Pod Save the World - Jared Kushner is “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit”

Episode Date: September 29, 2021

Tommy and Ben talk about the results of the German elections, Senate hearings on Afghanistan, a report about a Trump administration plan to arrest Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, votes on Israel and Yemen on Capitol Hill, an update on Burma, and funny Trump foreign policy stories. Then Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian joins to talk about his new podcast 544 Days, which details his time being held hostage in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsavetheworld. 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 Ditor. I'm Ben Rhodes. This is Potsay of the World Insomnia Edition. Yeah. We're both feeling our best today. Yeah, yeah. I've had a day, man. Some early wake-ups, quite a day. It's also weird to talk to you about foreign policy when there's so much dysfunction happening in Washington. I'm really upset with both sides. I'm just kidding.

Well, I mean, you know, the intangible point is when the United States is a complete train wreck at home, like our capacity to conduct a competent foreign policy, which is already difficult. is like when you can't raise the debt ceiling, how are you going to navigate a multilateral China strategy? You can't pay your bills? Yeah, it would be nice if we could go to India and China and say, hey, look at this giant investment we just made in renewable energy. Yes. That would be useful before the Glasgow conference that's intended to save the world from

impending climate disaster. But lots of big news in the world then. We're going to talk about the German election results. Big hearings today in the Senate on Afghanistan. There was a wild report over the weekend about the Trump administration. plans to arrest, maybe kill. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, super fucked up. Big foreign policy votes on the Hill last week.

Update on Burma, hacking for hire, and then some fun-ish, I guess, anecdotes about Trump and foreign policy in a new book. Our guest today is your friend, my friend, Jason Resign. Yes. Fantastic journalists. Great storyteller. Great storyteller. A hilarious human being.

New podcast is out on Spotify. 544 days. I will be binging on my drive home. So I listened to earlier versions, and then we put Jason through a second hell of making him retract like 50 hours worth of stuff. That's awful. And it is so good.

Like, and the sound is amazing. One of the hosts of ThruLine podcast did the music. It's just like incredible. It's such a good show. And you know, Jason, you know the story. We won't give anything with it. And I'm a repeat guest on that podcast. Yeah.

And also Ben, Did you know the September is National Voter Registration Month? As an avid PSA listener, I'm aware of that. Votesave America is trying to raise $1.5 million to are no off-years fund. That money goes to help organizations register voters in places that will make the difference in the next elections. Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, more, Pennsylvania, Texas, Wisconsin. Go to Votesaveamerica.com. Slash donate to learn more.

Ben, you're hitting the road soon, too. You're doing a bunch of events? Yeah, I have been in, let's see, Wednesday. So today, the day the pod drops, at least, I will be at the Village Well bookstore in Culver City. Then on Thursday, I will be at Stanford hosted by our friend Mike McFall. Yep. And then Monday, I will be with hosted by our former guru David Axelot at the University of Chicago. Oh, man, you're everywhere.

Yeah, so will those unite here? This is a nice time to visit Chicago. I agreed to teach at the University of Chicago for a week in January. Yeah. And that was less of a... It's not the time, man. It's not the right time to do it. Less of a smart move.

But those kids were so scary, smart. They got mad at me when I wouldn't give them, like, homework. Yeah, Stanford in Chicago, some smart kids. Yeah. So hopefully, you know, people buy some books and have the conversation and... Buy the books. Subscribe to the pods. Wear your merch.

Wear your merch. I'll see you. Shout something about soft. power. Yes, I'll put faces to the numbers of the world that's out there. I love it. Yeah, I love it. All right, so let's start with these German elections because it's a big deal. Yeah. Germans went to the polls on Sunday. They're going to decide, a lot of them voted by mail, but they're going to decide their country's political future after 16 years with Angela Merkel as chancellor. There's not a new chancellor yet for reasons we'll explain, but here's what we do know, Ben. The center-left Social Democratic

Party got the most votes with 25.7 percent. Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union Party got about 24%. The Greens got 14.8%. A pro-business party called the Free Democrats got 11.5%. And the scary, shitty, right-wing AFD party got 10.3%. So what does that all mean? It means the social Democrats who are sort of center-left and the Green Party did quite well, both gained between 5% and 6% from the last election. It means that Merkel's party and her successor of this guy, Armin Lashit, got crushed. They lost nearly 9% since the last election. I remember that he was the guy who got caught laughing at a memorial service. Not, not good.

Yeah, you suggested at the time that that was not smart. I think that was. No, neither was, you know, dealing with the floods in catastrophic ways. Yeah, it was impressive call. So, and also, well, it's not great that the AFD party, this right-wing party, got double-digit support. They did lose about 2% from the last elections. I guess we should all feel better about that. And it kind of tracks with Marine Le Pen's election dip in France.

Yeah, and what we should feel good about, too, is when Merkel and, the boldest move of her tenure took in a million refugees, largely Syrian in 2015. Everybody said, oh, this is going to drive them to the far right. And that just hasn't really happened. Yeah, yeah. If anything, we can talk about it, but this election seems to indicate a move to the left. Yeah, right. So before we get to this next chancellor question, I'm going to try to quickly explain how German elections work.

So every four years, Germans over 18, you cast two votes. The first is for your local representative. The second is for a party. And you can split those votes if you want, which in America would seem weird, but in, you know, a system with like five different parties is not as strange as it might sound. The top vote getter in each district for that first vote gets a seat in Parliament. But here's where it gets confusing. The overall makeup of parliament has to be proportional to that second votes result. So if the Greens got 50% of the second vote, they would need to have 50% of the seats in the Bundestag, which is very fun to say.

The way you make that math work out is by granting parties more seats into the proportions workout. So the size of the Bundestag itself, the number of seats fluctuates, which just blows my mind. In 2017, there were 709 members. Imagine being Pelosi trying to whip an ever-changing 709 member parliament. Well, if they're very reasonable Germans, so, I mean. Yeah, it's probably not a lot of mansions. Not a lot tea parties, yeah. So I'll spare you the additional details, crazy system.

What happens now is all the parties get together. They negotiate to see you can build a coalition that represents a majority in the Bundestag and decide who is chancellor. This is going to take a bit. In 2017, it took five and a half months. So, Ben, with those confusing basics completed, any big takeaways from you about what this election result means for Germany and their leadership role in Europe? I think that, you know, my main takeaways are that, number one, like Germany's had a very dominant figure in its politics for 16 years. And it's going to take, this election is not resolving kind of, you know, someone ascending to the position of chancellor

who's going to have the same clout within German politics or even within Europe itself. And so, you know, when I was there for eight years, you know, Angle Merkel was the kind of first port of call in Europe, you know, on everything. She was the person who could kind of marshal collective action in Europe on the financial crisis, on the refugee crisis, on any number of issues. The second point is that this is a noticeable shift or attack somewhat left. I mean, it's an overwhelming result and it's still clearly a fairly centrist kind of country, but it's like 40%. Yeah, the Social Democrats and the Greens clearly are the ones that picked up that improved their standing. And I think that that's represented.

of, you know, a natural correction from 16 years of kind of center right, all the very centrist kind of governance. And also in the Green movement, this kind of increasing focus on climate change. And so then the most likely coalition, you know, will probably be one that has the Social Democrats and the Greens together with the FDP, which is this kind of libertarian party that has always kind of been around German politics, actually sponsored a trip. that Josh Ernest and I took in 2005. That was that. Across Germany, it was great.

We got to drink a lot of beer and meet all our Germans. But I digress. The FTP has a history of being a coalition partner. Right. Have you seen these sketches? They have names for these potential coalitions. They call like the traffic light, because it'd be like red, yellow, green, like the SPD, the FPD, the green party.

Like it's very funny. The Jamaica Coalition, yeah. It's very fun. Yeah, I know the colors, it's like a soccer team. or something. Yeah. But I mean, it seems like that would be the most likely result with, but yeah, I think within Germany that means, you know, probably like more consensus-based, you know, governance, although Merkel is definitely consensus-based, but but with the needle pointed a little bit more to the left. And in Europe, I think that means, you know, less of a

German-centered EU set of policies than has been the case under Merkel. And Macron, particularly if he's reelected, we'll probably be trying to kind of throw his weight around in Europe. But inevitably, that all sorts itself out as kind of a, the big, big European powers, you know, in some fashion, kind of setting the pace. Yeah. So I know you're a Merkel fan. I think we've sung her praises on this show before Obama was a huge fan too. But I did want to get your reaction to some criticism of her from this recent Atlantic piece I read. The title was The World Won't Miss Angela Merkel is by Yasha Monk. The gist of the argument is, look, Merkel is going to be replaced by a moderate, we might get a slightly more progressive sort of status quo or coalition. So like, you know,

there probably won't be major changes even though she's gone now. And then the piece specifically criticizes Merkel for two things. The first is basically fighting for austerity. Yeah. And cuts after the financial crisis instead of like what, bailing out the countries needed bailouts or kicking them out of the EU, just sort of like bumping along for a decade. And the second and third over effects that arose from that. The second argument was when Victor Orban was first elected, the EU could have imposed sanctions on Hungary, checked him early, but Merkel opposed taking meaningful steps to hold Orban accountable and allowed his party to remain a member of the Christian Democratic faction in the European Parliament.

The peace also criticized as her record on accepting Syrian refugees and sort of suggest that it wasn't all she said it was, but I found that hard to stomach or believe, to be honest. What do you make of those criticisms for her? I entirely share parts of them. You know, the fact that Germany has been a restraining force from kind of utilizing the EU's power to sanction or curb the excesses of Victor Orban and Hungary or the Law and Justice Party in Poland is certainly the case. You know, Orban, his corruption benefits enormously from EU funds.

So they get like billions of dollars to build roads and stuff. And he notoriously kind of skims off the top and enriches a bunch of cronies with that money. and the EU just keeps the spigot on. And, you know, with Merkel, I think it's number one. She was so focused on holding the EU together that she didn't want to do something that could push somebody out. But also, like, her Christian Democratic Union

shares some overlap with Orban's kind of right-wing Christian party, Fides. So I think that's an entirely appropriate criticism. I think austerity, look, Obama had this argument with her, you know, from the first G20. I don't know if you remember. Oh, yeah, man. We were going saying, now is not the time for austerity, now is the time to spend some money and stimulate the economy

and strength and safety nets. But I think on that- God, that was annoying. It was annoying. It was annoying. And so, yeah, we had a philosophical difference in the mark on that. I do think on that front, she's pretty reflective of Germans. You know, like they're pretty prudent.

They're pretty fiscally responsible. And where I'd push back and defend her is, look, she's a small C conservative, right? So I don't share all of her politics. but she was willing, unlike almost every other leader that I encountered, she was willing to do politically unpopular things that she thought were right. So even on the austerity piece, Germany, we were constantly pressing them to do more to kind of help bail out Greece in southern Europe. And she never went quite as far as we wanted, but she went farther than the German people wanted.

And that kind of held the Eurozone together. Again, most famously on the refugee thing. It was not in her political interest. And there have been very few occasions in the last couple decades where political leaders did things that were politically damaging because she thought it was right. And they did take it a million refugees. And they have done a good job at absorbing that refugee population. And so I do think that, look, everybody should be criticized. On balance, if you look at the totality of her tenure, she was the center that held in Europe.

and she was a center that held through the financial crisis, and she was a center that kind of held through Trump. And yes, I don't always like that the center is further to the right than I'd like. But man, wouldn't you like to have Angela Merkel as your right of center party in the United States? Oh, God, yeah. Yeah. Oh, God, yeah. Speaking of leaders getting a lot of criticism, there were some big hearings in the Senate on Tuesday, Ben,

where Lloyd Austin, the Secretary of Defense, Mark Miller, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Frank McKenzie, who's the head of Central Command, and sort of the de facto leader in Afghanistan for the U.S. military were oppressed a lot on Afghanistan. So the biggest headline coming out of the day that I've seen so far is that Chairman Millie and General McKenzie said it was their personal opinion that the U.S. should have kept 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and presumably they provided that advice to Biden in various situations or meetings. That seemed to contradict what President Biden said in an ABC News interview last month. Let's listen to that. Top military advisors weren't against withdrawing on this timeline. They wanted you to keep about 2,500 troops.

No, they didn't. It was split. That wasn't true. That wasn't true. They didn't tell you that they wanted troops to stay? No, not in terms of whether we were going to get out in a time frame, all troops. They didn't argue against that. So no one told your military advisors to not tell you, no, we should just keep 2,500 troops. It's been a stable situation for the last several years.

we can do that. We can continue to do that. No, no one said that to me. Then I can recall. So reporters are calling out what seems like an obvious inconsistency there, which was these generals saying we said, yeah, keep 2,500 troops. Biden saying, no, they didn't. What Biden's team is saying, Jansaki, Cape Bettingfield, are saying that Biden's argument was, no, the advice was split.

Different military leaders offered different advice. But also that none of his military leaders said you could maintain stability at the 2,500 troop level without a return to direct conflict. So the point being, there was this status quo and a ceasefire against U.S. forces from the Taliban based on the deal Trump cut. If you left 2,500 troops in forever, the Taliban starts attacking us again. There's no status quo. I don't know.

It's a rough soundbite for Biden. I know what they're saying. It's a complicated issue. Yeah, but when I heard that at the time, I thought, this is coming. I was like, you know, all those generals argued for more troops. Yeah, because I get, you know, eight years. in the White House, there was never one occasion in which a general didn't argue to keep troops in Afghanistan or add more troops. Literally.

So when he said that, I thought at the time that what he meant is that there was no dissent on kind of like once he decided to withdraw, like the pace of it or something. Something was just off in that exchange. And you can like, because it was reported at the time that he made the decision that he overruled Austin and Millie. And there was even some kind of backgrounding from the White House to that effect. it felt like. So it just, you know, look, we've worked for a politician who every now and then they say something, you're like, you know, that's not sort of garbled. It's kind of garbled.

And, but yeah, like, there's no surprise that that he overruled the military and the withdrawal. Like that, that I think it's been kind of priced into my understanding of the situation from the very beginning. Me too. Interestingly, Millie later seemed to concede that even keeping 2500 troops wouldn't have created a durable Afghan army, a durable Afghan gun. government that the final outcome would have been basically the same. So I mean, I think that is the big picture point. General McKenzie also said that Trump's peace deal with the Taliban was,

quote, the primary accelerant to lowering morale in general efficiency of the Afghan military, something we've heard before. Secretary Austin pushed back on the idea that you heard in a lot of right wing circles that it was a disaster to close Bogram Air Base. Yeah. We should have held onto it during the evacuation. Austin told senators it would have required sending an additional 5,000 troops of Afghanistan to keep Boggham open and not helps with the evacuation efforts. There were a lot of important conversations about the withdrawal, the future of Afghanistan, the presence of ISIS, Al-Qaeda. But, you know, it does seem like this will mostly just be used as fodder to, you know,

try to draw out inconsistencies. I know you watched some of these hearings. You were up early. Any big takeaways? Yeah. I mean, I thought, you know, Lloyd Austin at the beginning and at times throughout the hearing, acknowledged like the failure of certain aspects of U.S. strategy Afghanistan over the years in ways that I don't know if I've ever heard like a sitting military leader do.

You know, that the model for how we built the security forces was flawed, that we couldn't kind of forge a nation. So to me, that was an interesting, you know, moment in American kind of military history that like for my experience of the U.S. military, you know, and certainly when you and I were there, Tommy, was like a belief in, you know, the rightness, for instance, of counterinsurgency strategy or the viability of building massive security forces like this. And it did feel to me, like, in a healthy way, there was some acceptance of and some learning of lessons. I mean, about that. Maybe we shouldn't have tried to build an army kind of in the image of our own army. Maybe it needed to be something different in Afghanistan. And then Millie, I think on the kind of Woodward stuff was kind of interesting and defending what he did and, you know, kind of identifying, you know, what he believes the responsibilities of a military officer are, which are, yes, to the chain of command, but, you know, also there's kind of like a set of kind of values and, you know, kind of there's like a higher duty essentially to the Constitution. Yeah, Millie was sitting there thinking, I should not have had the soup. This has created a lot of problems. You should listen to Dan, man.

Yeah, I listen to Dan. He should listen to Dan. He had a lot of soup. General Millie. Did you happen to listen to the New York Times The Daily episode today? No, no. This is the day. They interviewed Sammy Sadat, who was like the Special Forces Commander General in Afghanistan.

It was a really interesting interview because Sadat actually said that he left Afghanistan in June. and he's someone who grew up in a born in Afghanistan, the Taliban take over, lives through that with like five sisters who are brutally repressed by the Taliban, could go to school, anything else. But then he also, he eventually said he couldn't support the Ghana government. So he left the country in June and then came away feeling like ultimately the Taliban taking over was better for the majority of people in Afghanistan because kind of like that New Yorker piece we talked about, like at least people in villages aren't getting killed by air strikes right now, even if, you know, you can't listen to music, the Taliban's repressive, et cetera.

It's just a very interesting perspective that you don't hear very often. Yeah, I mean, I think that the cost and consequence of the actual war, you know, is, you know, often the Taliban rules is not measured against that. It's measured against what we were trying to achieve this, you know. And again, that doesn't make it any easier for the Afghans who are under Taliban rule. But it does remind us that the kind of state of war is not like in Washington used to bother me that like there was some equation between the presence of American forces and even in a war as like that's a stabilizing thing for people. And I mean, if you look at the countries where we've been fighting these wars, like they are not stable places. Yeah, no, that's right. And then of course, you know, the Taliban, you know, they've completely locked women out of the government.

they are oppressing students. There's also reports of atrocities. Like the horrible things are happening, but it was just an interesting interview here on balance. Yeah, I think what will be interesting to watch is if things are relatively calm in terms of they're not being a war. Like, does there start to be internal pressures on the Taliban? Right.

From a population that is more educated that had a taste of democracy, that had women who were able to go to school, that would be the hope, right? Is it there some internal pressure that builds up? And hopefully that some sort of diplomatic effort can help. Yeah. Push that as well. So, Ben, over the weekend, Yahoo News published this wild story about the Trump administration and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Here's some big takeaways. First, Mike Pompeo, failed Secretary of State. And failed CIA director, which is- Then failed CIA director. He apparently advocated for kidnapping Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he was living at the time,

and then either rendering him to a third country to be interrogated, yeah, that worked that well in the past, or turning him over to the British government. I think the Brits said, absolutely. Absolutely not. You are not doing this on our territory. The report also said that at one point Trump's team got wind that the Russians were planning to get Assange and move him to Moscow, presumably. And the CIA started preparing all these options to prevent that from happening, including, quote, potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange. A few too many born movies there. Yahoo also reported that President Trump actually asked about whether the CIA could assess. Fascinate Assange and wanted to see options for how it could happen. Lots of people in the story pooh-pooing it saying, oh, he wasn't serious. It was Trump being Trump, but it's kind of serious when the president says that. It also details debates during the Obama and Trump administration about how to classify WikiLeaks, and even some of the journalists who worked with WikiLeaks like Glenn Greenwald and Laura Portris.

Some intelligence officials wanted to call them information brokers rather than journalists so that they could more aggressively spy on them. the Obama administration rejected that idea. But spying on WikiLeaks got more and more aggressive over time, especially during the Trump administration. So it's a long story worth reading in full. Ben, you and I dealt with like the early days of WikiLeaks together. Yeah. For a sort of trunch of cables and things.

But I was long gone when Edward Snowden emerged and when these. Lucky you. Yeah, big time. More intense debates happened. What did you make of this reporting and like, I don't know, when does Congress haul Pompeo's ass up to the hill to testify about this. Yeah, I mean, there are two pieces of this. Like, the reporting is terrifying and it's awful and they should never have been considering doing these things. And look, they did, I mean, they assassinated Qasem Soleimani, you know,

like Pompeo loves to crow about that. I mean, again, not a good guy by any stretch of the imagination, but their willingness to kind of push extrajudicial kind of action. around individuals, you know, was not limited to this, you know. By the way, best detail in the story was that there was like a period of time when everybody within like a couple block radius of the Ecuadorian embassy where Asandra was hiding out, they said every single person there was like either a Russian American or British intelligence operatives. Like even like the cleaning people, like the woman pushing the baby in the carriage, you know.

Bunch of the guys with Russian accents like reading newspapers on a bench. That was good. Very subtle. But to me, like, there was a, it speaks to kind of like a, you know, I said this to you, Tommy, you're not going back and forth about this. Like, there were a series of leaks and stuff that it was always like the end of the world. This is like the worst leak in the history of leaks that happened like a lot during the bomb years. Oh, yeah.

Continued under the Trump years, apparently. And this kind of desire for like vengeance is an unhealthy impulse for a security service and intelligence service. And I remember Pompey at the time referring to them as like a foreign adversary or something. And everybody knew then it was kind of weird. I will say on Assange, like I have no sympathy for this guy beyond obviously thinking that he like any individual should not be targeted in this fashion. So but my, look, my assessment of him and, you know, I'll get people adding me and, you know, Glenn Greenwald. But like the Russia thing, this is not a conspiracy. There is a report that we can all read the conclusion of exhaustive investigation that like the Russian GRU, like directly provided WikiLeaks with the emails that they leaked.

So they were at least an unwitting vessel for Russian intelligence operations. And that's problematic. It's hard to deal with that. I think people should recognize that. journalists sometimes are unwitting, too, like of where information, you know, might have come from that reaches them. So this is like an ethical challenge when you have a group like WikiLeaks that kind of embraces the values of journalism, but clearly engages in, you know, kind of guerrilla, you know, leaking sometimes on behalf of quite bad actors, right? And so I don't find Assange to be a particularly sympathetic character even, but I do some, I do on the sense that nobody should be subject to what the CIA was apparently contemplating. Yeah, I think this quote really like summed it out well for me. For a former Trump national security official, the lessons of the CIA's campaign against WikiLeaks are clear. Quote, there was an inappropriate level of attention to Assange given the embarrassment, not the threat he posed in context. And that should never happen. So this was after the so-called

Volt 7 leaks, which are like super-sophisticated cyber tools. Yeah. And it just seemed like they were pissed. They were freaked out. They wanted vengeance. My views on WikiLeaks, Manning, Chelsea Manning, Assange, are like complicated and incoherent and have evolved over time. Like the way Chelsea Manning was treated by the military while she was in detention is horrific. It like bothers me. I've been reading Spencer Ackerman, but it like upsets me every time. Obama commuted her sentence in part for that reason. I don't think it's okay. Like some of the disclosures she released about, you know, like the helicopter gunship video. like I do think that kind of information should be out. I don't think it's okay to dump

250,000 cables that you haven't read. I also don't think it was like a huge national security disaster like the government always acts it is. Again, like totally incoherent thoughts on this, but it's complicated. The coherence like that I might try to grope for here, acknowledging how complicated it is, is I did feel and see them kind of evolving, right? So our first interaction with them was their leaks were focused on a rock and I'm Afghanistan. And that's the stuff that Chelsea Manning provided, some of it. And that did feel more whistleblower-ish. Yeah, you know, it was like, we're revealing kind of abuse here. We're revealing the excesses of this military campaign. I think military contractors, too. Okay, so that's-

And I think the Iraqi military and other, yeah. Yeah. So that's where we start with them. Then we get to the cables. And I remember when they, you know, chairing some meetings around the time, Tommy, where the scale of it is coming down on us. Yeah, he's like, what the fuck? And part of me was like there's something kind of, there's like a twisted genius behind this kind of mass transparency. What I've said to you in the past, too, though, the problem with not looking at those cables in the same way that the Times or the Guardian did. Is it like, you know, the names of civil society people meeting at the embassy? There weren't redactions. And like, that's shitty for those people.

Suddenly their names out there meeting with the embassy. So then I start to be more concerned. then by the end of the Obama years, they're releasing like John Podesta's emails, which is not providing any public service, you know, other than to the Trump campaign and the, you know, like, so I felt like they lost their credibility as like a truth to power transparency organization. There frankly wasn't much transparency objectives served in dumping all the Clinton campaign emails out. That was serving a very direct political interest in the States. Yeah. I mean, right, like the DNC ones you could argue well, it showed that, you know,

sort of the primary process seemed rigged to some people. I think that's a fair argument. But you go, back to the State Department cables. I mean, if the ambassador to France meets with someone, they have a conversation that's secret, they classify it, they send it back. If you release that, that's not whistleblowing. You can do it. You could say like there should be more transparency. We classify too many things. Happy to talk about that because I'm likely to agree with you, but it's not whistleblower. Well, think about it this way. There's no mouth. Like, there's a difference between what Chelsea Manning thought she was doing, you know, whether it was like legal or, you know, appropriate people can debate, but versus what the GRU was doing. You know what I mean?

Like she, I think, believed that she was trying to bring some information to light, you know. The GRU wasn't trying to serve the interest of transparency by giving a bunch of emails to, to WikiLeaks. Yeah. And Snowden was trying to talk about, you know, bulk surveillance. And again, I think there's an important conversation that was had at that. So, Ben, there were a bunch of interesting votes on foreign policy last week on Capitol Hill that I think are worth mentioning. I think they're doing the NDAA, right, like the big defense financing bill. So the first was a dust up over an amendment to provide another billion dollars in new funding to Israel to pay for interceptor missiles for their Iron Dome missile defense system. That's the system that very recently knocked down thousands of rockets from Gaza from Hamas.

So it's a very effective system. It's been funded by the U.S. That amended ended up passing overwhelmingly. It was a margin of 420 to 9 opposed in the House, but it was only after progressives, you know, expressed enormous frustration at the process the funding request went through or really the lack thereof. There wasn't really a traditional process. And generally speaking, the lack of willingness to talk about how U.S. assistance, military assistance, Israel can continue what AOC called, quote, persistent human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. That was in her statement explaining her vote. Second, there was a bill from Congressman Rokana to end logistical and intelligence support

to Saudi Arabia in Yemen for the war in Yemen. And that passed by a vote of 219 to 207. If that language ends up in the final National Defense Authorization Act or NDAA bill in Biden signs it, it will essentially end the U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen. So a lot of activists have been frustrated that President Biden announced that he would end supporting offensive military operations from Saudi in Yemen, but he has not done more to end the Saudi blockade of Yemen. And some would argue that like the Saudi led war in Yemen is essentially, it's entirely an offensive operation. So any support you provide them is, is helping there.

So Jake Sullivan, Biden's National Security Advisor is visiting Saudi Arabia and UAE this week. Hopefully he gets to fondle that big orb that they rolled out for Trump. Let's pause there, Ben. two interesting fights for progressives, this Iron Dome funding won in the Yemen one. One, I feel like we made a lot of progress. One, not so much. What would you take? I mean, the Iron Dome thing was incredibly complicated, right? Because it's the most defensible, you know, and sensible aspects of like our military assistance.

It is defensive. It saves lives. When you and I have talked about conditioning aid, it's related to, you know, other types of military assistance used for offensive purposes or the cost of the security around settlements and things like that. I think it's less about taking issue with the fact of funding Iron Dome. I think what progresses were frustrated by is kind of two things that are not going to go away. One, the prioritization of this, you know, like we are in a week when we got the debt ceiling and government, you know, shut down and the entire Biden agenda

is hanging on a threat up there. And it reminded me of like in, you know, because we talked about this on the pod way back when I joined in 2019, I think, like I think S one, like the first bill the Senate took up was like an anti-BDS bill. And it was just kind of like, even if you oppose BDS, there's a debate about whether you need to legislate. slate around speech. But like, is this really the top order of business, you know, and so the speed with which Democratic leadership was, was pushing that forward, you know, felt just kind of incongruous to the priorities of the caucus? And then I think there is another question that is a legitimate question around the degree of budgetary support we provide to the Israeli military when

this is not like a poor country, you know. Yeah, they spent, I think, 20 billion in 2020 on their military. Yeah. And so, you know, in any other circumstance, we'd probably be discussing why we were cutting checks for all this stuff, you know. Clearly that this was the worst vehicle to have this debate because it's a defensive system. So it kind of, it was never going to end like that. But again, it's a sign of just kind of creeping discomfort. I don't want to overstate how widespread it was in this case because there was only nine

members, right? But I think everybody kind of knew that this this kind of rudinization of just shipping aid out the door and prioritizing these types of bills over kind of everything else is just something that doesn't feel right process-wise. Yeah. And then in the attacks on the nine members who dared to ask questions who voted no. Over the top. So over the top. The ADL tweeted this. Funding for Israel's Iron Dome may have passed yesterday, but nine members of Congress voted no. No to helping Israel defend itself from rocket attacks from terrorists. No to protecting Israeli schools and hospitals in the civilians inside, no to saving innocent lives. Now, this was another billion on top of billions that had already been provided for the Iron Zone system.

So they weren't saying no. They were, I think, trying to start a conversation about, okay, exactly how is this money going to be spent? Why this number? Where did a billion dollars come from? There was no line item. Yeah. Like, what did, you know, and look, I think. They're doing their jobs.

Yeah. Well, also, like, nine people vote against this. There's this kind of overwhelming force that comes down on anybody that bucks. the trend. Dunkin on them. And like, so they voted against a package of military assistance. That doesn't mean they want people to die. You know, I mean, if they'd voted against a package of military assistance to any other

country in the world, I don't think, you know, that there would be this kind of response. And so just like the politics of it feel like the most, it's like all they were saying was really like, can we debate this? Right. Which is kind of what lawmakers want to do. on the Yemen thing, it's a hugely constructive step. And it's a sign that how positive is for Congress to keep on an issue, right? Just because Biden made an announcement that we're ceasing the offensive support,

like Roe Kana, who's been a leader on this stuff, you know, this is him saying, like, well, hey, we're holding you to that. Like, let's go here, you know. And I wondered whether Jake's trip was, like, not entirely divorced from. from that vote, you know, because, you know, it's a sign that useful pressure, even from friendly sources, right, of like, hey, come on, we're nudging you guys. Like, this is dragging on. There's a blockade that's caused humanitarian, terrible humanitarian consequences.

So hopefully, you know, this kind of expedites the cessation of U.S. support for this whole enterprise. Yeah, two other some interesting points. Jamal Bowman, Congresswoman from New York, proposed an amendment that would have required congressional approval to have U.S. troops in Syria one year after the measure became law. It failed, but he got 141 votes, which is interesting. So, like, it's seeming like maybe a similar slow building of pressure to get us out of Syria that we're seeing in Yemen.

And then depressingly, then, the NDAA authorized more defense spending than Biden even asked for, $768 billion, which is $25 billion above what we requested. So that's just like, come on. This is a huge failure, I think, of, you know, there needs to be more of a focus on the bloated defense budget. It's absurd. And it, nobody knows what's in it. You know, anything that's cut is treated like we're going to be, you know, the Chinese are going to be invading the United States next year, like terrorists and we're running through our cities if we spend $10 billion less when we already spend more than like the next 15 nations combined, including China.

And frankly, if you're looking at scarce resources and you're looking at how you're going to spend money to fight climate change and all these other things, you got to, like the defense budget is a place to take from. And frankly, our security would be better served, spending some of that money to deal with climate change, you know, when you just do a threat assessment. So I was really disappointed to see that. I do want to just say one more thing about Yemen, which is there's something to the idea that the offensive distinction is, you know, pretty difficult to draw because, like, we're providing logistical support that's kind of like refueling support and things that just kind facilitate general military operations or we replenishing weapons stocks are we selling offensive

military capability to the Saudis like there's a there's a cutoff and then there's a gray space and we'd seem to be in the gray space even though the direction that biden has said is far better than the direction that trump said yeah and look i think some military analysts would argue the same thing about iron dome and that yeah they could there's really at the end of the days there of no such thing as purely defensive or often like it all kind of enables the argument that someone would make would be that that giving them, and this is a difficult argument, giving them this defensive system makes it more likely that they engage in these offensive operations in Gaza.

I still think on balance, like, people, there are rockets that fired at Israelis, before Gaza wars, and if we have a capacity to help them shoot rockets down that would kill civilians, like that seems like the better use of our military systems. Yeah, I'm pro-iron dome. A couple more things. I'll try to go a little faster going along.

So this story about Burma or Myanmar caught my eye bend. So a federal judge ordered Facebook to release records of Facebook accounts connected to anti-Rihinja violence in Burma. Facebook fought the release saying it violated privacy law. The judge basically laughed at them in that argument like, oh, you guys in privacy got it. So the Rohingya are a Muslim minority group in Burma. Back in 2017, more than 730,000 of them were driven out of Myanmar and into Bangladesh. There were widespread reports of war crimes and atrocities against the Rohingya by the military. There's an effort underway to prosecute Myanmar at the International Court of Justice at the Hague under the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.

UN human rights investigators say Facebook played a key role in spreading hate speech that fomented the violence against the Rohingya. More broadly, you know, the military coup in, I keep saying them interchangeably of Burma or Myanmar, are more broadly this military coup is. ongoing. You know, the crackdown against regular people is ongoing after I think eight months. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimates that 1100 protesters have been killed, but the United Nations just can't do anything about it. They're paralyzed because Russia and China sell the Burmese military bunch of weapons and they block any meaningful action, security council. So basically, I just wanted to bring the story up. We haven't talked about in a while, vent about Facebook for a minute because, you know, they're also being accused of allowing incitement

on their platform in Ethiopia, while blocking release of evidence about that same kind of deadly rhetoric and behavior in Burma. And it's infuriating. So if you want to dip in the back catalog, episode four of Missing America, my podcast I did with you guys, is all about disinformation and hate campaigns in Burma. And it was central. I mean, basically, like, there was like a massive effort to gin up hate of the Rohingya to kind of, you know, they were conceivable.

conspiracy theories, there's fake news about Rohingya, men, raping Buddhist women, you know, things that kind of whipped the population into this frenzy at the same time that this ethnic cleansing happened. And Facebook did nothing, really, very little to curb this. And when I traveled to Myanmar to work on a story, I was writing for the Atlantic, like, that Facebook had no employees in the country. Yeah, they could barely read what was being right. Yeah, they had two people who were in, I think, Singapore that came like once or twice

a year, mainly to make sure that the government let Facebook be there. Like, they just didn't seem to care, you know, that this was happening. And to me, like, the long poll in the tent here is, like, is liability. That, like, essentially, this is an important step towards trying to set a precedent that Facebook has some responsibility. And I think, you know, with government regulation, it should be legal responsibility for things like whether or not, like, a ethnic cleansing campaign is being orchestrated on their platform. And I think that, you know, the time, you know, the time Times did a good investigation that identified that the Burmese military was behind a lot of this hate campaign. So, yeah, it's a positive step forward. Yeah, release the documents, guys.

Another update, because I'm basically out of questions about this subject for you. So the Washington Post reported that the CIA recalled its Vienna station chief because of inattention to cases of so-called Havana syndrome. Havana syndrome is this mysterious illness that seems to manifest as headaches, nausea, like a traumatic brain injury and has reportedly afflicted around 200 U.S. intelligence officers or diplomats or other serving abroad. Congress has now authorized money for treatment. Tony Blinken, the Secretary of State, reportedly met with a bunch of State Department officials who have been suffering from the disease. There were reports that a staffer who traveled with CIA director Bill Burns on a trip to India came down with symptoms. That was weird. David Cohen, the CIA's

deputy director, said the agency is getting closer to figuring out what's happening, but not close enough yet to make a sort of analytical judgment or a public judgment. So scary stuff. It is. And it's important to keep checking in because this keeps popping up. And like, look, they need to, you know, what I hope they're doing is like that there's a clear, someone is in charge of this. Because it kind of felt like definitely the Trump years and into the beginning of Biden because they're just getting into their offices and stuff. Like didn't feel like someone owned this in a clear way in the U.S. government. And I think it does, as I've said, we need some answers here. Like, this is a weird thing to just kind of be a part of the backdrop. Yeah. Yeah. It'd freak me the fuck out.

And tell us what you know and don't know. Because the workforce of these places is worried. I mean, I talk to diplomats. I talk to intelligence. People like people are worried and they want some additional information or some degree of assurance. Yeah. I think they want to feel listened to and not treated like they're, you know, these are just symptoms that they're manifesting out of stress. I mean, look, these, those kinds of things have happened before, but so many people are suffering from, from this syndrome now that it's, you know. Oh, and I talked to, you know, some cases are probably are that, you know, someone had something else.

Like, they had food poisoning and it. Right. But clearly, some of these cases are because of something that is being done to people, you know, just a scale of this suggests that. Yeah. Another issue we talked about a couple of times is this growing spyware, spy software for profit industry. So the industry leader is a company called the NSO group. Good for them. Industry leader. Great Yelp reviews. It was started by a bunch of former Israeli intelligence people.

They claim the software is only used to track bad guys. That is bullshit. The Pegasus spy software that they created keeps showing up on devices used by journalists and human rights activists. The latest story that we wanted to highlight is of a woman named Ala al-Sidique. This is according to a great report in The Guardian. So she was the executive director of ALQ. It's a nonprofit advocating for human rights in the UAE in the Middle East. She tragically died in a car accident in June, but a recent examination of her phone found that she had been hacked by the government, a government client of the NSO group back in 2015. So Ben, I know you flagged this story. You know, maybe this will come over when Jake Sullivan's trip to the UAE is happening constantly.

Because if you read the story too, like what it speaks to is that she felt like she was being surveilled. Yeah. And she was afraid. kind of, you know, paranoid with good reason. And some of her friends kind of suggested that that might have contributed to her, due to what happened to her. And look, it's a reminder that like the, if the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the, you know, five stars, V. Orban. Yeah. Yeah. Muhammad bin Salman.

NBCZ, you know, Maham bin Zayahed in the UAE, the UAE puts on a huge, you know, show to the West about how much more kind of modern and in some ways liberal they are. And, you know, if you travel through Abu Dhabi, that's what you experience. But this is a reminder that there's like a very dark, autocratic undercurrent, you know, even harassing female human rights activists outside the country. In London. like London. And I think any analysis of stuff like Pegasus and NSO, there's like a lot of traffic that runs through Saudi UAE. And so to me, this story is worth flagging both to honor the courage of activists from those places, but also to kind of be the reminder that like there's a nexus here that runs through the Gulf and Hungary and Russia, you know, that is, that is uncomfortable

because it's not far away. This is happening in London. It's happening. in Washington, I'm sure. You know, it's happening on our countries. Yeah. Yeah, Muhammad gave Pegasus five bones sauce in his review. So let's end with a little more Trump book news. It's given us so much lately, Ben. So the latest book is from Stephanie Grisham. She worked on the Trump campaign. Then she was Melania's press person. Then she was the first White House press secretary in history who never held a White House briefing. When they said this book was coming out, by the way, I didn't remember who she was. And it's pretty extraordinary that I forgot the name of someone who was like press secretary for like a year or two or something. Right. I mean, because saying you're the

press secretary without briefing is like saying you're a teacher, but you've never stepped foot in the classroom. It's like core to what you do. Yeah. Anyway, so the book has some anecdotes about foreign policy that I thought we'd get into end with. So the first is about Russia and Trump and Putin. So quote, with all the talk of sanctions against Russia for interfering in the 2016 election for various human rights abuses, Trump told Putin, okay, I'm going to act a little tougher with you for a few minutes, but it's for the cameras. And after they leave, we'll talk. You understand, Grisham writes, recalling a meeting between the two leaders during the group of 20 summit in Osaka in 2019. So basically Trump's saying, hey, man, I'm about to sound tough. It's just for the press. But wait, like, my reaction

to that was like, I don't recall him sounding tough for the press, you know? Like, that's a good point. If the Delta was like, this is me being really tough. And then what happens in closed doors is me cozing up to you? Like, man, he must have been cozing up in Friday. it because I don't really remember a tough message at the Osaka G20, you know. You know, ironically, point Trump team who are pushing back hard on this book because you're right, that makes no sense. Here's the second Russia anecdote. So, quote, as the meeting began, Fiona Hill leaned over and asked me if I'd noticed Putin's

translator, who's a very attractive Burnett woman with long hair, a pretty face, and a wonderful figure. Grisham writes, she proceeded to tell me that she suspected the woman had been selected by Putin specifically to distract our president. Now, that checks out. That 100% checks out, and I will say that I was in a bunch of meetings with Putin, and nobody who fit that description, let's just say, was translating. Yeah. It was like stern Russian men.

Yeah, some, like, clear, you know, ex-KGBB person. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Grisham says that a trip to North Korea inspired Mr. Trump to ask her to research ways the press could be permanently evicted from the James S. Brady briefing room. That's kind of funny. Yeah, that's just kind of funny. I mean, and not surprising in the slightest. Not at all.

This is my favorite, Ben. Ms. Grisham reserves special ire for Jared Kushner, whom she calls Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit. That's a very, I mean, look, I'm just going to, I'll give this one entirely over to Ms. Grisham. That's a very apt description of Jared. The slim-fitting suit somehow contributed to the Rasputin vibe, because he was like that, you know,

wealthy son of a real estate development, guy who like thinks he's cool because he gets like a slim cut suit or something you know like give me a break jared with that i mean like you're not like you you are what you are which is someone who's like basically had a checkbook behind you're her life yeah and now you're like utilizing your position of power and influence to service your your own personal ends like good description there so i don't know a ton about rest mutant i guess he was sort of like a russian mystic and he sort of advise the Tsars. But apparently his scandal, this is according to Wikipedia. It's a deep research here. I'm actually done some deep dives on recipes. So did he help discredit the Tsarist government?

And when he was died, led to the Romanoff's being turned over. So basically he like can be used this kind of mystic guy con man grifter. Right. So he was a grifter. It was all about on real estate. Yeah. Well, not real estate. It was all about like advancing. He owned the New York Observer. Exactly. And and and he like could comfort. the the Tsar and Zarina's child was like a hemophiliac and he could comfort him and and that gave his influences principally with the Tsar's wife and this was a source of building resentment around the the world family and then and Petersburg and and yeah like you know they killed this guy is kind of like one of the early acts of what became the Russian Revolution but but what he has in

common with Jared is he did not wear slim-foot suits as I understand but he was entirely like a grifter power behind the throne kind of guy. Yeah, I love it. All right. Okay. So maybe that was a point, Grisham. And shout out, by the way, to fellow podcaster Mike Duncan's Revolution's podcast, which is why I've recently been immersed in Rasput.

I'll check that out. Also, great show in Hulu called The Great, which is about Lazarus Russia. That's a good show, although it was funny. It's like one of those shows you put on, you're like, oh, I'm going to watch this period drama. And there's just, like, orgies. Yeah, it gets raunch. be real fast. It gets real fast. There's like a lot of sex.

Yeah, I was not expecting the tone. I didn't want to watch it with my parents. I watched the crown with my parents. Yes, yes. Watch the crown with your parents. Watch the great with someone, not them. Yeah. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, and then we'll have my interview with Jason Rizai.

I am so excited to welcome back to the pod, Jason Resign. Jason, it's so great to see you again. Tommy, it is great to be here. I'm, you know, talking to you from my basement bunker. my little 11-month-old is screaming somewhere upstairs. And here we are. Again, after a long time. A lot has changed.

A lot feels the same. I'm in the same place you are. So we're here to talk about your incredible new podcast, 544 Days. It is hosted by you. It is written by you and produced by Gimlet, Crooked Media, and A24. So some decent production companies there. It's the story of the 540. 34 days you spent in the notorious hellish of in prison in Iran after they wrongly accused you

of being an American spy. Your wife, Yegi, was also taken prisoner. The stories about your detention, the massive effort by the U.S. government and your family, your colleagues at the Washington Post to get you out. Oh, and by the way, Barack Obama was cutting a nuclear deal with Iran at the same time. So, you know, not at all complicated. It's not a lot of moving pieces there. So just for listeners who might not be familiar with your story,

Can we just start with the basics of why the Iranians arrested you in the first place? Yeah, so I was the Tehran Bureau Chief for the Washington Post in the summer of 2014. I've been living in Tehran since 2009, working as a reporter for international media, you know, freelancing, really, for several years until I was hired by the Post in 2012. And at that time, when I was hired, I really thought that this, relationship with one of the made newspapers of the world, the paper of record of the U.S. Capitol, I thought that gave me some cover, right? Some protective cover.

And as the nuclear negotiations started heating up in 2013 and 2014, one thing that nobody really factored in was that there were actors within the Iranian regime that did not want to see any kind of rapprochement between Iran and the West and Iran and the U.S. specifically. So when I was taken in July of 2014, it was right at the height of those negotiations. The time frame for coming to a deal, the deadline, had been extended by several months. And I think anybody who was following this closely believed that the deal was kind of a fait accompli. I mean, it was going to happen one way or the other.

And as you know, from being here in Washington at that time, there were a lot of opponents in the U.S. against diplomacy with Iran and that deal in particular. Inside Iran, there were opponents as well. And the main opponent was the Revolutionary Guard Corps. And agents of their intelligence wing raided my home and abducted my wife and I. very suddenly without any kind of warning and took us to Evan prison where we really had no idea

what we were being accused of. I mean, they said, okay, you're a spy. They put us in interrogation rooms for weeks on end. And during that time, they asked us all manner of questions, which showed very clearly they had absolutely no evidence that we were doing anything wrong. I mean, I was just a reporter working with state permission in that country who was was kind of rounded up as, as bait. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're very clear when you talk about the experience. I mean, being put in solitary confinement for that long,

being interrogated under those conditions, it is torture. But what is surprising about this show and this podcast and, like, just you generally is how funny the show is. You, like your wife, your mom, your brother, like you are all able to somehow look back and laugh at this experience. You guys make fun of your tormentors. Is that something you figure out how to do after the fact? Or did you keep your sense of humor in prison?

That's me, right? I mean, you know, that's how I've walked through life so far. I've tried to look at the lighter side of every situation I've ever been subjected to. You know, my dad who died 10 years ago, he used to say, if you worry you're going to die. And if you don't worry, you're going to die. Right. So don't worry. And I've tried to kind of, you know, incorporate that mantra into as many moments in my life as I could. Obviously, this was a very extreme one, right? And I had no way of knowing if and when I would get out. But I had to assume that I was going to survive this thing somehow. And, you know, you get to a certain

point after several days when you realize, okay, am I going to be a friend to myself or am I going to be my enemy? Because I'm in solitary confinement. There ain't anybody else around, right? So you look for things to laugh at. You, you know, you look for memories, you plan for the future, conversations you had. And you can very easily go down very dangerous mental rabbit holes if you let yourself. I chose not to let myself. And part of that, a big part of that, was finding things to laugh at. And as my world in prison opened up a little bit, more interactions with my interrogator and getting to know my guards. And then after time having a cellmate, I just found endless things to poke fun of. Because ultimately, this was really the most

absurd thing that had ever happened to me. And I really wanted to pull out that absurdity in retelling this story. Yeah. Is it traumatic? Do I still have, you know, emotional and psychological scars? Fuck yes. Am I going to let that stop me from laughing at it? I better not, because then I'm really screwed. Yeah. I mean, some of the details is incredible. And I will not give all of the details away to listeners, but things you wouldn't expect, like the word avocado or Kickstarter become really central in your in your tormentors twisted, twisted mindset in ways that are just, I don't know, it would drive me insane. You're stronger than I am because I would live in those dark rabbit holes.

Well, look, I think, you know, the pull is very strong to go to those places. But when you realize that that's not getting you anywhere and that you're better off kind of trying to, you know, maintain a sense of equilibrium. The only way to do that is if you can laugh at shit. Yeah, yeah. And so while you're in prison, there is this government effort to try to negotiate your release. At the same time, there are ongoing negotiations over, you know, what will eventually become

the JCPOA or the Iran nuclear agreement. What's amazing in this podcast is you interviewed all these people about the process of negotiating your release. negotiating the JCPOA, and you talk to them during the Trump administration when they were out of government, when they were willing to let their hair down and speak freely and not be like, you know, the talking point robots that we all turn into when we go back in. And now a bunch of them, John Kerry, John Feiner, the Deputy National Security Advisor, are all back in government. Like, what are people going to hear from those individuals that might surprise them?

Look, I mean, I think that, you know, we always think of people in government as, you know, superhuman or subhuman, but definitely not human. And I think when you hear these people, you're going to realize that they are in so many ways dealing with issues in the same ways that anybody else would. They're just people tasked with a job, a huge job. And I think that the sort of impossible challenge of weighing massive geopolitical issues against the concerns of a single family is something that government has to deal with all the time. They're not necessarily always really graceful about it publicly or privately. Yeah. But I think we really see into that here. And for me, you know, I've had the opportunity over the last five years to get to know a lot of these people.

And also people in the Trump administration, specifically around the issue of hostage taking and hostage recovery. There's a level of trust and intimacy that I've been able to build up with these folks. But as you say, I mean, you know, they can't really. really let their hair down right now. They have a lot of other things to deal with. I'm, you know, of the eight or nine high level officials that we interviewed for the show, Ben would probably be the only one that would be willing to talk to me right now for this subject. And I know that because, you know, I continue to report on hostage cases. And I can't get any of these folks on the record at this point. So, you know, that's no knock on them. That's just kind of the

the nature of how things work here in Washington. But I would say there's a level of intimacy to this show that you almost never get when you put somebody in government alongside with somebody who was affected by the policies that they're tasked with implementing. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you get town halls with presidential candidates where they're talking directly to someone who's impacted by war or taxes or, you know, healthcare policy, whatever. It's so rare to hear you, who was taken by the Iranians, talking to Ben Rhodes or John Kerry or Brett McGirk about the decisions they literally made involving you or release from prison.

I mean, like, I don't know that I've ever heard that anywhere else. I don't think I have. I'm sure that there are, you know, fictionalized tales like that, you know, on film or in, in literature. But to me, that's the thing that jumps out to my ear. Because look, I was incredibly lucky. Not everybody has the kind of advocates that I did. And that starts with a family and your employer.

And, you know, between my big brother and the Washington Post, they were able to get themselves into the West Wing multiple times. And, you know, as much as they became a thorn in the side of some of these people, there's also kind of a respect level that was built up over time. And I think that that really comes through in the show. I mean, it's five years after the fact that I'm talking to these people. And, you know, folks like Wendy Sherman and Ben and John Feiner have very distinct memories of dealing with my brother. That's pretty cool as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's not all government dorks in the show. Your wife, Yagis, is interviewed a lot and is hilarious, your mom, your brother. So Anthony Bourdain has a big piece of the show. Can you tell people how Anthony Bordane became part of the story? Because, you know, for me listening to that trailer and hearing his voice again, someone who I followed and listened to and revered in some ways. It was, you know, it was both jarring and also. so wonderful to like hear the guy's voice again.

Yeah. So when when when we were arrested in 2014, six weeks earlier, we had been asked to appear on parts unknown when he was in Tehran. We spent an afternoon with him and it was, you know, it was a really lovely experience all the way around. And then when we were arrested, you know, invariably someone's going to start thinking, okay, it must have something to do with, you know, with being on that show, right? There's a lot of people who thought it had something to do with them. It didn't have anything to do with anybody. But Bourdain was somebody who really, from the get-go, was full-throated in his advocacy for our release. And that never stopped. It kept going. And a couple of weeks after we got out, we had the opportunity

to meet up with him in New York. We had a meal and some beers and talked a lot. And Bordane just gave Yegi and I incredible life advice. And from that moment until he died, he was somebody who was very much in our corner, very supportive of us. And ultimately, when I proposed, a memoir and, you know, wrote up the proposal and we took it to publishers.

We, you know, we had sort of one of these many bidding wars where half a dozen different publishers wanted to publish the book. He reached out to me and said, hey, Jason, you know, whether you choose me or not, just give it some consideration. I'd like to publish your book on my imprint. It's such an important story to me. And I want you to tell it how you want to tell it. By the way, you know, he ended up bumping up the, the fee that he was willing to pay. The book advance, you know, above and beyond any other publisher just to see all the deals. So it's just like, you know, when we made the decision, Yegi really, you know, kind of looked me in the eye and it's like, Jason, were you ever even considering doing this with anybody else?

And the answer was no, right? I mean, this guy believed in us and we believed in him. And we believed in So, you know, that's how that happened. And as part of reporting out my story for the book, I spent an afternoon with him at his condo in Manhattan. We had some beers and turned on the microphone and just kind of recorded a conversation. And I think, you know, magically it really fits into the story that we're telling here. Yeah. I mean, it's weird to miss someone I've never met, but I do. You mentioned that in the course of your work of the Washington Post, you report on a lot of these hostage takings. Unfortunately, hostage taking is far too common in foreign policy and foreign affairs. Terrorist groups take hostages. Iran is taking countless hostages. I think some listeners of the show might say to me, hey, Tommy, you could argue that some get-mo detainees were or are hostages and they would have some point. There's also a troubling rise in journalists being held hostage. One example is a man named Danny Fenster, who's an American journalist who's currently being held in Myanmar. He's been imprisoned wrongly since May. What do you think the best way, I mean, based on all your reporting for the U.S.

government to deal with these cases? And like, what did the Obama administration get wrong in your case that the Biden folks hopefully can fix and get right? So I think the first thing that the administrations often get wrong is not calling it what it is. When we call something an arbitrary detention or a wrongful detention, I understand that the the motivation for doing that, it is essentially to say that we acknowledge the sovereignty of this other country and the independence of their judiciary. Well, in doing that, oftentimes we're doing the dirty work for those regimes, right? Because all of a sudden, if they say, you know, Danny Fenster is being held because he's threatened our national security and, you know, the New York Times and

the Wall Street Journal on Washington Post all, you know, put a headline out there. that says, you know, Danny Fenster is being held on charges of disrupting Myanmar's national security. You're digging a deeper hole for the guy, right? Come out and say it. This guy is being held because he's a journalist who reported on this country. So there's nothing confusing about it for, you know, the average American or international reader who's learning about his plate. I was fortunate enough to speak with Danny's brother, Brian, a couple of. weeks ago, around the 100th day of his detention. I was introduced to him by another character

in the show, Bill McCarran, the executive director of the National Press Club. And the press club was giving Danny a Press Freedom Award, one that I received while I was in prison. You know, I joked in my column, and in real time, that, you know, this is not an award you want, because this is award that they give to people who are being detained to really raise the stakes and raise the awareness around their plight. And so much of what his family is struggling with right now is what my family struggled with. And I can tell you that, you know, they feel like they're getting, you know, a lot of support. I think that there's been a lot of change in how we deal with hostage cases since the hostage policy review that Obama old.

ordered in 2015. It's just kind of changed how we approach dealing with families, right? And that's an important step, right? Because, you know, for a long time, there was not a lot of information sharing with the families of Americans being held hostage. And I think that there was a realization that that was a mistake, right? No loved one is going to do anything that's going to hurt the chances of bringing their their loved one held hostage home safely. Yeah. And at some point you're going to give a little agency. I mean, it's their family member. You know, you can't be so paternalistic. You know, back to your reporting. I mean, before you were, you know, held hostage in Nevin Prison, you were just a reporter for The Washington Post. You were living in Iran. You're covering life there. You were meeting

regular people, you know, like, what do you think it does to the Iranian people to have this big diplomatic agreement, the JCPOA comes into force? They see this glimmer of hope for better relations with the West. And then the Trump administration comes in. You go back to sanctions. The U.S. assassinates the top general. Now they even have an even harder line president. What does that look like for the Iranian people? So, I mean, I think the Iranian people have been screwed by their own rulers, for lack of a better word, going back at least a century and a half, maybe more than that. And I'm talking about different monarchies and now in the last 42 years, the Islamic Republic. And also screwed by the international community, right? It's sort of an incredible thing that although we paid to

to foment a coup in 1953 that over through the democratically elected prime minister and reinstalled the Shah and he was there for another quarter century. And although we supported Saddam Hussein in the eight-year-long war between Iraq and Iran, and although we shot down mistakenly, an Iranian civilian aircraft in 1988, killing 300 people on board. Although we put massive sanctions on Iran and have continued to do so in a way that, you know, has hurt that society way more than it's ever hurt their rulers, average Iranian is still pretty darn pro-American, right? I mean, they want to study here.

They want to live here. They want to consume American products. And I think there is always this belief that right around the corner there's going to be a sunnier day in which the U.S. kind of holds up its end of their bargain in talking about supporting the Iranian people. We haven't done that, right? There's no two ways around that. And I think that Iranians, average Iranians, are still waiting for that support. Unfortunately, in some ways, they don't know what that looks like, right? It's just like, hey, help us.

But we have not risen to that call. Not the Biden administration, not the Trump administration, not the Obama administration, not the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan administration. It just hasn't happened, right? And I think we have an opportunity now to kind of not necessarily hit reset because, you know, the Islamic Republic is in a much more combative. stance right now under the new presidency. You know, the ultra-conservatives, the most insular powers in Iran have been bolstered in recent months. But it's also, you know, in a much weaker state

regionally and in terms of the resources that it can wield. So I do think that there's change that we can help to affect there. I don't necessarily think the administration is putting enough thought into it. Yeah, it's, I would love to have seen them get back into the JCPOA a lot faster, but, you know, what are you going to do? You know, look, you're right, though. I mean, sort of both parties have seen it as almost cost-free to be incredibly hard on Iran. I used to like joke that, you know, sometimes it's like we would govern by adjective. It was like, you know, the harsher you could describe the Iranian regime, the more as seen as political advantageous.

Yeah, totally. That is particularly true in sort of like super right wing circles. Mike Pompeo, my favorite former secretary of state, failed secretary of state, still likes to demagogue your release from Iran, still likes to rant about pallets of cash going from the U.S. to Iran. Can you explain for listeners once and for all what actually happened with the pallets of cash and how it makes you feel to have Mike Pompeo out there peddling this

fable years and years later. Well, I don't want to give away too much because I think it's a pretty powerful part of, you know, the climax of our story. Yeah. But I think that what I will say is that it was not a ransom payment. And we debunk that pretty well, I think, in the description of it in the show, told from the people who were involved in deciding on, whether or not the U.S. should pay what was essentially an old debt to Iran that nobody disputed.

We knew we needed to pay that back to them. It was just a matter of how we were going to pay it back. Very quickly, after my release, you know, some members of Congress from the Republican Party decided to seize on this as a political talking point. And, you know, it has stuck to the extent that Pompeo was on Fox over the weekend. And he said that the U.S. had sent $150 billion to Iran and that it was Brett McGurk who sent this money to Iran. Well, it just boggles the mind. And I was glad to see that the fact checker section of the Washington Post wrote another fact check article about this. They called the $150 billion claim a zombie claim, which is basically, you know, a piece of misinformation that has been debunked so many times but continues to rise into the culture. It bothers me, it bothers me less and less, but I think it's a really youthful thing in terms of, you know, people might ask, why are we talking about Jason Rezaian and his imprisonment five years after he was released?

Why are we making a show about this? Well, I don't know, but fucking Mike Pompeo still cares about apparently. He's got his butt all bunched up over this. Yeah, he's talks about it all the time. All the time, all the time. So, you know, I think that it's the sort of thing that won't disappear. And we had the opportunity to really kind of do a play-by-play that I don't think has been attempted anywhere else. And it's pretty fucking hair-raising.

Yeah, yeah, it was, it's an incredible story. It's an incredible ending that I would argue out Argos, Argo. Again, I don't want to give anything away. Boom, I like that. So let's just do a little inside baseball here and talk about how this pod came together because it was really fun, like the stars kind of a line. Like, you know, I knew you and I had connected from afar, like on DMs and stuff. We like, I wasn't in the administration when this all happened, right?

So I was an observer from afar. But, you know, you would come to L.A. We were talking. Ravi Nondon from A-24 had just read the book, your book, and asked me, if I knew you. And I was like, not only do I know the guy, he's here tomorrow, you know, you came in, you did the show. I mean, it felt very serendipitous how this pod came together.

I mean, I don't know. It's amazing that two years later, here we are. Totally. There's a product. That it is, it's incredible. When you, when you said that Ravi was, was interested in read the book, he came over, we had coffee, you know, I had taken a lot of meetings like that in the last few years. since my release.

Then we did the show and we had a conversation with Ben and I think it really connected for all of us that this is really powerful way of telling a story, right? You know, the people in government talking with the person affected by policy. I love that episode and I think, you know, it's one that people keep coming back to me. I don't know about if you hear this a lot,

but that that's a favorite episode, right, of popular in the world. And I remember telling you at that point that we have, that I had all this audio, you know, of my conversations with people who were involved. And, you know, the fact that we pulled this off, the editor on the show, who I've been working with since the beginning, pointed out last week that, you know, we've now been working on 544 days for nearly 600 days, which is a pretty good indication of how much, you know, energy in terms of writing, reporting, interviewing, producing, fact checking, we've done. So, you know, I love the product

that we're about to put out in the world. Yeah, you learned the hard way what a really great podcast producer will put you through. It's, it's almost torture-like. It's almost you have in prison. I said that a couple of times in the recording studio. It's like, okay, Jason, that was an incredible read. Now do it 73 more time. No, but it's like, look, I obviously, the reason we love doing these limited series and telling these stories in a narrative fashion is I can read a book, I can watch a movie, but the power of hearing your voice, of hearing Anthony Bordane's voice, of hearing John Kerry, of hearing Yegi, if hearing your mom, if hearing your mom make fun of the judge who was presiding over your life and death, you know, it's just different. It lands differently. And it's just an incredible show. And I'm

so excited that it's finally in the world. I couldn't agree more. You know, people keep asking me like, you know, when's this going to be, you know, a movie or a TV show? I mean, I think it all depends on, on, you know, things that are out of yours and my control. But, you know, we did the oral part. And I think that it's pretty fucking good storytelling. Yeah. As far as I can. Hey, Hollywood, call us.

So, 544 days. You can only listen to it on Spotify. Do not complain to me because it's free. You can get it for free on Spotify. The episodes are out of September 28th. You can listen to three of them right away. So you can do like a little mini binge, white your appetite. then we cut you off for a week,

then you get more and more and more. But Jason, congratulations, man. It's just an amazing show. I'm lucky enough to have heard early versions. But it's not just the show. I mean, the music is amazing. The sound design is incredible. Like, it's an all-star team.

I'm so thankful that we were able to do this, and I'm excited to get it out into the world and just keep talking about these issues, about this story, about Iran, about America. And I'm hoping we can do more Me too. Because honestly, this not only did the issues not go away, I think they've actually gotten more acute. There's even more risk of a blow up with Iran. There's even more hostage taking happening. So this needs to be talked about and sorted through by the government officials and everybody

else. 100%. All right, buddy. Well, thank you again. And 544 days. Check it on Spotify. You will love it. Thanks again to Jason for doing the show. Hell of a podcast, Ben, 544 days on Spotify. get it for free. Three episodes are out right now. It's really good. I do want to say to you, Tommy, I heard your joke on Potsid America about a two-bill solution.

Thank you. And I was literally like guffawing. I think guffaw, right? And the fact that neither John or John, like you even acknowledged your existence in the passing of that joke, I found kind of offensive. Look, first of all, I appreciate that.

Second, Favreau, to his credit, did give me kind of like a, you know, like a look. Like I heard you did. He saw you. He saw you. Love it just ignored it. Well, Love it was plowing ahead to like his DLC kind of advice. Yeah, Love it was plowing ahead to whatever he was going to say next.

Maybe he was threatened by the degree of humor and subtlety brought to the ocean. Thank you. I really appreciate that. You know, every once in a while. Got to get a little world out life in there. Yeah, yeah. And there was a good clap back at Dan on him in the future, I think. At the end of that, too.

That's good. Dan, if you made it here. Yeah, again, we respect you. Yeah, we respect you. All right, that's all we got this week. Great. Talk to you soon. See you.

Potsave the World is a crooked media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Yale Freed, and Phoebe Bradford, who film and share our episodes as videos each week.