Pod Save the World - How Trump’s Mar-a-lago Docs Endanger National Security

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Tommy and Ben talk about the national security implications of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document indictment, China’s eavesdropping base in Cuba, Ukraine’s military counteroffensive and critics of US policy, USAID’s suspension of food aid to Ethiopia following an investigation into theft, how Sudan’s civil war is getting worse, how crypto currency is funding North Korea’s ballistic missile programs, the death of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, protests in Senegal and executions in Iran. Then Ben talks to friend of the pod David Lammy, Britain’s Shadow Secretary of State, about Boris Johnson’s resignation from parliament and the arrest of Scotland’s former leader Nicola Sturgeon. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to POTSafe the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben, I saw our former colleague. It's funny to call her that Hillary Clinton last night, our former boss colleague opponent. Really good person. It was my boss, but it was superior. How about that? Yeah, it was funny. She certainly outranked us. We never worked directly for her. She was at our Potsive America show in New York last night. Lovett and I tried to bait her into a lock him up chant, but sadly it didn't work. What a surprise that Lovet couldn't land that plane. You won't like it, though. I asked her about a conversation she had with Vladimir Putin about the horrors that his father lived through during World War II and the siege of Stalingrad, which people don't know, you know, like millions of people died in this battle in World War II and how that impacted Putin's psychology. and it was pretty fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot that is informing Putin's psychology today. And Bachmoud is like a mini, mini, mini, mini, mini-Salin grad, right? Just a gruesome, grinded out urban warfare. Okay, this is how much we have a little mind meld on this show, because that was exactly what I said. You know, we're going to play a clip so that people can hear a piece of it. And we'll play the full thing. It's on Pate America if you want to hear it.

He goes over. He starts trying to pull. this body out of the pile of bodies and the body collector is screaming at him, stop it, stop it, you know, get away from there. And he says, no, no, that's my wife. That's my wife. I know it's my wife. And he keeps trying to pull her out. And finally, the body collector said, well, just take her, take her body, but then you have to return it. You have to get rid of the body. So he took her and she was alive. And he took her back to their apartment and nursed her back to health. and then a few years later, Vladimir Putin was born.

So he tells me this story, and I'm sitting there thinking, wow, this explains so much. Think about this story, and think about the trauma that his family and so many Russian families went through. And in some people, that kind of trauma makes them feel like never again, no war. We have to be more compassionate and caring.

We have to help people. And in some people, it makes them think, I'm going to be on the side that wins. So, Ben, what you were just saying was exactly my question, which is, you know, this is a story about her dad coming sort of back from the front of the siege, seeing his wife in this situation that she described here. And I asked her, like, how do you make sense of a guy whose family lived through that experience? and then he sends his own people into a very similar meat grinder in a place like Bakhmut where, you know, young Russian soldiers are just dying at horrific rates. And this was part of that conversation. Yeah, that's a very powerful story and very, like, insightful armchair psychology there

by Secretary Clinton. I mean, really interesting. Because if you consider, okay, that happened in Stalingrad. had like the most horrific battlefield of the 20th century. Then Putin is kind of born in St. Petersburg, which undergoes this gruesome siege during the war. You know, people don't have enough to eat. People are dying of malnutrition. That's kind of where, that's what Vladimir Putin comes from, you know.

And then he has the trauma of, you know, as we've talked about packing up the KGB office in East Germany at the Klopjev Soviet Union, there's a lot of. anger and kind of rage that informs the psychology of Vladimir Putin. And it doesn't start, you know, it's funny, like these debates about the war and its origins in Ukraine, sometimes they started like the Medan, the protest movement in Ukraine. Sometimes they start with like NATO enlargement. Sometimes they start with like the, you know, the Iraq war or something or Chechen war. But like, actually she's right. You start all the way at the beginning and it probably makes more sense. You got to know who this guy is, no his family is, no his background. Super interesting story and longer

conversation with Hillary Clinton about the indictment, how to run against Trump, lots of stuff. So check that out. So Ben, I know we say this a lot, but this might be the craziest news week ever for like pot-day-the-world purposes. Like if we had an enemy's list, we'd be checking them off. Yeah, man. Don't cross us. Don't have one. We don't have one. We don't have one. That's the message. So today we're going to cover the Trump indictment. There's reports of a Chinese spy base in Cuba. I'm sure you'll have thoughts on that. The latest from Ukraine, food aid in Ethiopia, how the conflict in Sudan is really spiraling out of control in a scary way, how cryptocurrency is fueling North Korea's ballistic missile program.

Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is dead, and then some news out of Iran and Senegal. And then, Ben, you just talked with a Potsave the World fan favorite. the right honorable, David Lammy, Labor MP. I'm guessing maybe Boris Johnson came up. What did you guys talk about? Yeah, he's very right and honorable today. We talked about Boris Johnson's resignation, very dramatic, bombastic resignation from Parliament after he was going to be found by a parliamentary committee

as having lied, which we all knew. Shocker. And the kind of chaos he's trying to, you know, there's some allies of his that are resigning the Tory party. What does that mean for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Tories? What does it mean for labor? Is they get ready to go to an election year? We talk about the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon, the former guest of Potts of the World

and leader of the Scottish National Party until recently. You know, interestingly, like, SMP is a left of center on a lot of things, but they're obviously a competitor to the Labor Party. So that also helps. If Labor can win back those Scotland seats and defeat the Weekend Tory Party, like they're going to be on a roll. That's what David said, basically, to give it a bit of a preview. And then we just talked a bit about how the Trump indictment looks from the perspective of London. And, you know, I think you can hear in David's answer, like, you know, obviously he is very supportive of the rule of law and the checks and balances on display in the U.S. system.

But, like, you know, people in other countries don't know that Trump's not going to be president again, too. And that's a very strange thing to realize when Trump is, as we speak in presenting himself in a Miami courthouse. So it's a good interview. people should check it out. Excellent. Always love hearing from David Lamie. I also cannot wait to listen to Potze of the UK this week because I imagine those guys, Nisha Coco have been on like a three-day bye-bye Boris Bender. That's been very fun. But so Ben, let's start with Trump and the Mar-a-Lago documents. We finally have an indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents hoarding case. It's a doozy. He is charged with 37 criminal counts. 31 of them are related to the willful retention of national defense information.

There's five counts of obstruction of justice and two counts of making false statements of the FBI. Trump is being arraigned as we speak on June 13th. Here's a sampling of some of the document that led to charges against him. This is the description by the government in the document. It's in the indictment. A document concerning military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States. That one is classified top secret slash SI slash no foreign slash FISA. It means it was gathered via information was gathered via signals and intelligence.

intelligence in some sort of collection on a U.S. person that was authorized by a FISA court. There's a document concerning nuclear weaponry of the United States. It was classified secret slash formerly restricted data, which is a category of data related to the military utilization of atomic weapons. There was a document dated June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country. The classification marking on that was top secret slash redacted slash redacted slash Orkon slash no foreign that I've never seen a classification demarcation redacted before. But Orkon means the agency that collected the data controls its dissemination. No foreign means you can't give it to non-U.S.

citizens. Then there was something about military activity in a foreign country that was top secret slash HCS-P, a bunch of other acronyms that I won't get into. But HCS-P means information that came from human intelligence, CIA assets, CIA spies around the world. So we're going to leave it to the legal analysts out there to tell us if he's guilty or not. I know strict scrutiny is going to record an emergency episode about this. But a couple of things that jumped out of me, Ben, from a national security perspective. First, as we expected, the documents Trump took were not like memos from his staff.

They were intelligence community and Pentagon documents in the most sensitive ones possible. Two, DOJ has not said that they know for sure that they've gotten all these documents back. and I think that's interesting and notable. And then, you know, third, despite reports that the special counsel's office had subpoenaed records relating to Trump's business dealings, there's no mention of that in this indictment. It doesn't mean that those connections don't exist necessarily or will never be drawn. But, you know, you have to assume that if Jack Smith had solid evidence that he had sold these documents or give them to a foreign national, that would be in this indictment, which just sort of gets to the last point, which is it's a very unsatisfying thought that. We might never know.

We probably will never know whether any of these documents were fell into the wrong hands. I'm sure the intel community is doing a damage assessment as we speak, but that will necessarily be conclusive. So very bad. Give me your hottest takes on this thing. What have you been thinking about since you read it? I mean, first of all, when this first broke, right, there was a spectrum of what these documents could be.

The most benign end of that spectrum, as we said, was like, you know, the letters with Kim Jong-un or some call transcripts with foreign leaders that bring back good memories. Then the next, you know, wrong of the spectrum would essentially be like the intelligence reports that you're not used to read, right, like that are kind of like 10, 15-page analytical summaries of some issue in the world, that they're really interesting. Maybe they have some kind of cool insight or anecdote or something. Yeah, the stuff on Discord. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. The stuff that we're like, yeah. stuff that we're reading on Discord. Exactly. What is really shocking to me about this is he's at the far end of the spectrum in terms of the most damaging possible documents in that the documents that have the most cost associated with them in terms of U.S. National Security and the documents that are like least possible to say they're like, you know, they're dealing with something in the past, you know, so, you know, maybe they could have shown someone about collection. Like to home in on one, for instance, it's been reported widely that one of these documents is like the U.S. war plan to attack Iran, right, and attack its nuclear program. Like, there is no way in which that document could possibly not be incredibly sensitive because it's about something in the future, you know, it's not even like an analytical assessment of something that happened already. It's about plans for things that would have to happen in the future. And if you looked at that document, and I've looked at, you know,

similar documents over the years, like you could look at it and you could not only understand like what do we want to strike or what do we understand about the Iranian nuclear program and where we might want to target, but also you can kind of surmise from that, where would the U.S. position military assets to carry out an attack? Would we need cooperation from other countries in terms of positioning resources or airspace permissions and things like that? I mean, this is something that if it's out in the open, like, the Pentagon has to like revise its plan around this. And to be clear, like, I hope we'd never have to use that plan. But like, it is incredibly sensitive, right?

Yeah. Just to clarify, like, people might be thinking, why the hell was a Pentagon drawing up war plans with Iran? Because that's their job. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs Office, they have plans for everything. That's what they do. And to your point, Ben, Trump claiming that he declassified the thing. I mean, someone should probably have told the Pentagon that because now they have to write up a new war. plan if that were to be true. I mean, it just like exposes how ludicrous these arguments are.

And that's my point. It's like you literally can't really declassify that, you know, because if it was a document, it's something that already happened. Okay, you have to do a damage assessment. You have to say, would the revelation of this document allow someone to figure out, you know, that we were listening in on certain conversations or we had a spy somewhere? This is about something that hasn't happened, right? So that jumped out to me. The fact that this does include documents that rely on human sources, demonstrates that like the revelation of these documents or they get in the wrong hands that that could that could literally put someone's life in danger. That is not an overstatement, you know, because that's the nature of human intelligence. That's the nature of spying.

And the things that jumped out to me, like the hot takes, I would add to this initial conversation. Again, we know from reporting that like there's this recording of him talking to like Mark Meadows biographers about like, you know, presumably. About the Iran War Plan. Right. So he's taking out this document. He's like, you know, I shouldn't be showing this to you. I didn't declassized. But what really jumped out to me about that is if he's showing this document to the Mark Meadows biographers, like, who the fuck else did he show that document to? You know, like, what he's showing the caterer's. Yeah, that's not the only people, you know, and I know this goes beyond what's showing off. Yeah. Jack Smith can only focus

on what he knows. And if he has a recording, then he knows that. But to your point of what we don't know, we have no idea who the hell he was showing this to for the last couple years, you know, and all these documents. We know from the kind of photos that were released that these documents were like they were in ballrooms, they were kind of like hanging out around Mar-Lago. These weren't even in like a locked closet. Like this is the kind of stuff that, again, Mar-Lago has been likely the number one intelligence target in the entire world. Hold on, Ben.

That's unfair. Republican Congressman Byron Donald's pointed out that there's 33 bathrooms at Mar-Lago. So don't act like it's a random bathroom that guests can just go into. That's an exact quote. And Kevin McCarthy pointed out that bathrooms can lock, unlike Joe Biden's garage, although he seems to have, I don't know, maybe not been inside a bathroom recently and realize that they lock from the inside usually. Well, and Joe Biden. People out of bathrooms.

Yeah. And Joe Biden's not exactly having like weddings and parties and fundraisers and, you know, bar mitz's. Thousands of people. Yeah. It's a country club. I mean, again, like people have to occupy this reality because they hear people say, national security, well, you know, that's hyperbolic. the Chinese and Russians, there's no question in anybody's mind that they've been trying to get into Mar-a-Lago since 2016, if not before.

And if you think they're not good enough to figure out how to get someone into a wedding or get someone into a party. Or a job as a caterer. Yeah, job as a caterer. Like, you haven't clearly watched enough spy movies because they've definitely been trying to do that. So to me, the main takeaways are this is the most sensitive possible documents he could have taken. there's real and significant risk that these documents are compromised. And yeah, we still don't know the motivation. Hopefully that comes out in the course of the trial.

Maybe that Jack Smith has a couple of things up his sleeve. But this is real. And like people looking at this around the world in addition just thinking, how on earth is this guy still like a frontrunner for the Republican nomination, like genuinely should be asking themselves and I'm sure are, do I want to cooperate with the United States? Like, do I want to spy for the United States? Do I want to share my intel with the United States if it's going to end up in, like, the ballroom of Mar-a-laga?

Yeah, box next to a toilet. Yeah, we've not heard anything that's indictment about the possible giving these documents to foreign governments. That doesn't mean that the kickbacks from these foreign governments haven't come in. Don't take our word for it. Let's hear Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie talking about the Trump family and the money they've made in the past few years. Let me tell you something, everybody. The grift from this family is breathtaking. It's breathtaking.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. Two billion dollars from the Saudis. You think it's because he's some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it's because he was sitting next to the President of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis? That's your money. that's your money he stole

and gave it to his family Hey Chris Shut the fuck up Christy Let's cut him off That's what it makes That's my line He's still my line

It's the thing about Investment genius I think I've used that I was gonna say Chris don't forget to rate and review the episodes It helps people find us in the iTunes store

We really appreciate it I like seeing him out there Listen I don't like Chris Christie You don't have to like him either But a whole bunch of us might be given that guy $1 so he ends up on the debate stage and just get yourself okay with that. It also makes you wonder, like, some Democrats have gone there. But like, why isn't every Democrat in Congress been saying exactly that for the last couple of years? You know, like, every now and then you see a Republican, like, you know, do the gut punch.

And you're like, man, I wish we had, you know, gut punchers like that. But yeah, he's raising the right questions. And to connect it to the documents thing, Tommy, like, we know that Trump was hosting, like, live. you know, golf tour events and different, you know, Bedminster, I think, had one. Like, you honestly think that he dust off the old Iran war plan for the Mark Meadows biographer. And he doesn't, he doesn't think like, oh, I got some Saudis coming for the live tour. Maybe I'll dust that bad boy off and throw in my briefcase and take it up to Bedminster

for the day. Like, I mean, this is a real issue, real concern that, like, what has he been sharing with the Saudis? Yeah, 100% chance he has done it, in my opinion. Okay, Ben. So speaking of spying, over the weekend, the Biden administration disclosed the existence of a now no longer secret Chinese eavesdropping base in Cuba. This news came out in sort of a weird way. Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that China and Cuba had reached some sort of secret deal where the Chinese government would pay the Cubans billions of dollars for permission to establish a base on the island of Cuba. The White House initially said, no, the story is inaccurate. But it turns out what was inactive. accurate about the Wall Street Journal story was the suggestion that this base was new when, in fact, it had been set up in 2019 and maybe it had been like refurbished recently. I don't know. But, you know, first of all, it's a good window into why being a national security spokesperson is

very complicated because, you know, the White House reads this story. They know parts of it are wrong, but you can't explain what's right and what's wrong until you get the intelligence community to declassify a bunch of information so you can put out the real facts, which they did, I think, on Saturday. But Ben, Biden's team clearly wanted everyone to know that this base was set up during the Trump administration, that they got briefed on it during the transition. And I think Politico was suggested that maybe they wanted to avoid, you know, sort of a Chinese spy balloon style blow up because Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State is supposed to visit China next week. More recently, we learned about China's attempts to build a military base in the UAE. But Ben, I mean,

What do you make of these reports and the sort of broader sense of the Cuba-China relationship? Is that long-standing? Does this sound new to you? Like, what was your take? Yeah, no, it's long-standing. But my take is 2019 is a very notable year, okay? Because we have the opening to Cuba. And what's that that that's doing is that that is providing like, you know, an infusion of additional resources to Cubans, right?

Because more Americans are traveling down there. there's kind of a tourism industry that is building out. There are these small businesses, a Cuban private sector of people that own restaurants and drive taxis and things like that. Trump comes in and he rolls back a big piece of that opening in 2017. But then Marco Rubio and all these guys like convince him to go further and further and further and sanction and sanction through 2018. And so lo and behold, 2019, the Cubans did take this step because,

they have nowhere else to go, right? Like, we basically delivered Cuba into the arms of the Chinese. The timing is incredibly revelatory because that is precisely when Trump went to a maximalist sanctions policy. And if you are a small island state that has been in a conflict to the United States that bets on a different approach of opening up to the United States and then gets the door slammed in your face such that suddenly you have a humanitarian crisis in country. Suddenly, like, you've got an outflow of people to the U.S. border. Like, you have no word to turn but to China and Russia. And so we've talked about the insanity of U.S. Cuba policy because it hurts the Cuban people. We've talked about the insanity of U.S. Cuba policy because

it is driving a migration crisis to our border. But the geopolitics of it are actually even dumber because we're basically saying, hey, there's this island 90 miles from Florida. because of our politics with Bob Menendez and some people in Florida, we're going to have a total sanctions wall around this country, such that not only can they not get U.S. investment, but they can't get any investment from Europe either. What do you think is going to happen? They're going to turn to the only option they have, which is China and Russia.

So the U.S., the United States government is kind of like a co-investor in that base. Because we gave the Cubans nowhere else to go. Yeah, we got an equity in that. It's, yeah, it's absolute insanity, and it just shows you how stupid this policy is. Part of why I found Hillary Clinton's story about Vladimir Putin's father so interesting is that the heart of diplomacy is trying to have empathy for your adversaries and your friends, right? And sort of like see the world from their perspective. So Vladimir Putin thinks, you know, the Nazis would have slaughtered us all if we didn't

fucking take the fight to them, right? To your point, the Cubans, the Cubans couldn't hold. their May Day parade this year because the island had run out of gasoline. That's how desperate they are. This comes after COVID, after U.S. sanctions. So I'm not defending the decision to set up a Chinese spy base, but of course, let's look at a place you would turn for an infusion of capital. No, in my experience, right? So I, like, I negotiated with the Cubans over many years. I spent hundreds, probably thousands of hours with senior members of the Cuban government up to Raul Castro, who was then the president of Cuba. And what was very clear to me,

is that there were divisions inside of that system, right? So you had some people that were more pragmatic who were thinking, you know, there's still guys that we don't agree with. There's still autocrats, but they're thinking like, you know what? Like, we need to diversify. We should open up to the U.S. We should open up to Western investment. It's a better bet for us in the long run.

If it means we have to tolerate like the internet coming online in Cuba, tolerate people coming here with different political ideas, we're willing to take that risk. I knew at the time that there were hardliners in the Cuban system. that did not like the opening, the kind of really retro guys in the Cuban military and other aspects of the Cuban system that didn't like the opening. And Fidel Castro himself criticized the opening. He was clover in a different place even from his brother. And what happened is when Trump slammed the door in their face, it dramatically undercut all the people that had participated in, negotiated, and supported that opening of the United States. And the hardliners came in and said,

you were wrong. We should just throw our lot in with the Chinese and Russians. It's the only way that we can get any resources. And look, the check that they get from the Chinese or that base is not the kind of sustained revenue that would come from travel from Americans, who, by the way, want to go to Cuba. But yeah, it doesn't make them right. But it makes them rational, self-interested actors that if the United States government is not going to give them any capacity to do any business with anybody that is one of our friends and allies, they're just going to be left with Russia, China. The same thing. thing has happened in Venezuela, where Russia and China have an enormous influence. So, you know what? Like the Biden administration can't say out of one side of its mouth, we're running a strategy to try to prevent Russian and Chinese influence in this hemisphere. And the other hand, set up a bunch of policies that give countries in this hemisphere no choice but to deal with Russia and China. It's insanity. That's a really good point. Speaking of Russia, Ben, so lots of news out of Ukraine this week. The long-awaited Ukrainian counter-offensive has officially begun, Nizelensky has confirmed as much. The reporting so far seems to suggest that the Ukrainian military is probing the Russian lines in a whole bunch of places before deciding where to sort of go all in with these newly trained, newly armed units.

There has been some limited success so far. They've retaken some small villages, but things have been complicated by rainstorms and mud that make it hard to move heavy equipment. Rain or shine, though, this is going to be a very difficult, long process getting through these Russian minefields and fortifications. So expect this to take much. before we, I think, have a verdict on whether it's worked or not. Last week, we mentioned this sabotage of the Kakovka Dam in eastern Ukraine, which is holding back a body water to the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, which is now pouring into the ocean. Seems clear now that the dam was blown up, probably from the inside by the Russians who were occupying it at the time. The floodwaters have displaced thousands of people.

It's creating this ecological catastrophe that is being routinely described as the Ukraine's worst environmental disaster since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. Think about that for a minute. Massive amounts of farmland is unusable. Landmines are washing down screen. Oil and gas. It's just a disaster. The Ukrainian government in the UN are providing relief to those affected in Ukrainian occupied areas, but the Russians are doing nothing to help the people in the areas they control that are getting flooded out, despite being there to liberate them ostensibly. They won't even give the UN security guarantees so they can go in and help. Instead, the Russians are shooting at people evacuating the flooded parts of Ukraine. So that's, you know, tells you kind of who they are.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a surprise visit to Ukraine, pledge some money. Joe Biden pledged another $325 million in aid. The leaders of France, Germany, and Poland got together in Paris to reaffirm their support. So lots of diplomatic activity happening. So, Ben, lots going on here. There is this big ongoing debate that I think has both military implications and political implications for Joe Biden and everybody else supporting this war about what success looks like. The New York Times tried to shorthand it in a piece, I think, over the weekend. They talked about it being Ukraine retaking and holding important territory and brushing back the Russian military to the point where it kind of raises fundamental questions about their capacity. Failure would be,

we give Ukraine all this new equipment, all this new training, and it just has no impact militarily. Does that sound about right to you? Yeah. I mean, we've talked about this expectations question. And it's been interesting to see that in the run-up the offensive, the expectation setting was very maximalist. It was like victory, victory, victory. And then as soon as it began, it's like, I think, a smart effort to lower expectations. I mean, in my mind, you know, it would seem like, and you see this in the reporting, that like, if they could break that land bridge, if they could take back pieces of southern Ukraine that separate Crimea from what Russia controls in eastern Ukraine, that that would be a very successful.

counteroffensive. But that's not easy at all, given that Russia's been able to dig in and fortify. It's harder to make progress the longer the Russians have had to prepare. The only other thing I'd put into this mix, Tommy, after your good summary, is that, you know, there's been this question of like, what would Russia do to escalate? I think the damn explosion, presuming that was Russia, and it certainly seems that way, that's a pretty good indication that they are willing to do some shit that, as you said. Massive war crime. Yeah, and no caring for even their own people. Like, the only reason there was some question over who did this at first is that it hurt a lot of people in Russian-controlled areas. It hurt kind of a water resource for Crimea. The fact that the Russians

clearly just look at Ukraine as like a map and could give a shit about any people there, including the people that, like you said, they claim to liberate the Russian-speaking populations, that's worrying to me because it is a sign that they're willing to escalate beyond just kind of bombing war crimes to, you know, more in this case an ecological disaster. The nuclear question is still out there. So it does suggest that, you know, there's places that Russia can go in defense of its own the territory it's claimed that are quite escalatory. And Ukraine's going to be dealing with the after effects of this dam for a very long time.

Yeah, for years and years and years. And so I mentioned the politics of this and sort of like what it means for Joe Biden and sustaining political support. I just wanted to talk about two examples, one on the Democratic side and one on the Republican side of sort of where the policy conversation is shifting. The first is just a quick clip of now Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking about Ukraine. It's on Fox News. Worst of all, we've killed 350,000 Ukrainian kids for a sham, something that, you know, they're going and fighting, believing at their fighting for their nation. But if you look at the history of war. That's the Russians doing that.

Well, but, you know, what was our history of provocations? You know, you had George Cannon, who was our senior diplomat. the most important diplomat in our country, in our history, who designed the containment policy during the Cold War. Bill Myers was the, excuse me, President Clinton's Secretary of State, William Berry, who said, both of them and the current CIA director, Bill Burns, have all warned in advance If you try to move NATO east to the Russian borders, it is going to force the Russians into a war with the United States. And then, you know, we spend $5 billion.

And you would want to put it into that. So I just want to be clear that we didn't choose that clip to like mock his voice in any way. He's got a rare disorder that impacts the muscle in his larynx. The issue we had was the substance of what he's saying there. Like RFK Jr. is blaming George Kennan, an American diplomat who was born in 1904 and died in 2005 for Putin's decision to invade in 2020. You and I have had a number of conversations. We had Peter Beinart on the show to talk about NATO expansion and how it made the Russians feel boxed in.

It was maybe a bad idea at some points. But the idea that we, the U.S., forced Putin to invade Ukraine is fucking ludicrous. And this guy is polling at like 20 percent. Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, is endorsing him. Elon Musk is, you know, lifting him up on social media. Like, the debate is getting very weird on this stuff then. No, there's a kind of zeitgeist out there that RFK Jr. is in, which is like the, you know, libertarian, anti-woke, you know, anti-establishment.

It's easy to kind of roll your eyes at it. I think that you can miscalculate how profoundly there's a vein of public opinion on both the left and the right that just distrust U.S. foreign policy, you know? And it's all post-Iraq war, chiefly. I mean, it's always been there, but I think since Iraq war, Vietnam, it's very pronounced. And I think that there are these assumptions about support for something like the war in Ukraine that are just really shallow, because even at the height of support, for Ukraine, even in the early days of the war, when there was this kind of outpouring and the media kind of reflected a sense of total support for Ukraine. You look at a poll and it was like a hovering

on 50% support. I just think people in the foreign policy establishment and the political establishment ignore at their peril. It's not to say he's not right. I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's wrong to treat that as like some quack view because that's basically... Or that it's self-evident. that it's a quack view. Because it probably sounds compelling to a lot of people. Yeah, it is. Like, well, you know, you should. If someone expanded NATO's foreign military alliances, you know, to Mexico, what would we do?

Like, there are all kinds of ways of framing it. The bottom line is that that's Donald Trump's position. That's the only challenger to Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's position. That's the position of a bunch of people in Congress. And it's kind of the position that could travel in an election year. So I think the point is you should never take for granted. this support, that Joe Biden is going to have to explain all the time why we're doing this and not just assume that everybody agrees that it's a great thing that we're in this war

through a proxy that we're arming them because I think that there's more traction out there for that view than people might think. I do too. And there's another guy in the Republican field named Vivek Ramoswamy, who's a sort of businessman who came out of nowhere, is doing surprisingly well. It's early. I don't think he'll necessarily sustain it. But his plan, end when it comes to Ukraine is to basically end U.S. military support for Ukraine and try to cut the following peace deal, which is to get Russia to agree to end its military alliance with China, withdraw weapons from sort of the Ukraine region, rejoin the START treaty, and then exchange, he just wants to give the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine to the Russians and Ukraine's

end Ukraine's effort to join NATO because I guess he doesn't think partitioning a country has ever ended badly or he apparently thinks that Putin would actually abide by this agreement over the long term. I mean, but like this guy is getting some traction. Well, and, and to your point, right, this is the kind of, you know, Vivek and RFK Jr. are both the kind of guys who swim in the sea of like, you know, Elon and David Sacks, you know, the, the Allen pod rose. Yeah, little Joe Rogan. Yeah, a little Joe Rogan for you. A little Joe Rogan flavor. And the thing is actually, Those people are incredibly powerful people, not David Sacks, but like Elon Musk is, you know, audience, owns Twitter, Jack Dorsey.

Like, these are people with a lot of resources who, if they want to push certain content, they want to drive certain arguments into the mainstream, like, they can do that, you know? And so I just think that that people, when they talk about Ukraine, are going to have to explain core principles of, why we're doing this, because this is going to be a building sentiment. And if the Ukrainians don't get a lot done in this counteroffensive and if there's more loss of life, then there's another argument of like, well, we should, you know, stop the killing in Ukraine. We're prolonging a war that isn't leading someplace. So I just think it's not that I agree with those views, but you've got to make the argument.

All right. So some troubling news out of Ethiopia, Ben, where the U.S. government is suspending food aid after an investigation found that Ethiopian government officials were stealing food assistance from USAID in the World Food Program and using it to feed the military and then also selling grain to millers in Ethiopia who then ground into flour and re-exported it to places like Kenya and Somalia. USAID told the post after a countrywide review, USAID determined in coordination with the government of Ethiopia that a widespread and coordinated campaign is diverting food assistant. We cannot move forward with distribution of food assistance until reforms are in place.

So this is like a hard stop on USAID's work. Ethiopia, as we've talked about before, they've been fighting this horrific civil war for last two years. The entire horn of Africa is struggling after five failed rainy seasons, which have led to droughts and failed crops. 20 million people in Ethiopia are on the brink of starvation. And it's the largest recipient of food aid in the world currently. So, you know, USAID did this in phases. They first cut off food aid to the northern part of the country, Ibizu is being used to feed rebels up there. but I think this investigation they did basically found diversion of food aid in every area they looked at.

The Ethiopian foreign ministry said they're going to work with us on an investigation. But I don't know, like even if this was mostly done by local officials, you got to assume there's pretty serious questions about what Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government knew or allowed to happen or questions about the world food program's ability to monitor its own programs. The theft was not at all subtle. the Washington Post pointed out that there was one town in Ethiopia that had two flour mills despite the fact that there were no wheat fields within 300 miles of these facilities. And there were just bags labeled USAID and World Food Program sitting out in front of them. So it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. But Ben, you read a story like this.

And it's the most demoralizing thing in the world because like well-intentioned programs are getting stopped and won't be able to help these people. It's so damaging for people in Ethiopia. it's so damaging for political support for foreign assistance programs when opponents of them can lift up programs like this. It's just like makes each want to scream. Yeah. And it could exacerbate, obviously, the near-term food and nutrition issues in Ethiopia. I would hope that the goal is to try to find some new mechanism for delivery rather than just kind of pull up stakes.

I mean, I understand why USAID took the step they did, obviously. but you really don't want the U.S. to be absented from like the capacity to provide food aid to someplace like that. So hopefully the goal is can we find some other delivery mechanism? Can they, you know, make an example of some local officials? Because if the U.S. is kind of out of that space and other countries, potentially donor countries are out of that space, then you're just going to create an even worse situation in terms of not just humanitarian crisis, but it kind of like, you know, the worst actor.

are often empowered, you know, by our absence. So, like, my hope is that they can try to work to remedy this and resume, recognizing that there's a higher bar now, as there should be, because otherwise it's pretty grim. Yeah, it's dire. Staying in Eastern Africa, unfortunately, things are getting far worse in Sudan. So back in April, the Sudanese military started fighting with a paramilitary force in Sudan called the rapid support forces or RSF.

They had been partners, the military and the RSF, following a 2021 military coup that deposed the civilian government, but then they broke out to the Civil War. The heaviest fighting started in Khartoum, Sudan's capital, but it is spread to other parts of the country, including the Darfur region, where militia groups are using the power vacuum to take territory, settle, scores, et cetera.

I'm sure a lot of listeners know that Darfur is the place where one of the worst genocides and modern history occurred. That was when Arab militias called the Janjaweed slaughtered mostly non-Arab tribal groups. Many of those Janjaweed militias later became the RSF, so a lot of the same actors here. So you're starting to see activists sound the alarm about fears that the Darfur genocide is restarting. The governor of Darfur called on citizens to take up arms and defend themselves from attacks from the RSF. According to Al Jazeera, there's a doctor's association in Darfur compared the intensity of fighting in one city to the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The U.S. and the Saudis have been trying to organize these peace talks and negotiating these sporadic ceasefires, but they seem to quickly get broken. And to the extent that the ceasefires have worked, it's really seemingly only in Khartoum, not in the Darfur region. On top of that bend, the Sudanese government declared that the head of the UN mission in Sudan was persona non grata. So they're basically booting the guy out of the country. The latest stats are about one and a half million Sudanese people have been internally displaced in the country. Another half million have been forced to leave the country. Half the country of Sudan needs humanitarian assistance.

So, Ben, this is sort of the worst nightmare scenario. I'm starting to see calls for the UN to deploy peacekeepers to Sudan. Previously, there was a joint UN-African Union peacekeeping mission. That mission ended in 2020. Do you think that's the right move? And if so, like, how quickly can something like that happen? Well, I mean, first of all, we're seeing, as you said, the worst case scenario play out because what happens is do you have two kind of warlord-type figures that decide to fight for control of the country?

That can very quickly become zero-sum, as we've talked about, because, you know, whoever loses is, that's it. They're out. You know, they'll probably be killed or they're certainly never going to be anywhere near power. And so then as it becomes zero sum, these guys need every advantage they can get. So then they start stoking, you know, ethnic tensions and, you know, factional tensions and regional tensions because it serves their purposes. They clearly don't care how many people get killed. And so you have this kind of spiral where what starts as a power struggle kind of, you know,

they go around lighting every brush fire that they can to their advantage. And you get this kind of killing and violence. It's just horrific. I think the daunting challenge is the geopolitics are much worse today than they were in the past when, you know, peacekeeping missions were authorized. The UN is a shell of itself because the UN Security Council is totally paralyzed by the geopolitical competition between the U.S. and Russia and China. So getting kind of a UN Security Council resolution around anything of any consequence is incredibly complicated, and that would normally be the umbrella for something like a peacekeeping mission or some peace deal. The African Union as the kind of chief regional

entity, you'd want to be playing a lead role, but, you know, it doesn't have the same clout that the UN Security Council once did. And, you know, what countries are going to put peacekeepers in the middle of a civil war like that? And so I think, yeah, ideally you'd want some UN back peace process for dialogue and ceasefire coupled with the deployment of some peacekeepers. But man, there's a lot working against that right now. I think that's a long shot. Yeah, I do too. And look, these are enormous places that these peacekeepers would have to cover. You've got to set a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. And to your point about the geopolitics, I mean, we know that the Russians, you know, the Wagner group is probably benefiting from some of this instability,

you know, extracting more minerals and things from various countries. So yeah, it's just, it's dire. Yeah. Switching gears here, Ben. There was an interesting report in the Wall Street Journal about how North Korean hackers have managed to steal more than $3 billion worth of cryptocurrency in the past five years, and they are using it to fund about half of North Korea's ballistic missile program. Wonderful. Just the solution we were looking for from cryptocurrency.

So the first major crypto heist by the North Korean started in 2018, there were more than 42 successful attacks identified in 2022, according to the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies. North Korea has long been known to have a surprisingly strong sort of cyber force, I say surprising, because it's, you know, I don't think you think of them as the most online culture out there or necessarily educated. But North Korea has workers in countries all over the world. Many of them apply for jobs at like crypto companies. They get hired. and then they set up a back door for future access or otherwise cause mischief. There was the, a bunch of North Korean hackers infected a bunch of hospitals with ransomware

a couple years ago. So these activities have become a critical lifeline for North Korea to get around sanctions. And experts say they have basically shifted most of their cyber operations from traditional espionage to theft. So I don't know. I don't want to, am I being too hard on cryptocurrency here by blaming them? It's North Korean stealing the stuff, but man, did it make it easier, it seems. Well, if you set up, and I know the crypto enthusiasts will, you know, not like this,

but like if you set up a whole kind of currency mechanism whose chief, you know, attribute in your view is that it can evade government regulation, guess who's going to move into that space pretty rapidly? Like, what's interesting by North Korea is they've kind of established themselves as like the bottom feeders around global capitalism. So they have a cyber theft capability where they've essentially trained a bunch of hackers who've like either through ransom attacks or just outright theft have created a source of revenue. Now they're getting in the crypto space. By the way, we should add, this is like a very close first cousin of RFK and, you know, that whole set of people. You know, the same people that have theories about the Ukrainian war are often crypto enthusiasts. That's all crypto.

There's some great people in crypto. I'd want to see. Check Dorsey changed the name of his company to block blockchain. Exactly. So there's that to it. But I mean, the whole point here is that like I really do think for even the kind of better intentioned, more earnest crypto investors, the idea that you're going to have a completely unregulated currency system, the big countries that don't like that, like the

United States and China, for that matter, are going to start building up walls and start prosecuting people as we've seen with FDX. And, you know, the North Greece of the world are going to be, or the, you know, the guy in El Salvador or Bikali who's building like, you know, Bitcoin cities, those are going to be the people that rush into this space. And, and again, I think the interesting that the North Koreans is they don't need, like, because they don't care about their own people, like a ton of money. They need, you know, a few billion dollars to sustain nuclear and ballistic missile stuff. And they're finding ways to do that by exploiting these kind of new, unregulated kind of wild west, slothel. I'd look for what North Korea is going to do with AI, for instance, because AI is a shortcut to having a lot of capabilities.

You know, their capacity is to kind of hang out and like surf the next wave. First it was crypto, then it'll be AI next year. You know, like, I think this is going to be part of their model. Yeah, it's not great. Ben, Henry Kissinger might still be alive. We can celebrate him while he's living. But Sylvia Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy, is now dead at 86. he's probably the foreign leader

who most resembles Trump you think he's sort of like Trump before Trump Yeah self-made unlike Trump He was a self-made media mogul Yeah I mean he set up like He figured out TV early He made massive amounts of money Setting up all the TV stations

And a bunch of He had a media empire He was crass, he was corrupt He used to host sex parties with prostitutes called Bunga Bunga parties He was later accused of having sex With an underage prostitute Although he was acquitted on those charges

He was convicted of tax fraud in 2012. But despite all these controversies and scandals, Berlusconi was prime minister four different times and a dominant figure in Italian politics for several decades. His politics were kind of center right to right wing. He dabbled a lot with right wing populism. There's more of a cult of personality than anything else. It's buddies with Putin. He was recently caught on tape blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion. I think that here are times one of the stories about him described his brand of politics.

as populist buffoonery, which I thought was pretty perfect. And, you know, he was incompetent when it came to economic management. So, Ben, you know, I think in summary, here's like what your take is on his legacy. He was certainly a close U.S. ally in all our biggest mistakes, like the Iraq War. Yeah, yeah. Libya, some might say, right-wing populist, a real scumbag, but, you know, also just a towering, towering figure in Italian politics. Total scumbag.

I mean, you know, first of all, his political resilience and, you know, success is helped a lot by the fact that he owned all these television stations, right? So people ask, like, because he often ran the Italian economy in the ground and, you know, he obviously had these personal scandals. But when you own the TV stations, it'd be almost as if, like, Rupert Murdoch was also a politician or something, you know, that's the degree of how much he could, like, rely on, like, a mouthpiece for the last 20 years. So that, that, to me explains his resilience. But in a way, you're right, he's like an innovator, like, he anticipated Trump, right? He was a showman. He attracted attention to himself. He had no shame, right? Like,

he was ahead of the curve of what people like Trump figured out or Boris Johnson that if you do not have the capacity to be shamed, you can kind of get away with stuff because, you know, you don't have to apologize and resign because you're like, don't give a shit, right? That's one thing. I am struck by the U.S.-centric view of Burlesconi. I remember my consciousness of him started around the Iraq War because he was like all in the Bush, right? So like... Do you remember the debate? when I think movies John Kerry criticized the war that the U.S. is going at alone

and Bush started yelling, like, tell that to Sylvia Berlusconi. You remember that? Well, it's the same debate where he was like, you forgot about Poland, you know? Because like France and Germany had obviously broken in the U.S. And Burlesconi, like, stood by or aside.

And like, it just goes to show that like, you know, Bush, we don't drag Bush enough sometimes because like, you know, remember he was looking into Putin's soul and he was buddies with Berlusconi. My memory of Berlusconi that stands out is, Tommy, were you at the G20 in Cannes in, in like, 2012, I believe? So at that, that's at the height of what was the Eurozone crisis, which was essentially

Greece was like defaulting, the Italian economy was following Greece, like, down a rabbit hole. And there was a concern that Italy and Greece were going to literally drag all of Europe into some massive financial crisis in another recession, which would have been existential to, like the Obama presidency as well. And what was clear in all the meetings that the leaders were having, like Merkel and Obama and all these people, Sarkozy, is that there was no solution to this problem unless Silvio Berlusconi resigned as Italian Prime Minister because he was so incompetent, gave so little of a shit of like making a deal to rescue the Italian economy that

like you just couldn't do anything. And there was this kind of massive peer pressure from within Italy and from within Europe and to be like, just step aside and let some tech. technocrat in. And he did actually. Like he finally was like, okay, fine. I'll let some technocrat take over, stabilize the European economy. Then he came back, you know? And so he was this kind of weird, flexible guy in a way, because like usually if a bunch of people are like, yeah, you need to resign, like you'd fight. But I think Burles Scuny knew that he always could come back because of these TV stations. And so I just remember watching him, like everybody in the room was pissed at him. The entire G20s, like you are the obstacles of solving this fucking problem. And he just didn't

seem to care of that much, you know. Just having a good time. Yeah. Just hanging out. It was in Cannes. So can you imagine what kind of parties he was going to while Anglameh and Obama are like designing a bailout package? Yeah, making spreadsheets.

Was that the one when we stayed up literally all night long drinking with some Brits the night before and halfway through the night, we realized they were all like MI5 and MI6? And then I basically went from the bar to the bus to fly to the next event. That was not. There's, you know, that's not the only time. That was Dovial. So, no, yeah, that was in, that was Dovial. That was a G7 or G8.

I got to get my G's wrong. Yeah, that was another G. And let's just say, I remember having to fly to that one and attend a meeting with Dmitri Medvedev during which I had the worst hangover had. And I remember looking across at like Lavrov. And they all, all the Russians had the same thing over. Like they'd all been, like, like, everybody was like sweating bullets in this room that was too hot. Smold like vodka.

And I was like, I'm going to have to like run out. of this room and I'm like, I look at Lavrov, I'm like, I think he's feeling the same way I am. That guy, full of shame and drinks from the night before. All right, a couple of quicker things to close. In Senegal, violent clashes between police and supporters of a leading opposition figure named Usman Sonko have left at least 23 people dead and 390 people injured, according to Amnesty International. Senegal is known as one of Africa's most stable democracies, but there have been major protests

since Sunco was sentenced to two years in prison earlier this month, which will bar him from running in future elections. He was actually facing much more serious charges, specifically rape, but he was not convicted there. Many people are furious at President Mackey Saw for the brutal police response to the protesters. That includes firing live ammo. People are just getting killed indiscriminately. They're also mad at him about high unemployment and corruption. human rights groups are also concerned about a broader erosion of democratic norms in Senegal, including the arrest of journalists and opposition politicians.

So not good. Yeah, what's interesting is Mackie Saul came into power as like the democracy candidate backed by civil society who was denying like someone with autocratic tendencies from sticking around. He's, you know, he's got a choice to make. you know, there's about whether to be one of these guys who tries to extend his time in office or whether to back a successor. Look, you can never measure places against the perfect, but I think the important point here is that Senegal is an election upcoming, and it has been, along with Ghana, like a mainstay of some semblance of democracy and stability in West Africa.

This is the same region where we've seen, you know, coups in places like, you know, Burkina Faso and Mali. And so you really hope that that stability holds and they get through this election in a democratic way. And so this is something to watch because it does have an impact not just on Senegal, but like on this wider region that had been one of the more, you know, one of the bright spots in terms of democracy. You hate to see that, you know, go up in flame.

So the Senegal election is one to watch here. Yeah, for sure. Also, we have talked many times on the show about the murder of a young woman named Masa Amini by the so-called morality police in Iran. Her murder led to this wave of anti-government protests, a brutal crackdown by the security forces in response. It turns out now Iran is prosecuting two women who simply reported on Masa Amini's story. Nulufar Hamidi and Elehi Muhammad are journalists. They have spent eight months in prison before going on trial last week. they were charged with conspiring with foreign intelligence agencies to undermine national security.

Those accusations are self-evidently ridiculous. But if convicted, their punishments could be death. There has been a surge of executions in Iran lately. The Wall Street Journal reported that at least 142 people were executed in May alone. The highest monthly number since 2015. About half of those are drug charges, but a lot of them are protesters and people who are just sort of expressing frustration with the government. So awful story, Ben, I'm hoping that, you know, some more attention on this will lead to some sort of international diplomatic effort to pressure Iran to release them, to at least not use capital punishment. I mean, something to walk this back. Yeah, no, it's horrific. And the challenge, right, is that we've seen in the aftermath of the

breakdown of the Iran nuclear agreement, but then also the obviously most acutely in the aftermath of these protests and the war in Ukraine, as the Iranians kind of just go all in with Russia, their capacity to be influenced by, you know, the U.S. has always had some limited capacity, but Europe was a voice that Iran sometimes listened to. It's just harder and harder to affect Iranian behavior. And, you know, there's clearly this kind of zero-sum crackdown that's happening in Iran. I think part of what's looking in the backdrop, too, is that there have been some reporting about this recently, the Supreme Leader is old, very old. He's been in poor health. So there's like succession issues like looming on the horizon. The capacity for Iran to be a very volatile place, you know, continues to be acute. You would hope that in the interim, though, that international attention, international spotlight can at least try to curb some of these excesses and protect some of these journalists. There's no, you know, you know, what about is in the world that could ever justify what's happening.

So the point I'm about to make is not at all to let Iran off the hook. It would be nice if the U.S. opposed the killing of journalists as a general matter in the Middle East. And that's harder when, you know, the Saudis are buying up, you know, professional golf and hanging out, you know, with us after they killed the journalists. So that be good to have that moral authority too. Yeah, that's a fair point. Yeah, not great. Not great that Muhammad bin Salman is welcomed back into the fold after that. Although, you know, the Saudi is also leading the charge when it comes to executions globally.

So another great thing about that. Yeah, we're in that club, too, the U.S. I mean, it's an argument against the death penalty here, not that we have to go down that road. Yeah. The other countries that utilize it are good advertisement for not doing that. I could not be more opposed to the death penalty. Last thing before Ben's interview, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, died recently in his jail cell. Thoughts and prayers to all the Harvard grads out there.

I know you lost a real one. Did you know that he was subjected to the CIA-backed MK Ultra experiments while at Harvard? No, is that true? I had no idea. I saw it mentioned in one of the obits I read that linked me to a really long Atlantic piece about him that said that, said that he was there was there's an experiment where these subjects were put under essentially mock interrogations they had like blinding spotlights they were verbally abused and they just like shouted them down about their beliefs and harshly criticize them there's no evidence that lSD or

other substances were used on ted kaczynski that for those who don't know mk ultra is this crazy cia back program of like the most famous piece of it was you know giving people lSD to see if you could get like truth serums or mind control or just like that shit crazy cold war thinking but yeah the unabomber was subject to mk ultra backed experiments while at harvard seems like that one didn't work out um no i i i um i did go down like the obit rabbit hole with him and you know what's interesting is if you go back and look at i mean first of all it's extraordinary that the new york times in washington post like literally published this guy's like 30 000 word manifesto yeah why did they do they did it because he said he wouldn't kill anybody anymore if they did. And that's true. And actually the irony of it is the publication of

his manifesto is what tipped off his brother, his brother, read the manifesto. And it's like, holy shit, I think that's my brother. And that's how they got him. That's got to be a tough phone call. But like if you look at his ideology, right, it's kind of anti-everything, anti-tech, anti-fut, you know, like today he'd be in like a Twitter space or something. Or he'd be in like a 4chan or something. Like he's actually like a very recognizable character today as this kind of anti-world government, you know. But, you know, he was a man tragically ahead of his times in some ways. Yeah. And so I guess there is a question of whether these experiments that were done on him sort of aggravated what I think was later diagnosed to schizophrenia.

And that led to this behavior where he sent these package bombs, killed three people, injured 23 others. and these completely random, just heinous crimes against people he'd never met. Yeah, horrific. And some of them, it's totally random. People married with children. Academics. We should always, like, there was a bit of a, like,

I guess there's like a boomlet and, like, people that, like, look up to him and, like, man, don't, don't separate out the crime from what this guy was saying. You're also a fucking idiot if you think he was some sort of genius. It's what you said. It's, like, completely wrote, like, Twitter Spaces's thoughts. Yeah, it's like Twitter Spaces ranting, like, you know, in Unabomber form. Yeah.

Okay, that's it for us and for the Unabomber. We're going to take a quick break and we come back. You'll hear Ben's interview with the right honorable David Lammy, so stick around for that. All right, we are very, very pleased

to welcome back to Pod Save the World. Member of Parliament for the Labor Party, shadow foreign secretary for Kirstarmer and Labor Party, David Lammy. David, good to see you again. Good to be here. So, David, we've marked the times

Boris Johnson's ascent and descent from his election to his resignation as prime minister. We had to have you on here to discuss the most recent turn of events with Boris stepping down as a member of parliament and some chaos ensuing in the Conservative Party. Why don't we just start with what happened and what is your reaction? Well, your audience will know that Boris Johnson, and got himself into difficulties because of lie. And the big lies he told was he crafted the rules that governed our behavior during the pandemic.

And then it turns out that he was partying with his staff in number 10. But the problem is in our parliament, there is a clear rule that you must not lie. Sometimes accidentally people speak, you know, they misspeak or there's a, there's an untruth. You correct the record very quickly. Boris Johnson did not do this.

There was a catalogue of events and things that he said in Parliament that were problematic. So it was then investigated by a what we call a select committee. This is the Privileges Committee of Standards across Parliament that look at these issues. It's a cross-party committee of parliamentarians. Actually, the majority of the committee are conservatives. it's chaired by a very eminent Labour MP Harriet Harmon. And they wrote to Boris Johnson to tell him where they had got to. It was that that led to him effectively writing this, crafting this letter,

that knocked the committee, called it a kangaroo court. And I think that's very interesting because I saw that language used by Donald Trump on exactly the same day in the United States. of America and also attack Rishi Sunak. Why? Because Rishi Sunak, on the same day, Boris Johnson has a list of people that he can give honors to, you know, in the UK, you can put people in the House of Lords, or you can make them knights or dames. And it seems that Rishi Sunak not back some of those recommendations of Boris Johnson or didn't do quite what Boris Johnson wanted to do, even though the list was full of cronies and, you know, and people who were associated with partying and

some of the worst aspects of populism in this country. So it was a day in which he then ultimately resigned and two of his close colleagues who did not appear on that list, but expected to, Nadine Doris and Nigel Adams also resigned. So we now have three by-election, and this is hugely undermining for Rishi Sunat because he's likely to do very badly. in those by-elections and the Labor Party are likely to do very well. Again, your listeners will have followed that we are doing very well in the polls here in the UK and a lot of people are predicting that Labor is likely to return government at the point at which there's a next general election. So that's a summary of what's gone on. And what is Boris's next play here? Does he have a

path back to power or is he just a chaos agent? Is he just got a vendetta against Rishi-Soonak? Like what is he doing with this kind of performative resignation and trying to get his allies to step aside? Is this part of a plan or is this just him being Boris? Well, let's just deal with the fundamentals first, because let's just look at the populist playbook first. One, there's an undermining of the institution that is parliament. You know, it is actually serious when you have lied, when a panel of your peers have looked into this. It's unprecedented in wrongdoing to undermine a committee of the Parliament of the House of Commons. The cronyism, you know, favouring your own in this way and giving them honours and expecting the new Prime Minister to do your bidding is also deeply, deeply flawed and undemocratic and is all about his judgment.

What's his play? Well, his play is he wants to return as leader of the Conservative Party. He expects that Rishi Sunak will not be successful in the next general election. He wants probably to get back into Parliament, either in one of these seats, we'll see that in the next week play out or a little bit later on, and to return as probably the leader of the opposition for the Conservative Party. You know, in a way, the opposition plays to him because he's got no responsibility, but then to lead the Conservative Party back to victory. It's a, you know, it's a playbook, but we see in other parts of the world. It's very, very dangerous, very, very worrying. You know, Americans might think he's a clown, but it's far more problematic than that.

And the other thing that I think is a real issue are the enablers. The enablers in the Conservative Party that have allowed this to happen and still hold up this figure that's become so corrosive to British political life. And I say that, of course, I disagree on policy terms with my conservative colleagues. But I have huge respect for the Conservative Party as a political force. It has been so depressing to see them moving

to the far right, really, of the political agenda and taking on this populist mandol. And I think that Boris Johnson is destroying a once great party, and certainly the party of Margaret Thatcher, Macmillan and others in the 20th century. Yeah, now it sounds like a similar play to what we've seen in the Republican Party here. We'll get to that in a second.

But that's interesting. I mean, essentially, like maybe let Rishi Sunak take the L, as we'd say here in the United States, take the loss to labor and then come back as a leader. I do want to ask you, like there, you've got Domino's falling all around you, David. A friendlier party in terms of ideology on some issues, obviously not all issues, has been the Scottish Nationalist Party, the S&P. We woke to the news that Nicola Sturgeon, the former leader, former guest on this podcast, was arrested in a payment scandal, a kind of corruption scandal. That doesn't necessarily mean she's going to be charged in the context of UK law.

But what is going on in the S&P? And for our listeners, you know, labor often is sometimes competing for votes in Scotland with the S&P. What does this mean for the SMP and what does it mean for kind of your strategy heading into an election where, you know, you have been competing with that party over the years for kind of a working class vote in Scotland? Well, look, I mean, for too long, and your listeners may not have appreciated this, but there's been a culture of secrecy and cover-up that's been allowed to fester at the heart of the Scottish Nationalist Party. and I think this is now coming home to Roost. And, you know, it's very sad to see the situation that Nicholas Sturgeon and her husband find themselves in relation to the finances of that party

and loans made to that party and whether rules have been broken. Now there's an ongoing police investigation. So I can't get into the weeds on that except to say that clearly it does present the British Labour Party with an opportunity in Scotland under our leadership of Anasawa and a revival in Scotland because it means that the debate now moves beyond just the question of independence. The Labour Party is a party that believes in the Union. and people start to focus on public services in Scotland. They start to focus on the real issues. Hang on a minute. What are the SMP doing about cost of living?

What are they doing about health? What are they doing about education? Are these guys in it for themselves? Some of the questions that are being asked in Scotland. And that presents the Labour Party with an opportunity. Now, I don't want to say it's any more than an opportunity because we have to be clear, on our offer to the Scottish electorate.

But you know, you do need a bit of luck. Sometimes in politics, you need fortune to come your way. I've looked at the polls more recently in Scotland, and it looks like the same revival that we're seeing here in England is being replicated in Scotland. And we could be on course to win between 12 and 20 seats, which would be a huge revival of our fortunes. And a lot of people said that it would be very hard for us to get over the line and walk into number 10 if we did not see votes pick up in Scotland.

And we now have the opportunity for that to happen. And I think good leadership in Scotland means that things are looking brighter than they've looked for some time. So one more British political question here, because part of what's interesting here is for people have listened to this podcast for a while. like, you know, the SMP and the Tories are very different in a lot of ways. SMP's been more progressive on a bunch of issues. But one common thread, you mentioned kind of political, potential political corruption, we should say, because it's not as if Boris Johnson didn't have some scandals around dark money payments and things like that.

But also nationalism and populism, right? I mean, you know, S&P is fundamentally a nationalist movement, kind of a populist nationalist movement. So even though it's more on the left side of the equation, you know, the SMP, you know, the side of the equation, it's, it has some of that DNA. You've called for general election right away. Rishi Sunak is unlikely to do that. There will be an election no later than kind of the end of next year. We see Rishi Sunak, he was just in the U.S. with President Biden. We see him really trying to present himself as this kind of technocratic statesman, you know, who's resolving making

agreements and he's hosting summits on AI and he's, you know, hugging the Zolanski. What do you guys need to do to close the deal here over the next year to take that contrast that you already have on nationalism and populism and corruption and turn it into like a governing majority? Well, let me just take the first point. And this is to say that we are up against as progressives, the politics of division, the nativism of populism, often playing to the worst instincts of humanity that divide us, don't bring us together. What I see in Joe Biden when I look from across the Atlantic is an attempt to bring a nation together in hugely divisive times. And I hope that the Labour Party presents that opportunity as well. What do we have to do? Well, you know,

we have to answer the vision question. In British politics, what can happen when a political party comes out too early with its kind of its policy operates manifesto is that you're a political opponents if they're clever steal some of your clothes so we're now going into the cycle where we lay that out very clearly certainly by the time we get to our conference season which is a bit like a convention and we'll have that in October of this year so that the country are very clear on what labour's offer is and that's for us it's the key domestic issue. What are we saying about inflation and cost of living? Inflation here is running at 8.7%.

What are we saying about public services? Key there is health and education. Child care is a very big issue on the doorstep here in the UK. We have to have a good offer on childcare particularly. And crime. Crime is rising. There is concern about antisocial behaviour in neighbourhoods. We also have to be very clear in those.

key domestic portfolio areas. And then by the election, people, you know, it's almost like that pledge card. People have got to know the four or five things that you were saying. Kyr Stama, no one thought, frankly, after the loss in 2019, the worst defeat for the Labour Party since 1935, no one thought three years later that we would be in this position. So credit to Kier Stama for getting us into this bus. I mean, I cautioned Kier Stama that maybe we should have a 10-year plan. Yeah. Because, you know, five years was pretty ambitious. But he has got us back into the game. And now we've just got to seal the deal. Yeah. No, I remember you came on after that victory. And you said, you know, hopefully you can be done in five years, but it might be 10.

But it seems like the timetables may be moving fast. Well, one more question for you, David, since the theme of this podcast interview seems to be crimes, misdemeanors, and lies. Donald Trump is presenting himself in a Miami courthouse as we speak. This is not to diminish the New York indictment, but this is kind of a far more serious charge because it touches on national security. We know from the indictment it touches on the Iranian War Plan. what is the view of this latest turn in Donald Trump's and American politics from abroad? Because on the one hand, I could see, well, this is justice working, and this shows that there's still like a legal system in the U.S.

that can take on someone with the political power of Trump. But also, it also could be seen as kind of the chaos of American politics, the strangeness of it, Trump's kind of resilience, that he's still the Republican frontrunner despite this. and frankly the national security concern of like, hey, can we trust the United States with our secrets? I mean, one of the documents that was reported in the indictment was shareable only with the UK and New Zealand and Australia. So you guys are in on this. How does this look from London? Well, look, let me just say, and, you know, I was in the Indo-Pacific just a couple of weeks ago. I was in Singapore for the Shangri-Arle Conference, all of the globe is looking carefully at what's

happening in the United States. We worry about a different political view is part of a healthy democracy, but huge, deep divides, I think are very problematic. I think if the United States were to move into an isolationist position where it's, is hostile to NATO, and we did see that before under the Donald Trump presidency, where the debates are so internal that it sort of departs almost from the international stage. I think that that is incredibly dangerous, and we have huge geopolitical forces that could capitalize on that, and I'm thinking of Russia, Iran, China. I'm thinking of what Putin's thinking.

at this time as he looks closely at what's happening in the United States. Obviously, I'm in the, you know, I'm shadow foreign secretary. The Britain has a historic special relationship with the United States where part of the Five Eyes intelligence system, some of the best intelligence capability in the world, sensitive documents, you know, put good people in harm's way. in harm's way and must never ever fall into the hands of those who would do us harm. So the issues here are not knock around issues. These are very, very serious issues indeed. And we will follow very closely what happens. As you know, the relationship that we have with the USA really goes way beyond who is in the White House because of how close.

really, our military and our intelligence, particularly and our historic cultural ties. But the world is in a very, very challenging geopolitical moment and we need calm heads. And it's been worrying to watch the extremes of political flavor really enter the U.S. political seen and you know and i you know that the justice stuff has to play out and i can't comment on how the justice system moves forward in the united states but but i can see that there's quite a lot of rancor um uh in america and that does worry me because i'm a i'm you know yeah i love the united states of america yeah no it's well said i mean you uh if you guys get in uh presumably next year you will have a five-year window dealing with as you and i have talked about kind of

offline, you know, Ukraine, China, AI, all these issues. I'll say it. You don't have to say it. It'll be easier for you to do with those issues if we have a kind of rational, competent administration. But look, David, it's been great talking to. Maybe we'll check in with you after the, around the party conference to see your part of that agenda and continue to, you know, be very impressed by how you guys have positioned labor heading into an election year. So thanks, Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. And we should just say, despite the doom and gloom, both of these stories do also remind

us that, yes, there are some populist tides in both of our countries, but there are also hugely important democratic checks and balances. And that's what I always remind people who are looking at these issues from afar. Keep an eye on the checks and balances that exist, because in the end, you know, that's what the people in Ukraine are fighting for to have that kind of deep democracy. And I know that the United States is still writing that story. And we, too, in the UK, are doing the same thing. Yeah. No, it's good. It's a great point because these types of leaders in countries without those checks and balances, it'd be a little more complicated. So it's a good note than none.

All right. Thanks, David. Good to see you. Great. Thanks a lot, Beth. Thanks again to David Lamie for joining the show. Thanks again to Boris Johnson. for resigning. Yeah. I wish we had some champagne. I was sitting in the studio with you. We did pour one out for him. But next time.

I mean, you know, he's, you know, Trump, Boris, like, we're working through them. We've got some other ones. Silvio. Yes, Sylvia. Yeah, thanks to Hillary Clinton for like a penetrating insight about. There we go. There we go. All right.

Talk to guys next week. Potté of the World is a cricket media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley News. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seaglin, Charlotte Landis, and DeCilius are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, B.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes

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