root canal, a partial root canal. It turns out that I'm going to have to go back in a month for the rest of the root canal, which makes it even better. But you know you're not living your life well when that hour feels like a vacation. I was going to say your life is kind of an ongoing route canal with this presidential primary. It actually was fun to get away. Yeah. That is said. I want to talk about the book, but I was hoping we could start with some of the wild news today.

Trump just fired his national security advisor John Bolton via tweets. Wait, I thought he quit. Yeah, right. I'm sorry. Sorry, John, if you're listening, I know you listen all the time. Curious what you think about this decision and specifically, you know, if you think or hope, what it might mean that a course correction for U.S. relations with Iran. Well, I would say for America's sake, I'm really glad John Bolton is out of there.

Yeah, me too. And I can't speak to why they, you know, what disagreed? even it was they had, but I think the guy is a menace and was another one of these people that Trump liked from watching Fox News. But I think the more significant point is that there have been more national security advisors than there have been years of the Trump presidency. And I think that's part of the reason why these guys have absolutely no strategy or doctrine except take really difficult situations and make matters worse, which seems to be their approach to the world, whether it's China, Russia, Iran, or anything else.

Yeah, that sounds right to me. You're also on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, so you oversee a lot of the activities that Mr. Bolton would have been steering. There have been a bunch of reports the last couple of days about the CIA pulling a source out of Russia, some sort of asset that we had worked on over time. I know you can never confirm or deny a story like that, but do you have broader concerns about the United States' ability to recruit and then protect human intelligence sources. I certainly have those broader concerns because people don't understand what the

risks are going to be any given day, given what comes out of the White House. But I obviously can't speak to anything related to the Intelligence Committee except to say that it is a comfort to me that the men and women of our intelligence agencies are continuing to do their jobs, even when we have a president who won't admit that Vladimir Putin hacked our elections in 2016. I mean, who's stand next to Putin and Helsinki and deny what our own intelligence agencies have found and concluded. They've continued to do their work every day they're doing what they're supposed to do. And obviously, that doesn't substitute for having a president who's behaving himself on this stuff. But it is somewhat of a company.

Yeah. Last quick newsie of the day one before I get to the book, inviting the Taliban to hang out at Camp David right before the 18th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. Good idea or great idea? Probably, I bet it's not the worst idea Donald Front had in the last week. That's probably true. But probably not a great idea. And it looks ridiculous because it now appears that he was doing it just to sort of give himself credit for reaching a deal that the parties were really far apart from reaching.

You know, I think we need a political solution in Afghanistan. There's not a military solution there. I think people realize that. But spooling everybody up for a deal that's not done yet. is not helpful in Afghanistan, and it hasn't been helpful in North Korea, but it's not surprising at this point that the guys look for a stage every chance he has. So you just published this book, Dividing America, How Russia Hacks Social Media and Democracy. The book includes a bunch of examples of Russian social media propaganda that are pretty

jarring. Why did you decide to write the book, and why did you want to focus on showing, you know, what the Russians are pushed? What should we learn from this book? Well, I think that the reason I did it was that I kept hearing people say, Mueller's, you know, terrible, Mueller's good. And nobody seemed to actually focus on the underlying substance of what Mueller's indictment showed. You know, Mueller ended up indicting a bunch of Russians for hacking into our elections and for using social media to push their propaganda. And what I was discovering as I traveled around the country was

nobody seemed to really understand it or know what it looked like. And I was struck walking out of a senior citizen center in Manchester when a guy said to me, just tell Obama, this was, you know, several months, just tell Obama to stop spending the money that should be for veterans on refugees. And what I knew was that was Russian propaganda, you know, because if you look in the book, there's a page where you see a picture of President Obama and the assertion is being made that he's spending money on refugees instead of on veterans. And here it is, I mean, obviously President Obama has been gone for two years, but it's still, you know, this propaganda has made its mark.

And when you consider the fact that it is really racist and really vile, a lot of the stuff that's in there, and that we were hacked by the Russians for a year before we even knew that this was Russian propaganda. In other words, we couldn't distinguish between their racist Russian propaganda from our own political discourse. it raises a question in my mind about our political discourse and what does it say about us that our, you know, adversaries see our diversity and our pluralism as a weakness to attack rather than the strength that I believe that it is. So that's why I wanted people to see it. And as you look at the book, you'll see that the Russians don't care what side of the issue they're on. They're on, you know, one minute they're supporting Black Lives Matter and the next minute they're, you know, they're attacking Black Lives Matter. putting patriotic things down about the police.

Yeah, they're on the side of chaos, it seems. Chaos, exactly. You know, it's an interesting conversation because we're also focused on these propaganda efforts now, but, you know, they're hardly new. I mean, I've been reading this great book about some of the work the CIA did back in the 50s and 60s to try to create a cultural propaganda campaign to showcase American values abroad. And the flavor of it was certainly different. Like the Boston Symphony Orchestra became really.

really famous because they had a CIA sponsored trip to Paris that went really well. So there's a little fun piece of history. But like, you know, if you're on the border of Russia, for example, you've been dealing with Russian propaganda and election interference forever. It's just supercharged by the internet, right? So are there countries that have learned key lessons and develop antibodies that we should study and learn from? I actually think there really aren't. There's a deep concern about it, as you know, all over Western Europe and the rest of Europe, for that matter, the democracies that are suffering through the effects of Russia screwing around on their social media and supporting right-wing extremist groups.

There's deep concern, and I think there's real concern that they can't push back effectively without the United States leading the charge. I have heard that they're now countries on the eastern edge of Russia that have television programs in the evening that are dedicated. They're news programs that are dedicated to debunking the Russian lies that have been posted during the course of the day. And I have never done the research on that myself, but that seems like something that would be an effective way of pushing back. We could use something like that here, not just with respect to the Russians, but lies in general. Yeah, so I know that you are very kindly sending copies of the book to Senator Mitch McConnell

to help pressure him to act. I thought it would be helpful to him. Yeah, that's really sweet of you. I mean, he's an avid reader, I think, mostly of, you know, financial statements from his donors. But what legislation do we need to pass? What sort of things are in a bill that you think would be meaningful? First of all, the reason why people can go to Michael Bennett.com or Russia hacked our democracy.com, and if they want to, they can make a very modest contribution.

I'll send a copy of the book to Mitch for them, because what I'm trying to do is push him to put the election. protection legislation on the floor. We've had eight different bills that he stopped, eight different times, some of which are bipartisan. And the kinds of things that we're talking about is investing $1.5 billion to harden local election panels and counties so that the Russians can't hack them. And you can think about, in particular, rural counties, but really every place, I mean, these places are at a position to stand up to the Russians' internet espionage.

So we got to work together to do that. There's other legislation that would say that if a campaign is contacted by the Russians and in the way that it's happened during the 2016 campaign, that they need to relay that to law enforcement to the FBI. I would love to see, Tommy, what United States Senator there is who would want to vote against that legislation. Yeah. It seems unimaginable.

It sure does. And I can tell you that it's not because we're passing background checks here. Like, we're not doing anything. It's just every day it's judges, judges, judges. How did you snag Russia hacked our democracy.com? You're sitting on a gold mine with that thing. I got to figure out how to monetize it. So, I mean, as we talk about this, right, like, you're kind of referencing not just a foreign policy challenge or security challenge, but parts of our democracy and our discourse that are broken, right?

I mean, we have social media platforms where these messages can just run wild. I mean, is this challenge manageable with things as they are? Well, you mentioned the time. You're talking about the history of our propaganda efforts and taking the, was it the Boston Symphony to Paris. You know, you think about a period of time when we were really the dominant power and there's very much the American century.

And now we're at a moment where I think our democracy is really at risk. we were very careless with our democracy, and we ended up getting Donald Trump elected as a result. The fact that the Russians saw it as an opportunity to try to push, and the Chinese are seeing it now as an opportunity to push, worries me as well. I think this is a moment when we have to stand up for the democracy, and who is in the office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a very important question for us to resolve, because that obviously matters. But I think what matters equally is what we as citizens, you know, how we think about the responsibility that we need to fulfill your, when it comes to our discourse, when it comes to, you know, what we think about the trades that we've made with social media around privacy or around, you know, the ability for white supremacists to be able to occupy corners, not even corners, but the main street of our political discourse in ways it's been really destructive to the country. and I think is setting a poor example for the next generation of Americans about how you actually run a democracy.

What that leads me to conclude is that all of us, you know, that the cure is actually in what we do as individuals to come together, not to agree about everything with each other. I mean, that's not the point of living in a free society like ours, but to work together on some level to leave something that we're proud of to our kids and to restore America's place in the world. I think there is no democracy in the world that can champion democracy the way we can champion democracy. We've been here longer than anybody else. We're the most powerful.

And the rest of the world is looking to us for leadership. And unfortunately, right now, we are supplying none of it. We are not. So you mentioned North Korea earlier. I was hoping to ask you a slightly convoluted question about North Korea, if you don't mind. I'm sure your question will be no more convoluted than my answer. So I think if you step back, like any objective look at Trump's diplomacy of North Korea shows that has been just a failure. The New York Times the other day reported that the Defense Intelligence

Agency thinks that North Koreans have created enough nuclear material for a dozen new bombs since the Singapore summit. They also reported that Kim is testing new missiles all the time. He wants to evade our missile defenses. We seem divided from our allies in the region like Japan and South Korea. So my question for you is, I'm a progressive, right? I want to incentivize diplomacy. I want leaders to talk as a way to solve problems and not invade places. But how do we be honest that this diplomacy has been a failure and it's making us less safe while not incentivizing our lunatic president to go back to fire and fury? Well, look, I think that being progressive and being for engaging people smartly is the right thing to do. But making these suckers bets all over the world is idiotic.

And we look like clowns. Whether it's when, you know, the second he gets any pushback on wow. He sort of crumbles on that before we actually have run that to the ground. That's the Chinese, not the North Korea. But on North Korea, you know, the promises that Kim made that his father made 20 years ago, they're exactly the same promises. And Trump, you know, claims, the history of this, as you know better than anybody else, but I mean, the history of this starts with Barack Obama and Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office

and Barack Obama very kindly turning over the keys and saying, the thing that is worrying me the most here is North Korea, and that's what we've got to really focus on. Trump goes over there. Kim says the same thing that his dad said and that they've said for years, and Trump claims there's a victory, gets on the airplane and tweets out, everybody can sleep well at night.

And the intelligence agencies have all said what you just said, which is that you can't sleep well at night because matters have gotten worse. And not only have they gotten worse, we have separated ourselves from our allies, like the South Koreans and like the Japanese and other people in the world. So, you know, this idea that it's okay to have a president who spends all this time coddling our enemies and pulling the rug out from under our allies, that somehow that that reflects an interesting form of rejection of political correctness, which is the way I think some people see this.

I think our answer to that needs to be, these are real dangers and real perils in the world, and there is no one else to lead us. And by the way, we may survive this for four years. The strategic relationships that we need to drive successful diplomacy, whether it's Iran or Russia or North Korea, eight years of a Trump presidency might mean that that stuff is all atrophied to the point where it can't be collected again. Yeah, neither. And that China will fill the voice. We spend, and again, this isn't just on foreign policy, but I find it interesting to think about

seven or ten months or two years consumed with Trump's $6 billion for his rinky-dink wall that was supposed to be paid for by Mexico. China is building 3,500 miles of fiber optic cable to connect Latin America with Africa back to the surveillance state of China so they can export that surveillance state, use the metadata they're collecting to drive their influence everywhere in the world. It's not like, you know, the fact that we are all sucked into the cable television vortex at night doesn't mean the Chinese are, and they're using this time to press their advantage all over the world. I agree. So, okay, so you get elected president. You go and bring your protege, John Bolton, back to the

White House. I mean, just kidding, everybody. So you're elected president. Do you reign back on this North Korea diplomacy? Do you go back to the... Iran deal? How do you think about it? I think on North Korea, you reined it back in the sense that you don't give Kim the stage the way that Trump has. You don't elevate him the way that Trump has. You don't show up in the DMZ with your hat in the hand the way that Trump has. I think you reset those expectations and get people at a responsible level at the State Department and other places to see if there's anything there. And we've got a clear set of priorities that Republican and Democratic presidents have embraced it to this point

to try to make North Korea less of a threat to the rest of the world, and I think we could pursue those. On Iran, I think this has been a complete, I mean, obviously I'm not objective about it, but I think objectively a catastrophe to this country. I mean, the Iran deal, in my mind, represented a singular moment in our history in the Middle East to try to deal with the problem in a manner other than just to go to war with it. And I never thought the deal perfect. I worried about its duration.

I worried about its scope. But it seemed to me that it was obviously better than not having that deal. And then when Trump became president, the things that I didn't know when I voted for it were now known facts. And the most important known facts were that the Iranians had complied with the deal. and they were now a year away from breaking out to a nuclear weapon instead of just two to three months, which they were when Barack Obama began to negotiate that deal. And as you know, the difference between two and three months and a year is the difference between not being able to consult meaningfully with your allies to decide what to do next versus having to act unilaterally in a way that might create endless misery for everybody, including American. So I think there was a huge mistake for him to do it.

And if I were president, what I would do is re-engage the Iranians and try to improve the deal. And people shouldn't be shocked. The Iranians are going to try to improve the deal for themselves. Yeah. Well, they got screwed. I mean, you know, they were promised a whole bunch of sanctions relief that never showed up. So I worry that the hope to improve the deal is going to be harder that everybody thinks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Well, it's hard to do the last time, too.

I mean, you know, the folks that said, well, we should have included rockets or we should have included whatever. I mean, I'm for all that stuff, too. The Iranians are just going to want to make it a trade as well, and people should just be aware of that. But there might be opportunity in that, too. And I also think the opportunity for us to restore our relationship with our allies in the region, who we've deeply disappointed in Europe because of, you know, our pulling out of that deal is an important reason for us to try to get back into the bargaining. My starting place, though, would not be just to go back to it as, you know, the deal as it was. That makes me a little sad, but I'm just going to move on.

Well, I don't want to, I don't want to pander. Well, look, you know, that's fair. I have two quick questions to conclude, if you don't mind, then I'll let you, like, go back to the smoothie dinner or whatever I post. Exactly. So today, the Israeli Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu gave a speech where he again talked about annexing the West Bank. The speech seemed to suggest that if he doesn't have tacit approval for, the Trump administration to do this and just start taking this territory, he thinks he can get it through negotiations. If that happens, do you think we need to have a conversation about conditioning aid to Israel or taking other punitive steps?

Well, I saw the stuff today, and I think that it is enormously unsettling that the prime minister seems to be saying that he wants to do this while the, you know, quote, window is open or whatever the language was that he used. And obviously for any of us that think that the solution here lies in a two-state solution negotiated by the parties led and supported by the United States of America, this isn't the kind of behavior that's helpful to any of that. I don't want to speculate about what the right action is to take down the road. But I do think this is utterly inconsistent with our values and the positions of Democratic and Republican presidents with respect to Israel and the Palestinians. basically forever. Last question. So the last time I saw you was at the Iowa State Fair. We were walking around. I think you were planning what rides to hit with your family. Did you guys ever, did you guys go on the roller coaster? What'd you end up doing? That's not the question. We did. We went on, I think we went on a roller coaster. I was photographed on a thing called

the airplane where I was in the middle of two of my daughters lying flat on my stomach with my arms straight out. And the photograph in the paper won us. the most fun farm political family, I think, of the weekend. So it was at least worth something. That's great. Well, it was lovely getting to meet your daughters and your wife. Thank you. It didn't improve my position in the polls, but I'm still working on that. There's time. Well, so, okay, so I spent a couple days in Iowa. You spent a lot more time in there. The conversations I had focused on Trump, electability, and to the extent I talked about policy with people or heard about it, it was domestic issues. I think that's not surprising,

but it is a bit frustrating when you think about how much latitude a president has when it comes to foreign policy as opposed to getting stuff through Congress, right? So are there national security issues that you wish we're getting more attention in TV interviews and debates that just aren't? Well, I think the opportunity cost of having Trump as our president with respect to foreign policy needs to be made much more clear to the American people. And then, you know, the conversation you and I had, for example, about North Korea, we could have about Russia. Russia we could have about China. And that burden is on the Democrats, and we need to make that.

We need to make that case. I think there's a very fertile case to be made that he's done an unbelievable amount of damage, not just to our economy, but to our alliances around the world. One thing you might be heartened to hear, based on my travels in Iowa and New Hampshire, is that in almost every town hall I have, somebody puts up their hand and says, You're right. It's mostly domestic issues, but in almost every town hall, somebody puts up their hand and says, what are you going to do to restore our alliances? So I think that is very much on the minds of the American people, and that's good. That is good. The book is dividing America, how Russia hacks social media and democracy.

Senator, thank you so much for doing the show. You have always been one of the most thoughtful and helpful people in the U.S. Senate during our time in the Obama administration. and I thought your conversation with Dan Pfeiffer in our candidate series was one of the most riveting of them all. So thank you for doing it. And everybody should check that out. Well, I appreciate. Thanks for letting me come on. We miss you guys. That's all I can say.

Oh, miss us? Oh, well, the Obama people, yeah. We do. Well, yeah, that was better times. Anyway, thank you, Senator. Appreciate it. Thanks, Tommy. Ben, thanks again for joining at a late hour from D.C.

That was, you know, I wish John Bolton could quit every day. That was a lot. I could have talked about John Bolton for now. I could too. Maybe we'll just re-up and do it again next week. Yeah, yeah. It's going to be much reporting about that dufus. Well, have fun at dinner with him tonight and I will see you soon. All right, see you, man. Positive the World is a product of crooked media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer.

Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narm Alconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.