Pod Save the World - Mercenaries invade Venezuela

Episode Date: May 6, 2020

Why the Trump administration is directing the intelligence community to prove their claims about China and the coronavirus is so dangerous. A truly unbelievable story about a ragtag group of mercenaries who attempted to invade and stage a coup in Venezuela. Trump’s nominee to be Director of National Intelligence gets a hearing. Then Asia expert Danny Russel joins to talk about White House plans to punish China over the coronavirus, how Beijing might respond, and what the hell we should make of Kim Jong Un’s reemergence after weeks of rumors about his health.

Welcome back to POTA of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, you just got back from Venezuela from the coup attempt? Yeah, I got out just in time. I made that. I escaped the Bay of Pigs invasion right before the enemy came crashing down on us. You listeners may not know what we are talking about. You soon will. Here's what's going on in the show today. We're going to talk about our concern that the Trump administration is directing the intelligence community to manipulate intelligence about China and the coronavirus and why that is such a big deal. We are going to talk about the wildest story I've ever heard about an attempted coup attempt slash invasion of Venezuela by this rag tag group of people.

The director of national intelligence nominee is getting a hearing today, so we'll dig into him again. And then our friend and Asia expert, Danny Russell, is going to join to talk about efforts to punish China for the coronavirus, what the Chinese response would be. And then since he reemerged this weekend, what the hell we all should make of rumors that Kim Jong-un was dead. Now he's alive. You know, it's like Tupac. More like Biggie, actually, Tommy. Yeah, more like Biggie. You're right. You're right. Okay. Before we get to the news, I just want to do two quick plugs. First of all, if you've loved listening to The Last Dance and all things, Michael Jordan, don't miss Hall of Shame's two-part series on Ron Artecest, aka Meta World Peace. It's about the malice in the palace, which is one of the biggest brawl. and sports history, but also the arc of his career. I listened last night.

It is fantastic. And then the other thing you just, I promise you, you don't want to miss, is our new original podcast series called Wind of Change. Patrick Radin-Keefe, one of the best journalists on the planet, has been chasing the story for a decade. It's a question of whether the song, Wind of Change, which was a power ballad by the Scorpions that became the anthem for the fall of communism and the breakup of the USSR, was actually written by the CIA.

The show is like spinal tap meets all the president's men. The team at Pineapple Street Studios did such an incredible job producing it. You will not want to miss it. It's one of my favorite stories I've ever heard in my life, not podcast, not booked on movies, like one of the best stories, period. So subscribe on Spotify because new episodes will come out weekly, but you can binge the whole series starting on Monday, May 11th on Spotify. So check it out on Spotify. Okay, let's get to the news. the New York Times reported that the Trump administration officials are pushing the intelligence community

to hunt for evidence to support this theory that the coronavirus originated in a government lab in Wuhan, China and not in an outdoor market. So if you're not familiar, the theory is that there are these labs in Wuhan that collect and study samples from bats to research viruses that could potentially spread to humans. They're called coronaviruses. Trump wants his intelligence community to prove that maybe a technician studying the disease at one of these labs got infected. You know, he left the facility, he gave it to everybody else, or maybe the lab improperly disposed of waste. But basically, they want to show that the original infection didn't happen at a live

animal market like scientists believe in that it was worse than that. Now, the theory itself isn't totally unreasonable. We talk about this with Danny a bit. In 2018, there's some State Department cables that express concern about safety standards at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And then, you know, recently I went down a rabbit hole researching laboratory accidents generally, which I do not recommend you do. You will not sleep.

But they are more common than you think, including an incident in 2004, when Chinese scientists researching SARS got infected. So the problem, though, here is the process. It's what intelligence officials call conclusion shopping. So an example of conclusion shopping would be, say you really wanted to invade Iraq. You tell the intelligence community, find me all the evidence there is that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. You are then likely, if you're an analyst at the CIA or a policymaker, to ignore or discount evidence that does not prove the requested conclusion and just focus on the things that do. And so we should all be worried that that's happening here.

According to New York Times, the Deputy National Security Advisor, this guy Matthew Pottinger, he's a China Hawk. they reported that he's pushing intelligence agencies to support the lab theory, even though many of them don't. Apparently, the CIA has only found circumstantial evidence to support it, most of it from public reports and not actually from intelligence collection. But despite this lack of evidence, Trump and Pompeo are taking this theory public. They're taking it right to Broadway. On Sunday, Pompeo was on ABC News claiming, quote, there's enormous evidence that the virus

escaped from a lab. Trump made similar comments. neither has released any of this evidence. So, Ben, I'll just pause there. I mean, do you want to talk about how the system is supposed to work when it comes to intelligence collection or a case like this? Like, I assume you've probably tasked the intel agencies to help you figure something out before. How do you avoid conclusion shopping and why do you think it's so risky? Well, I mean, first of all, the way the system works, right, is that the question that would be directed to the intelligence community should be investigate the origins of this virus and tell us your findings,

not go find out that this happened at the lab in China, you know? In other words, it clearly that the tasking that went, they're not even hiding the fact that the tasking that they've given to the intelligence community is to go find the evidence that supports what they want to say, not find what happened so we know what to say about what happened. So it's the opposite of how you should do this. I think the reason, I mean, there's so many things that are alarming about this. I mean, first of all, we are three and a half years into the Trump administration. We know that they have a tendency, not just a tendency, what they do is they reject intelligence findings they don't like. Well, like Iran is complying with the nuclear deal or Russia interfered in our election.

And they search for any evidence or anything really that they can spin as supporting their view of the world. That's been the case for three and a half years. It's also the case, though, now, Tommy, that because we're almost four years in, they've had the ability to have a lot of turnover there. You know, they've gotten rid of Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coates, who reportedly stood up to Trump on these things. And now you've got, you know, Rick Rinell in there, who we've talked about, who's basically a political operative and kind of a crazy troll running the place. And I'm sure that they've also been able to play musical chairs below that. So the danger, right, is that they have people that will do this for.

them just because the natural law of averages, as time goes on, they've got people in there. So the dangerous, we can't trust what they're saying. And it's pretty obvious, frankly, Tommy. They didn't even try to cover their tracks that, like, some of these leaks are like, you know, I see a single U.S. intelligence official telling the Fox News White House correspondent that the intelligence community thinks that this is a lot. Well, talk about a blinking red light, you know, a giant red flag here. You know, and the danger is, Americans can't trust what our own government is telling us about this pandemic that has hit us, but also the rest of the world's not going to trust us, right?

I mean, you want to have the credibility to go before the world if it's on something very sensitive, like China's potential responsibility for how this developed. What's the point of having an intelligence community if no one around the world is going to believe you because you've so systematically lied about things and dismantled your own intelligence community? I think there's also the danger that we're probably living in a world in which other countries are not sharing information with us because they have no idea how it's going to be manipulated for other purposes. And so you have this breakdown in both how the intelligence community is used, who is running the intelligence community, whether we can be trusted.

And that's going to have real impacts on our security, not just in this case, but going forward. Yeah, look, people won't be surprised that I agree with everything you just said. And look, I imagine listeners think you guys talk about Iraq a lot. And I just want to explain though that like the Iraq example here is really instructive because of the role scientists played in both cases. So as part of the leadups of the Iraq war, the Bush administration was really focused on this instance where they thought that Iraq was trying to procure a bunch of aluminum tubes, right? This was the big story. They leaked to Judy Miller at the New York Times. People went to jail over it. But then Bush, Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, all these folks were arguing that

these tubes are for nuclear centrifuges. They're to enrich uranium. and make a bomb. And the problem is that the administration, because they were so eager to find this conclusion to be true, they took the word of a younger CIA analyst over a bunch of nuclear scientists who said, hey, we do this for a living. No, that makes no sense. Those tubes are the wrong size. They wouldn't work for this. They're probably casings for like little rockets or something else, right? And, you know, a similar thing seems to be happening here because you have scientists who study the gene sequence of the coronavirus. And they're saying there is no. of human tampering or changing to this virus,

and that the most likely scenario is the virus jumping from animal to a human naturally. So while I think we should be open to evidence that something more nefarious happened, we should not be convinced by reports that say U.S. intelligence believes X or Y without evidence, because like we just talked about, you can manipulate it. And what I want to do here for the world does at home is assign a little bit of homework. This is the first time we've ever done this. When you're done listening to the show, Google Bill Moyers buying the war. It is a fantastic documentary on how the press failed to scrutinize the intelligence case that led us into war.

It's amazing. It's free on YouTube. It's free on Bill Moyer's website. End of speech on my soapbox here. Yeah. And look, I want to be very clear, too. And I think if you listen to this show, I'm no apologists for the Chinese Communist Party. Far from it.

A few problems with these guys, right? But there's a big butt coming here. The difference between suggesting that the Chinese failed to get on top of this virus and they lied about it versus suggesting that they somehow created it and maybe let it get out, that's just think about that. I mean, to basically suggest that the Chinese, you know, created a virus that is going to kill millions of people around the world and cause potentially a global depression. I mean, that's scary stuff to mess around with.

What are the consequences that would flow from that? And what is the xenophobia, frankly, we already see unleashed here. You know, I saw Pompeo out of tweet yesterday. China has infected the world. Yeah, what was that? How would you feel if you were an Asian-American and seeing that kind of language use?

This is some dangerous stuff that they're messing around with just so they can kind of blame somebody else for Trump's failure to prepare. And the only other thing I would have Tommy, we cannot emphasize this enough. We used to have a person in Beijing or in, you know, staffed in our embassy there, who went to Wuhan and would go to labs like this. And they fired that person or they terminated that position, just like they shut down a pandemic office. Frankly, we would have known a lot more about what was happening at the lab in Wuhan if he didn't dismantle the architecture that was set up for him, right? So, so this is dangerous stuff.

And, you know, I think people need to, to your point about journalists, I don't, I get very angry now when I see these like single source, you know, one U.S. official, you know, told us that this, do your work, you know, don't just get a fucking phone call from Rick Rinell or this, you know, guy who's a national security advisor or whomever saying, hey, got a tip for you. It was China. And go, you know, pop a headline on Twitter. That's, this is irresponsible reporting that's happening in some places. And by the way, you'll notice that you don't see this as much in like the Washington Post or in New York Times. You see it more on Fox, of course. But still, I hope that they learn from that Iraq experience that you mentioned. I'm not, I hope, but I'm not hopeful that they will. Yeah. And look, you know, as two guys who used to be sourced as a U.S. official talking about some, like, sensitive matter, blah, blah, not that we're ever leaking classified information. We did not do that.

But, like, we both know how easy it is to get quoted by a reporter, laying down some fact, And we did our best always, to be honest, but I don't trust the people in charge now. And so, yeah, we need multiple sources on all these things. We're going to talk a lot more about China and the way the administration is reportedly thinking about trying to punish China with our guest, Danny Russell. So stick around for that. But I want to turn now to Venezuela, Ben, because like this is one of the wildest stories that we've ever talked about on the show.

So buckle up, as I'm known to say, decide, Ben, there's nothing like having a podcast to really expose all of your verbal tics that annoy like everybody in your life. Yeah. I notice it. Yeah. Oh, as an aside, by the way, to the world those who complain, my children are playing outside right now. So you will not hear the sound effects in this episode. I would like anyone who complained about your children playing in the background of the show to feel deep shame. Okay. So on Monday night, the president of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, he went on state television to announce that his government had captured third. 13 mercenaries, including two Americans, in a coup slash armed invasion of the country, is how we described it. I think eight people were dead. I hope I'm not double counting anyone there, but this was a serious thing.

In the video, you can see Maduro, like, going through what I assume were the contents of these two American guys' wallets. He displays their passports, an old military ID card, an employee card for a company named Silver Corp, which is a security company, a private security company down in Florida. the owner of Silver Corp is a retired green beret named Jordan Gudrow. Remember that name? So Guadro had been planning this operation. He called it Operation Gedean.

Apparently he named his own operation with a former Venezuelan general named Clevei Alcala. So this guy, Clevei Alcala, is not a good guy. He was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2011 for providing FARC guerrillas in Colombia with surface-to-air missiles in exchange for cocaine. sounds like that's illegal. He's currently in the U.S. facing drug charges. But these two guys, they've been training mercenary forces

in Colombia for several months, at least, I guess their plan was to send 300 volunteers into Venezuela, start a rebellion, fight their way to Caracas and overthrow the government. Now, we know all of this because the Associated Press interviewed 30 people involved with

or aware of this planning. And the genesis of this idea came when Goudreau, this green beret guy, of the private security company, worked security at a concert in support of Venezuela and opposition leader Juan Guido back in 2019. I remember talking about that on the show with you, Ben. That concert, that effort got him connected with this rag tag group of Maduro opponents who hatched this plan, including General Alcala. So they set up training camps in Colombia that were pretty half-assed. They were training with broomsticks.

They barely had enough food and running water. I guess this general Alcala tried to get Colombian intelligence to help him. and according to the AP, the Colombian Intel guys, like, vetted him, and they were like, absolutely not. This is bullshit. Like, cut it out or we'll expel you from the country. One of the best parts of the AP story is they talk about funding sources to pay for this private army. I guess one source was a guy named Rowan Kraft, who the AP describes as an eccentric descendant

of the cheese-making family. So that's who's involved here. He was telling his rich buddies to pitch in because then they could get sweetheart deals with the new government for like mining contracts. Okay. So here's where it gets confusing. This idiotic plan seems to have been stopped, right? The Colombian police intercepted this arms shipment that was going to go to these mercenaries.

This general got arrested. The Associated Press report that describes the plotting in great detail posted on May 1st. And it noted that these mercenaries were disbanding. But despite all that, despite their secret plot being covered by the AP, these guys decided to go for it anyway. And this this Green Beret, Jordan Gujarot, even release videos on social media announcing it saying like wave one is going in, wave two is next. So that gets us up to speed with today in Maduro's video. And again, apologies to everybody for the long backstory. But as you could tell, that's confusing.

But like Ben, I thought you put it best on our our Worldo group text last night when you said, this makes the Bay of Pigs look like D-Day. I just want to turn it over. I want to turn it over to you for initial reaction before we dig into some of the very serious. policy pieces here. I mean, this is so crazy. What I will say, though, is it's the logical endpoint of where things have been headed in Venezuela in a bizarre way for the last couple years. There's been like a total fucking absurdity to our whole approach as a country to Venezuela since Donald Trump decided to recognize somebody else as the president of the country without any plan to do anything about that. If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you,

right? What have we had? We had that bizarre stunt to try to like force assistance into the country with General Marco Rubio like furiously live texting what he thinks is going to be the end of the Venezuelan regime, you know, from from wherever the hell he was. And like that came to nothing. Then you had Guido doing this kind of absurd stunt where he kind of proclaimed that there was a military coup that was going to happen. And John Bolton is like taping triumphant messages to the Venezuelan people from the Roosevelt room and nothing happened. You had the absurd stunt where Mike Pompeo goes out, again, harkening back to our discussion on intelligence, and claims with no evidence that a plane was on the tarmac prepared to take Nicholas Maduro out of the country.

Like, if you were watching this play from, you know, the armchairs of these green berets, what you see is the people running the United States government repeatedly trying to engineer a coup in this country and willing to entertain all kinds of ideas and putting Elliot fucking Abrams, the guy who used to run death squads in Central America in charge of the policy. So what would you think? You would think that it's amateur hour down there. It's, if you're like if you're a grifter slash glory chaser slash guy who just likes to hump the action and it looks like the actions in Venezuela, you'd go put together your own little bay of pigs invasion, which is exactly what this sounds like to me. There's just a giant vacuum because Trump has become disinterested in this.

Who knows what on earth our Venezuela policy is? We don't have a Venezuela policy. We have a Venezuela political strategy in South Florida that is somehow designed to call Democrat Socialists and appeal to Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans who are hardliners. And you get crazy shit like this. Like, lo and behold, where did John Bolton announce the last change in our policy in Miami? Where did Donald Trump announce the rollback of our Cuba policy at a theater named after the people who did the Bay of Pigs invasion.

So here we are with our own. You know what? Like the Bay of Pigs invasion was like the varsity play here. It was actually like the, this is the amateur. This is the JV. Bay Pigs invasion, right? And they'll say they didn't know about it. You wouldn't tell me, by the way, that the U.S. intelligence community had no idea that this was happening if the Associated Press did.

Right. I have a lot of questions about this, Tommy. Yeah. So that was a perfect segue. And I enjoyed every second of his. So I do think most of. reasonable people would probably hear this story or read that AP story and think more crazy shit, you know, like wacky cowboy nonsense that is too ridiculous for even the Trump folks to get involved

with. But let me offer you some evidence that might make you believe otherwise. And I don't know what I believe. First, so according to the AP, this guy, Guadro, the Green Beret, who runs a security company, had met with and discussed this plan with Keith Schiller, who was Trump's long-time aide, longtime personal bodyguard, who worked in the White House for a long time doing God knows what. Second, as you noted, we know that John Bolton and other Trump administration officials were actively supporting regime change. I mean, remember when John Bolton went to a press briefing and you can see when he had written 5,000 troops to Columbia on his not pad, right? Like, that was not subtle. And then third, you know, this White House has been pitched

on proposals to replace U.S. troops in Afghanistan with private security contractors, right? So why not have private militia force invade Venezuela. So it's worth noting that Tuesday today, Trump denied it. He said it has nothing to do with our government. But I guess I don't know, Ben, do you believe him? I don't know. I don't know if I do. Number one, but number two, even if this wasn't like cooked up in the government, we have empowered all these characters. Like, when somebody is able to excavate what is happening around Venezuela, like who the characters are involved in this policy, what meetings are being taken, I think you will find a pretty astonishing level of corruption and amateurism, right? Because you've got all these kind of wealthy exiles who are trying to fund Guaido,

you've got all these people down there in Colombia, you've got Rudy Giuliani circling around. Remember, he was going to get involved in negotiating an end to this? This policy is a complete and utter train wreck. Nicholas Maduro is more entrenched today than he was on the day that Trump recognized Guido as the president of the country. Just think of that. about that. The Russians and the Chinese are much more present in supporting Maduro. And what you have that's filled the vacuum of the U.S. having any coherent policy is stuff like this. And I would love to see who's had meetings at the White House on this stuff. There's the guy who runs Latin America policy in the White House is this guy who's basically a political operative from South Florida,

right? Who's the kind of person who deals with all these shady characters, right? So at a minimum, I would not be surprised that the Trump people were somewhat aware that this was out there. And nothing would surprise me about what you could tell me about this, because we know in the past that they've tried to do things like this in Venezuela. Right. I mean, you know, I was talking to our former colleague, our friend Dan Restrepa, about this, who's an expert in the Western Hemisphere, about just how wild it is to, like, go through with this invasion after your cover is blown in the Associated Press.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he just pointed out to me that there is a firmly, held belief along a lot of individuals in the exile community and neocons and a whole bunch of other people that all then as well and needs is a small nudge and the regime will collapse like a house of cards. Now, I feel like we've seen over and over and over again the last two years that is not at all true. But I guess if you believe it, you might decide to invade a sovereign nation with like 30 dudes in a speedboat and think you might be successful. But you know what? Because they've been told that, you know, when John Bolton appears in the Roosevelt room and announces that the

Venezuelan regime is about to collapse, when Mike Pompeo claims that there's a plane on a tarmac, of course some people believe it. Like, maybe you and I don't believe it. Maybe a lot of people listen to this podcast don't. But, but this puts in their head, Dan's exactly right. This idea of like, well, if they're about to collapse, maybe all they need is a few hundred guys, you know, and it totally misreads the actual situation, which is it, this is a divided country in Venezuela and Maduro has external support from Russia and China. And Donald Trump seemed to think that just laying hands on Guaido was going to make him the president of the country. That's clearly not happened. Yeah. So let's talk about all the many policy and political

problems this creates. So Venezuela constantly accuses Colombia of trying to overthrow them or interfere with their politics. They constantly accuse the United States of trying to do so. You know, when it comes to the U.S., there's a long, dark history of CIA meddling. in Latin America that was, you know, sort of in a previous generation. But, you know, who knows what bits and pieces of that have been revived by the Trump administration. You know, for the Columbia piece, like I think it's almost always bullshit with the accusations that Maduro makes about Colombian meddling. But, you know, this one feels a little more true. The mercenaries involved claim to have a signed contract for the mission with from Juan Guaido, the opposition

leader that we've been talking about who we've recognized as president of Venezuela. So that's awkward. Guido denies it. But I mean, true or not true, this is going to be hard to shake. There's some document that seems to have emerged now that looks like a contract. So who knows what the truth is there. And then on top of all that, Maduro is now holding two former U.S. Special Forces members prisoner. I mean, I imagine Trump is going to become under intense pressure to get them back, to give something for them. I mean, I guess, you know, there's so many ways this is a mess. How much are you worried about this event enhancing Maduro's stature? And how worried are you about this hostage crisis? Well, I think that the main thing, you just put your finger on it, right? This is a gift for Maduro,

gift wrapped. I mean, he claims that they're trying to overthrow him in a coup, and that's exactly what this is. Like, he's right in this case. I'm no fan of Maduro, right? But like, now he has a standing to say, see, this is just a bunch of gringoes, you know, conspiring with some other people who want to overthrow me. The second thing you're also right about, Juan Guido, his standing had been falling anyway, right? He hadn't delivered any results. You know, I think there was some frustration building with him. I don't think he did himself any favors by being in like the Melania Trump box at the state of the union being used as a prop for Trump. And now he's, how is he going to shake this? How is he going to, you know, if there's signed documents like this, like that's going to stick to him.

And by the way, not just the effort to kind of overthrow Maduro, he's already kind of all in on that, but the amateurism of it, you know, it just makes the Venezuelan opposition look not ready for prime time, right? And I think that we'll have policy ramifications not just in Venezuela, but kind of in that region, where other countries are looking at this. And part of what the only thing that was going for this initial play to support Guido was a lot of regional support, I think people are going to get kind of, you know, begin to get exhausted with this effort of Trump's to elevate Guido. So, yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of thought. On the guys, I don't, it's a tricky one, right, because they don't deny that they were doing

that, right? So it's not like they're being, you know, held, I want them back because you don't want anybody in Venezuela in prison, but like, it's not as if it's going to be hard to make a legal case against them when they've basically admitted what they're doing. Imagine if two Venezuelan guys try to invade Miami in a speedboat? We throw him in jail for life. Exactly. So I'm honestly not sure what options are available to Trump other than some exchange of some sort.

Yeah. I mean, I just think I guess the key point before we move on is like I think anyone with a heart and a soul wants to see a better government for the people of Venezuela. We want them to have basic services. We want them to health care not to be starving, not to have hospitals without electricity or running water. I think the path to that is a free and fair election. This stupid bullshit sets back any efforts to get to a better, more representative government into Venezuela by God knows how long.

And it's just a mess. And the last thing I'll say about this, Tommy, is like, I don't think I've talked about this before, but like at the end of the Obama administration, I was talking to Cubans all the time. And I said to them, like, hey, can we start to have a serious conversation about Venezuela and about what it would look like to work together? in the same way that the U.S. and Cuba worked together to support the peace agreement in Colombia that brought an end to a 40th of war. Like, can we try to bring you in to some type of conversation about this?

And they were, I think, open to it, you know? And then Donald Trump got elected. Like, if you really care about the Venezuelan people, you have to talk to all sides. You've got to, yes, get our team lined up, get the Venezuelan opposition, our team in the region, that is, the kind of democratic countries

that care about human rights, but then talk to the Venezuelan opposition, but you're going to have to talk to the Maduro people. you're going to have to talk to the Cubans and do some real diplomacy here, not this kind of, you know, rip from the playbook of the 80s Latin America policy or some blending of the Bay of Pigs and Eric Prince's, you know, contracting universe. Like, that's not going to cut it here.

Yeah, it just shows the fucking bankruptcy, moral bankruptcy and idiocy of a policy where you could make common cause with a guy who sold surface-to-air missiles to the FARC. To the FARC. When you worked for Maduro in like 2013, and suddenly think you're on the side of the good guys. Totally. Okay. Let's talk about the Director of National Intelligence.

So this morning, Tuesday, May 5th, the Senate Intelligence Committee met for a hearing on the nomination of John Ratcliffe to be Director of National Intelligence. The guy in the job right now, the one purging the place of career intelligence experts and probably helping Trump manipulate intelligence for political purposes. He's just a temp. He's a Twitter troll named Rick Rennel. We've talked about him before. He can never get confirmed.

so he's there in an acting capacity. So Ratcliffe has actually been nominated twice. The first time he had to withdraw for lying about his resume, then he was re-nominated because the Trump administration is desperate and they can't get people to take jobs. So again, for those listening, like the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, oversees the intelligence community.

He or she is responsible for the president's daily intelligence briefing, which entails pulling together the most important, thoroughly vetted accurate information you can find from this like deluge of raw. that's out there. That contact is why this story caught my eye. The Daily Beast reported that Ratcliffe's campaign Twitter account follows a 9-11 truther account with just one other follower and four accounts that promote the Q&N conspiracy theory. For those not familiar with Q&N, I'm sincerely jealous of you. It involves wild accusations of like pedophilia and cannibalism. And it's just,

it's literally so insane that the FBI views it as a potential source of domestic terrorism. And so, look, the charitable and likely explanation for why Ratcliffe's account follows these people is that some staffer did it, didn't pay much attention, whatever. And I don't want to make a huge deal about a tweet or a Twitter follow. But I do find it troubling, the degree to which Republicans embrace fringe conspiracy theories when they help them politically. For example, the crazy fringe protesters in Michigan and California demanding states open when we're not ready to do so, those events are, events are, filled with QAnon fans. They hold up their little signs. And I do wish Republicans would take a harder line that these conspiracy theories are dangerous and unacceptable, especially when you're nominated to be the Director of National Intelligence. But, you know, Ben, our options here are

Rackcliffe, the Q&ONO following guy or a Twitter troll named Rick Grinnell, who stays around in the acting job. So I guess pick your poison. No, but there's a theory that I think is probably partially true that one of the reasons to put Grinnell in there is he's so toxic that then you could get this guy confirmed, right? Because the, you know, some of the Republican senators were like, this guy, Rackcliffe is too out there. And it's like, oh, okay, well, we'll put Grinnell in there and then leave you with no choice but to do this guy. And look, he's clear, he's not qualified. He's called, you know, he's trafficked in the idea that the intelligence community that he's supposed to lead is, is kind of part of this deep state conspiracy against Trump. This is Rackleckleff, by the way,

not Cornell, Cornell's even worse. But I think you're right. The conspiracy, I mean, look, Trump was born of a conspiracy theory, birtherism, you know, and the White House chief of his staff, Mark Meadows, lead birther. They traffic in this stuff and when it politically suits them, but man, to let that kind of mindset anywhere near the leadership of the United States intelligence community in its vast resources,

it's just, it's a sign of how far we fall on. And I think the note I'd end on, Tommy's like, what kind of world are we in if Trump's reelected? Like, who's going to be in all these jobs? Like, it's gotten worse every year. Like, Dan Coates was the first DNI, like a right-wing Republican, but like a competent guy who could do the job. This is where we are in year four.

Like, imagine year seven, right? It's really, it's hard to overstate the importance of the election when you think about that. Yep. So the last thing I had on my agenda here is when we touched on before Ben, but I think it bears repeating just because it's so important. So on Monday, a bunch of world leaders convened virtually to raise money to develop vaccines and other drugs to treat the coronavirus.

It was led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, I hope I'm saying that right, and included pledges and messages from Angela Merkel of Germany, Emmanuel Macron of France, Boris Johnson, and the UK, Erdogan and Turkey, Bebe Netanyahu, Israel, and Shenzhou Abe from Japan. They pulled together $8.2 billion from governments, foundations, and businesses, to fund research and to create and mass-produced drugs to combat the coronavirus. Really admirable stuff. Boris Johnson, who nearly died of COVID, said, quote, the more we pull together and share our expertise,

the faster our scientists will succeed. The race to discover the vaccine to defeat this virus is not a competition between countries, but the most urgent shared endeavor of our lifetime, end quote. Notable that Boris Johnson is the guy who just, you know, did more to break apart the world with Brexit, right? So he sort of found some religion there. The U.S. didn't attend this virtual vaccine summit. We were absent.

And this is on the heels of Trump announcing he was cutting off U.S. funding for the World Health Organization. The U.S. is the primary funder of global health. It has never been more important or obvious that going alone is a failing strategy. Because if we invented a vaccine tomorrow, we'd still need 350 million, maybe 700 million doses in the U.S. alone, depending on how many shots of it you need to make it work. So, you know, Ben, I like doing this show because the issues are usually complicated and because we can argue different angles and debate whether ideas are good. This is not one of those times. We should obviously be leading a global effort to eradicate the coronavirus because it's in our interests. You know, in the past,

you've talked about how the Ebola response was led and how is this smart coordinated response. So today my question is a little different. Here's the problem is, I see. see it. It's easy to demagogue globalism or the UN or foreign assistance because for whatever reason it makes for good politics. How do you think we fix that? Like how should we message to the American people the importance of this effort of, you know, international cooperation in the face of a pandemic and that, you know, that's not like every man for himself in the face of a pandemic? Well, look, first of all, I think it's notable, yeah, like you're right. In any normal, administration, Obama. We led this effort. The UN, we convened a meeting with dozens of countries

to get contributions for the Ebola response. So we literally had the same meeting. Obama chaired it, and the U.S. called it, and it was at the U.N. in New York. I think it's notable. Look, people can say we bid up on Trump here. Fine. Like Boris Johnson, B.B. Netanyahu, Taip Erdogan. We're at this meeting. So this is not just a bunch of, like, pointy-headed liberals. It's not just our, the people we admire, by the way, like McCron and Merkel, who are frankly centrist, the right of center politicians, not exactly left-wingers, at least certainly Merkel. So I think that's important to show just how extreme Trump is, that even a Netanyahu and a Boris Johnson are participating. To your question, though, look, let's start with where we are, which is your health. What if

a vaccine is developed by another country before us? You would want that, wouldn't you? How are we going to scale up the vaccine when it is developed? If we're not even at the table and we're not even in those conversations, you know, globalism is something to demagogue until you're desperate for international cooperation because you could potentially die from a pandemic or the global economy can't resume unless we can, how are we going to figure out how to resume the international travel that is the lifeblood of supply chains and distribution and the global economy? So if this doesn't get, look, I know there's no way.

way to reach kind of 35% of Americans here. But if this doesn't get across, the WHO had testing kits that we could have used and we didn't take them. Right. So at every step, it's not submitting to global governance. It's pooling resources. It's us being able to access resources. It's the idea that if someone comes up with a vaccine somewhere else, we can use that and help scale it up. Like, this is basic common sense, life or death stuff for people that is evident even to a nationalist like Boris Johnson, who wanted to leave the EU. So I think we have to see that this is not some luxury or some elite fantasy. This is the only place you can turn when you're dealing with something that recognizes no borders.

And by the way, that's not just coronavirus. That's climate change. That's cyber threats. That's terrorism. That's just about every problem that we actually face in terms of our national security. That's immigration if you even care about, you know, dealing with that issue. So I think, you know, at a certain point, people have to recognize it that this is not like some one-world government. This is how you pool together resources and solve problems.

Yeah. It's just so frustrating going to this election, knowing that this kind of rhetoric is probably going to be popular, at least among his base. Yeah. Knowing that you see in swing, say, polls that, you know, 51% of people blame. China first and foremost for the coronavirus, 24% blame the Trump administration and that they're going to make the China piece the focus of this. And like, I don't want Joe Biden to be seen as a defender of the Chinese government of the Chinese response in any way, right? But like we kind of talk about later with Danny, like you do need to make an argument for a more, you know, rational,

productive strategy if you want to then implement it, right? Because you have to start the selling process now or warming people up to like what your ideas are going to be. And I just feel like there's a political trap being set here and it makes me very nervous. Well, the last thing I'd say about this, you know, our old boss, Tom Donald and Joe Biden advisor had a pretty good line on this, which is when you're not at the table, you're on the menu. Yeah. There's kind of a nationalist argument to be made.

Like, do we really want all these other countries that are making decisions without us? Right. You know, we're the ones who are going to get screwed if we're not even at the table, you know? If we're not running the meeting, the Chinese are going to end up running that meeting. And so I think there is a way to frame this in a nationalist kind of patriotic way. America doesn't sit it out. We run those meetings, you know? And if we don't run them, like we're going to get screwed.

Yep, that's right. Last thing before we get to our interview with Danny Russell, Michael Martinez, our producer for the show, is very excited about Korean baseball coming to ESPN. Are you a fan? Will you watch? Our friend Mark Lippert, who was the U.S. ambassador. to South Korea is like the world's biggest Korean baseball fan. He has all the jerseys. I think he named his dog after a player or something like he's all in.

I'll watch just about anything, any sports. I'd like, you know, I would sacrifice a few days off the back end of my life to just listen to one afternoon baseball game right now. By the way, not to be all world-a-nerd about this, they're playing baseball in Korea. Yeah, no kidding. It shows you that what a good government response can do too. Yeah, I know.

For now, I guess I'm just going to have to like live. for Sunday nights and watching the last dance, which is like maybe, maybe my favorite two hours of the week, every week. It's a combination of like watching Michael Jordan is awesome. The characters around him, like Scotty and Dennis Rodman, are hilarious and interesting and fascinating and cool as well

and also like world-class players. But there's also just something about that period of time, like the music, the nostalgia, even the look of like ESPN. Like in 1992 to 1998, I would wake up and watch Sports Center until I could repeat it back to myself. And just like seeing that footage

in those people again, I think, is like doing something to my brain that makes it happy. Even though I'm a Knicks fan and Michael Jordan ripped my heart out several times, I had the same nostalgia, right? And that was my high school and college years and like the music and the look.

And yeah, that was ESPN's kind of heyday. And sports figures were just huge. And there was a sense of common experience. It's before social media divided us all into our subgroups, before streaming. You knew everybody was watching the same game at the same time as you, you know?

Yeah. People weren't devouring it for later. People weren't streaming. We experienced things as a country, and not to get all serious here for a second, but we all experienced Michael Jordan together at the same time on the same television stations, you know, because we weren't in our little silos of information, right? And that's part of the nostalgia for me, too. Yeah, yeah, it really is.

Okay. When we come back, we'll have our interview with Danny Russell. He's an Asia expert. We're going to talk about China. The Trump administration reportedly planning to punish China. and then what the hell Danny makes of Kim Jong-un's disappearance and re-emergence over the weekend. So stick around for that. We are thrilled now to be joined by our dear friend Danny Russell.

He was the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the State Department. He was also our colleague at the NSC, where he was Senior Director for Asian Affairs on the NSC. And now he's the vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Danny, it is great to see you again. Glad to be here, Tommy. Hey, Ben. So, Dan, you are living in Manhattan, incapable of leaving your house most days because of what Mike Pompeo would call the Wuhan virus. So I figured we'd start there in their efforts to demagogue China.

So the Chinese response initially to COVID, I think most people would agree, was terrible. There were coverups. They suppressed information. Doctors were silenced or threatened. But then in early February, it seemed like the top leadership admitted shortcoming. and deficiencies and announced some reforms. And there's some debate now I've seen over whether that initial botched response was the result of decisions made in Beijing at the top, or whether this was local leadership in Wuhan or Hubei province trying to cover up the disease

so that they could hit economic targets. Do you have a theory of the case in terms of where and how far up the chain the blame lies? Yeah, I think it's all of the above. I mean, it's reflective of a system and the system sort of permeates all aspects of society and is part of the national program. It's part of the local program. So, you know, there was an incentive early on to delay, to downplay, to cover up. And that is in large part because Xi Jinping has outlawed bad news in China. And especially bad news when it could potentially threaten something that the party put value in. There was at the local level, the upcoming meeting of the provincial party heads in Hubei province. At the national level,

they were getting ready for the lunar new year, the spring festival. And all you have to do is crack open the China Daily, and you'll see that it's all good news. It's all how brilliantly the sort of socialist rejuvenation of China is unfolding. So there's a heavy penalty for

reporting bad news and a natural instinct to try to cover... It's all fox and friends. Exactly. Now, one of the reasons that the West got whiplashed when the Chinese reverse course so dramatically is that, you know,

once the fatwa is issued. Once the signal is sent from the great eye of Soron, then everybody immediately falls into line. And so on, you know, on Tuesday, the penalty for reporting bad news up the chain was serious enough that if, you know, a couple hundred or a thousand people die, well, you know, that's life in the socialist paradise. But on Thursday, it was the opposite. which is, you know, if you're not moving heaven and earth to get ill people into these recently constructed or hastily constructed hospitals and facilities, regardless of the impact on the economy, then you could be in big trouble. So it's all about follow the leader.

And Danny, you know, the White House, we hear a lot about the fact that they're drawing up plans to punish China. for the coronavirus, number one tough guy, Mike Pompeo, is out there about this all the time. We've heard some ideas around sanctions, around revisiting the phase one trade agreement, canceling even U.S. debt obligations. My question, I mean, obviously, there's a question about how much of this is a domestic political strategy and how much of this is an actual China strategy. I'm curious, I mean, how feasible do you think it is to blame China for this? And in what kind of policies do you think the Trump administration might actually pursue?

Or do you think that this is a case where this is just kind of a lot of rhetoric that he's going to use at home to demagogue China and, you know, paint Joe Biden and Democrats as weak? Yeah. Well, I mean, it is a collision between the domestic interests of Donald J. Trump, but also the, you know, the pent-up fury of the, you know, the pent-up fury of the, ultra-China-hawks and neocons within the system. But I mean, I think the starting point is that Trump is trying to use China in this situation, kind of like a red cape in a bullfight. You know, he can see that there is a big, fat, ugly day of reckoning heading his way for the catastrophic failure to prepare for COVID and then the sheer incompetence of the response.

And, you know, he's grabbing whatever's handy to divert and deflect. that. It's Obama's fault. It's your fault. It's Biden's fault. It's the media. It's the W.H.O.'s fault. You know, the China fault argument has a lot more heft to it because, you know, as Tommy pointed out, there's a lot to complain about. You know, the Chinese authorities let five million people leave Wuhan after they knew about the virus before they locked it down. You know, they stalled for weeks on the WHO investigative team and so on. So, you know, there is a lot to complain about, but I think that there are, you know, there are some really big problems that the Trump administration is going to face in trying to hold China accountable. And there's a

difference between holding China accountable and, you know, punishing China, doing bad things to China. There's a lot of punishment stacked up in the pipeline, things that Peter Navarro and others have wanted to do that the administration hasn't done because they come often at a very high cost for U.S. interests. And, you know, you hit one target and discover that, in fact, you know, other business interests or stakeholders in the United States are collateral damage there. But, you know, number one, the story that Pompeo and Trump are peddling about the Wuhan lab is, you know, just not credible now that scientists have established that the virus isn't manmade. So, you know, they're marketing a product that just doesn't work. I mean, except for

customers who drink bleach and don't believe in climate change. Secondly, you know, no matter how much fault they find with the Chinese and there's plenty to find, you know, that's not going to erase the incompetence of the administration's handling. I mean, it's pretty breathtaking. You know, like two months ago for perspective, I remember South Korea had at that point, maybe like 6,500 cases. Japan had about 1,000 cases.

The United States only had 280 cases, just two months ago. So we had time to see, you know, what was happening to prepare for it. So let's fast forward. to May 6th, okay? South Korea is up to 11,000. Japan's up to 15,000. The U.S. is up, you know, over 1.2 million. Like, do the math. Yeah, our population's larger. It's not a hundred times larger. So the second big problem, I think, is just credibility. And the third one is that other countries are unwilling to go along with Washington against China.

And it's not that they don't want China to be held accountable. They do. And, you know, like Australia made a pretty balsy proposal for an international team to examine the origins of the virus and so on. But that's not what Pompeo is demanding. And nobody even signed up to that. You know, other countries see the Trump administration making this a political, blatantly political campaign move.

And they just don't want to be dragged into some bullshit alibi for why 70,000 Americans are died. That's like seven times the world average, you know, adjusted for population. And then you got the, you know, hypocrisy of Trump's own record, of lavishing praise on Xi Jinping, you know, his great handling, the transparency in dealing with COVID. And then you got Trump like firebombing the WHO in the middle of a pandemic. That doesn't really inspire people to align themselves with that. So if there isn't going to be a unified like international push to demand that the Chinese like acknowledge culpability for mishandling the outbreak again, which, you know, they did like for SARS in 2003, then the Chinese are just going to, you know,

brush off the politically motivated attacks as they'll see it and shrug off the demands and, you know, also also punch back. Right. Well, okay, so earlier in the show, we talked about the intelligence case that it seems like Pompeo and Trump are trying to make or trying to push the intelligence community to make to find the worst case scenario that, you know, COVID escaped from a lab, not because it was created as a bioweapon, but because of sloppy research standards in this lab and maybe someone who got infected. Let's just assume for a second that that is true. The worst happened. The COVID escaped from this lab, the Chinese covered it up, maybe in part to stockpile.

PPE or other supplies, like really nefarious shit. What do you think an appropriate or proportional response would look like? How could you actually hold China accountable for this disaster? without risking a huge backlash or, you know, a big economic hit. Right. Well, I mean, before I answer that, I just really have to back up because you talked about the Intel reports and so on. And, I mean, what I hear from the friends I still have left in the Intel community is that

they are like bigly pissed about what is really a dirty trick, which is, you know, first somebody in the White House puts in a requirement to the CIA. to, you know, examine whether or not there are, you know, flying monkeys from Oz that are gearing up to attack Mar-a-Lago, right? And then, of course, the next day, there's a Fox News story running that says, hey, the IC is investigating the threat from flying monkeys. You know, and then White House surrogates start talking about flying monkeys coming from Kenya, you know, they're Palm Springs Airport. And so even though the CIA will say, hey, we can't confirm any of the shit. You know, somebody mentions like that the Miami Zoo has a chimp named

Toto, right? And that like proves what Saddam has WMD or whatever. So number one, that's serious, serious bullshit. Number two, you know, the story about the State Department investigation in the Wuhan Virology lab is also kind of bullshit because what happened was that, I mean, this was after I had left the State Department. But what happened was that, you know, in January of 2018, some State Department officials that are stationed in the consulate in Wuhan visited the lab and wrote a report, which is what they do. They're not scientists, like they're not investigators, but they ask questions.

So according to the cable that was leaked, the Chinese researchers that they met with thanked them for all the help that the University of Texas and these other American medical labs had given to help the Chinese build this research institute up in the first place. It's in Wuhan because that's near like the Batcave where SARS started and stuff. And it was the director of the research program that told the consulate guys, hey, you know what, we need more help from the U.S. because we're still short on trained technicians, and we need more people to help us safely operate this lab.

It's a high containment lab. So it's the Chinese scientists that asked the American diplomats for help. And the officers sent back their report, you know, passed along their request with a recommendation that the U.S. should do more to extend support. And, you know, three guesses what the Trump administration did about that. So, you know, if it's about accountability, right,

then it's really a matter of deciding what it is that we're trying to accomplish, right? It's, you know, the urgent things I would think would be getting all the scientific information from China that our scientists say that they need to combat the virus, and then to make sure that the information that you got from China is really accurate. You know, it would be things like shutting down the dangerous live animal markets. I, for one, would kind of want somebody to check that, like, the back door of the Wuhan Virology Institute is actually locked, right, even if that's not where this started.

And then you find a way. to get the facts out. You know, you put them through some sort of objective credibility test. But it's not going to happen if the Chinese don't, however reluctantly, ultimately assent to some sort of international scientific investigation. And they're not going to agree to it unless there's an international push on them, like real pressure, especially at a time when the Trump administration is threatening them with all kinds of, you know, punishments. So, you know, and as for, like, can you get reparations from the Chinese for the damage that resulted from there allowing the virus to get, you know, completely out of control in the early stages?

So setting aside the fact that it's a little bit rich coming from the human wrecking ball that takes approximately zero responsibility for like telling people not to wear masks and to shove a flashlight up their butts, right? But, you know, it's not so easy to punish a big, powerful, sovereign country like China. You know, so the things that are in the pipelines, the business and investment restrictions, like visa restrictions, you know, blocking federal pension funds, you know, that kind of stuff will happen. The sort of embargo. on semiconductor machinery and whatever. More of that than before is likely to go through.

That has nothing to do with accountability. It doesn't have anything to do with like, you know, indemnity or anything. But, you know, without real international backing for an accountability push, you're basically just getting into a dope slapping contest with the Chinese. And they can slap pretty hard. Well, separate from all the bullshit, if we can somehow cut through that, which is near impossible in this environment, you know, we're in a presidential campaign. And look, there's there's a lot of things to be concerned about with the Chinese Communist Party separate and apart from even this incident, right? We talk a lot on the show about Hong Kong, about a million Uyghurs being in camps, about the concerns about, you know, creeping surveillance, not just in the, in China, but around,

the world, a much more assertive, almost belligerent China. If you're the Democratic Party, if you're Joe Biden, right, and you're dealing with, obviously, Trump is demagoguing this, but we do need to, I think, put forward a strategy for how do you deal with China that is updated from, you know, the strategy that we used in government a few years ago. What would you advise a Joe Biden or a Democratic Party that needs to lay out in the context of this election and preparing potentially to govern, hopefully in January, as your way of being tough on China and being clear out about the very clear failings of the Chinese Communist Party in its system and its international agenda without, you know, spilling over into the kind of demagoguery and xenophobia that we

see from Trump. How do we contain, confront, compete with, coexist with China? You know, first and foremost, I mean, so I think the policy answer is not so hard. The political answer, of course, is well beyond me. But, you know, as a matter of policy, the Chinese Communist Party is a quintessential Leninist system that is power-based and that will make its decisions, will assess the correlation of forces, you know, based on its evaluation of power and the power dynamics. And the weaker that the United States is or appears, the harder it will be for the United States to deal with China in any sector in any circumstance.

And so the basics of getting ourselves back in shape, and I would suggest we might want to begin, by combating the virus that is killing tens of thousands of Americans and on track to kill hundreds of thousands, that would be a good starting point to try to restore some perception of competence in the eyes of the rest of the rest of the world, let alone the Chinese leaders in Joan An Hai. But, you know, the basic common sense program about investing in our own infrastructure research and development education in trying to reduce the polarization politically that causes just absolute stasis. So there's, number one, the stuff that we have to do at home. Number two, what we need is real strategic alignment with as much of the rest of the world as we can recruit. And it's,

it can't be built around a selfish nationalist, jingoistic, America first, every man for himself banner. That just won't work. We're going to have to find some basic principles and precepts that will encourage people to align with us. You're not a leader because you boss people around. You're a leader. if people opt to follow you, to go with you. And so that's the second absolute common sense priority. Third, I mean, we've got a lot of cards to play.

There's a lot that China wants from us. There's a lot that China wants us to not do or to stop doing. And the trick is to differentiate between the things that we want from China, both affirmatively and things we want them to stop doing, the things that they want from us as well, and figure out where there is room for either some limited cooperation and collaboration or compromise and where there isn't. In the places where we're going to hold firm and push back,

we just can't blink. We can't show hesitation. we have to be, I mean, this is the essence of deterrence. The other side has to believe that you really mean it. But in other areas, you know, we can set aside just absolute ideological thinking in favor of pragmatic cooperation on specific areas where we really need it. there is a raft of problems. And, you know, pandemics are right smack in that list,

along with climate change and terrorism and so on, that simply can't be addressed without getting some degree of cooperation from China. And we have to remember that as long as we are solid on our, principles, as long as we're not alone, and as long as we're going in with open eyes, specific, well-defined and beneficial cooperation with China is not naive, and it's not a sin. Dan, so last question for you is a bit of a swerve. So we just went through, like, weeks of breathless speculation about Kim Jong-un's health and whereabouts.

there were reports that he was dead in a vegetative state on a bender with Dennis Rodman. That report came from this show. And then over the weekend, North Korean state-run media released photos of him, cutting a ribbon at a fertilizer plant as one does on the weekend. A couple questions for you. One, the new fun theory is that this was a body double. Can we safely ignore that theory? And, you know, do you think we'll ever know what actually happened to the guy?

And then second, you had this fantastic LA Times piece last week that we talked about on the show about secession planning. I just wondered if you wanted to touch on a bit of why that conversation about secession planning is so complicated in North Korea. And what things do you think that the U.S. should be preparing for no matter who comes next? Well, you know, I don't understand why there should be any ambiguity about where Kim Jong-un was for that two weeks or so. I mean, I think it's pretty obvious that he was hold up watching the last dance on Netflix, like over and over and over again. Me and him both. You know, and when he got to the part where Dennis Rodman is thrown out of the game with the nets,

like, do you think he, like, started jabbing the launch button for his nuclear ICDM to take out New Jersey? Anyway, I mean, that's as likely an explanation. as any of the others. You know, I mean, it does seem plausible in my view that Kim Jong-un may well have had another medical procedure of some sort. You know, some analysts point to some of the photos that show him at the horseshit factory riding a golf cart.

Now, of course, you know, that may just be Donald Trump's influence. But last time apparently that he was at that factory, he walked around. So, you know, who the hell knows? The point is that, you know, the whereabouts and the well-being of the leader is super-sensitive, super-secret in any dictatorship. And this, he's not, he's a supreme leader, and this is like supremely secretive dictatorship. So that makes him sort of a magnet for all kinds of, you know, stories and rumors and so on. When I was at the NSC and later at state, I mean, the reports about Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un, you know, he fell off a horse, he smashed up his mazoradi, he was assassinated by generals, he OD on heroin, whatever.

But, hey, I mean, Kim Jong-il, it turns out, did have a stroke and he did die of a heart attack, and, you know, Kim Jong-un did disappear in 2014. So, I mean, the simple answer is, that you have to, it's hard to put the clues together for a definitive answer. Sometimes you just have to wait. And yeah, I think that in the fullness of time, we'll be able to sort of suss out maybe what was really up. In terms of the succession issue that I wrote about in LA Times, you know, I try to make the point that North Korea is, you know, a weird hybrid political system. It's, you know, half-Leninist dictatorship. It's half medieval monarchy.

You know, it's half branched Davidian cult and it's half-Mafia crime family. They're the world's only hereditary. socialist paradise. And, you know, the sacred mountain of North Korea, Mount Pektu,

where they pretend Kim Jong was born. You know, the blood of Mount Pektu is a thing. So to be the ruler, you've got to be a direct descendant of Kim Il-sung, you know, at least.

You know, whether you're actually ruling or being a figure. Figurehead is something that may get put to the test. That's why Kim Jong-nam, the older brother, was assassinated in Malaysia, in K.L. Airport. You know, and that's why Kim Jong-un's older uncle has been warehoused out in Eastern Europe and North Green embassies. It's why his other older brother has been kind of locked in the basement listening to Eric Clapton,

tapes and so on. The exception has been his sister, and I think a lot of this has to do with the kind of sexist, misogynist, old-fashioned culture that holds that women are subservient and are sort of unlikely to take the lead. You know, Kim Yo-Jung, the sister's sort of main job other than sort of, sort of, you know, sitting near Mike Pence, giving him heart palpitations during the Winter Olympics, has been holding Kim Jong-un's ashtray when he smokes his cigarette and all that. So, you know, it's not inconceivable that she could serve as some sort of figurehead for at least some period of time,

but that doesn't mean that she would have real power. And so it's harder to guess how this will end than it is to guess, to see that. that like the scenarios for succession, at least until Kim's kids grow up, seemed pretty dicey. There's a lot to worry about. So if Kim were disabled or died, then the scary thing would be the fact that

the Kims have always pitted their rival security agencies against each other, and the domestic security police against the military, and so on. It's divide and conquer. That's kind of dictator handbook 101. So if Kim were to disappear, you could find yourself in a very unstable political arrangement or unleash a power struggle that could get very messy, very fast.

And, you know, China is every bit as concerned, probably more concerned about instability. It's their northeast border, right? they kept the older brother in Macau under wraps until Kim was able to get a clean shot at him and kill him. They cultivated his dead uncle now. He was supposed to be Beijing's ace in the hole, John Soap Tech, which is why he got killed by Kim. So, you know, at a time when China stressed about COVID and the economy and battling with the U.S. and worried about Taiwan and Hong Kong and so on, there's no fucking way that they're going to be relaxed about some sort of instability. on the border. And from the U.S. point of view, the big scary scenario are loose nooks, right?

So, you know, it's a pretty safe bet that the U.S. has plans to send a military team to, like, secure nuclear sites. It's an equally safe bet that the Chinese have the same kind of plans. If, on the other hand, little fatty Kim III, as the Chinese sensors are constantly having to scrub out of Chinese social media because that's his nickname. Yeah, that's his nickname in China. So if little Fatty Kim, the third, is, you know, alive and kicking, or even if it's his body double, you can be totally sure that he's got his eye on the U.S. elections. Because historically, North Korea has calibrated their provocations or their olive branches, you know, carefully with the U.S. political calendar.

So Kim, you'll remember, did a whole lot of threatening and pot-banging in the run-up to the 2016 elections. But so far in 2020, he's limited himself to just testing medium-range missiles, you know, continuing to manufacture more nuclear weapons and more missiles as fast as his little pudgy hands can move and making sort of angry grunty noises about sanctions. But he hasn't really done anything threatening. And that's because he understands perfectly that Trump's claim to have ended the threat and to have, you know, solved the problem means that the White House has to downplay North Korean bad behavior, at least up to the threshold of an ICBM test. And so,

we will see if he starts, you know, pushing the edge of the envelope with Trump as the election approaches to see what he can squeeze out. But I think if Trump were to get reelected, then for sure we should expect him to go all out, pushing for Trump to, you know, come to Pyong for a big summit blowout where, you know, the Donald can basically, you know, bless North Korea's nuclear status, although at that point, maybe our perspective on the prospect of nuclear Armageddon will have changed a little bit. Well, you know, look, yet another reason we desperately need to win this election because we don't all want to have to watch Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump and Dennis Rodman party in

Pyongyang as they celebrate their nuclear status. You know, we've been focused on North Korea's nuclear threat and North Korea's ballistic missile threat for, rightly so, for years. But what is being badly neglected, I think, is another threat that's sort of the next generation threat from North Korea, which is the cyber threat. You know, North Korea has built an army of like 7,000 hackers, has dispersed them to China, to Russia, to India. they talk about cyber warfare as a sacred shield and treasured sword, just the way to talk about nuclear weapons. They've been incredibly successful in stealing secrets. They've been equally successful in stealing money,

like ransomware, think Wanna Cry, that kind of stuff. They've really taken the sting out of sanctions by stealing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But the real threat that we are not, not ready for, but that is unmistakably coming at us is cyber attacks against infrastructure. And, you know, Sony Pictures hack was chicken shit. It was small potatoes compared to what they can do, not just exposing records and stuff, but taking down power grids and dams and that kind of stuff.

You know, the risk return calculation for cyber warfare is like a million times better. than for nuclear weapons, which you can only use once. So I think if you want something to worry about, this is something to worry about. And if you want something that we need to get ready for and to deter, it's North Korea's cyber threat. Good advice to all policymakers in the White House or in the Biden camp. Hopefully they will be taking the reins. Danny, great talking to you, as always. Thank you so much for helping us understand what the hell is going on and stay safe in Manhattan.

Yeah, good to see you. Thanks, Tommy. Thanks, Ben. Thanks again to Danny Russell for joining the show. Ben, I'm glad you made it back from Venezuela in one piece. We're going to be talking about that story for a year. Let's keep coming back to that because more stuff's going to come out. It's going to be great.

So much is going to come out. Could you imagine the drip, drip, drip? I hope these guys are okay down there. I don't want to be tortured or something. What a guy's in this. Anyway, it'll mess, man. All right, buddy. Have a good week, and I'll talk to you soon.

See ya. Potta of the World is a product of crooked media. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Segglin is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malkonian, and Milo Kim,

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