Pod Save the World - Paging Moscow Mitch McConnell

Episode Date: July 31, 2019

First, Tommy and Ben discuss President Trump’s choice to be his Director of National Intelligence. Then, GQ’s Julia Ioffe joins to discuss the brutal crackdown on protestors in Russia. Then Tommy and Ben discuss Bibi Netanyahu’s new campaign strategy, Bernie Sander’s policy towards Israel, our policy in Afghanistan and the bizarre role Secretary Pompeo is playing overseeing the military. Finally, they check in on Boris Johnson and Trump’s global corruption network. Then Tommy talks with The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald about some why his reporting led the President of Brazil to threaten him with jail time. 

Welcome back to POTS of the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we have a great show this week. Great show. We actually have two guests. We'll get to that in a second. But I think we'll start with Trump's pick to be the new director of national intelligence. Then GQ's Julia Yafi is going to join to talk about the brutal crackdown on protesters in Russia. We'll do some updates from our best friend, BB Netanyahu, and then talk a bit about Bernie Sanders' U.S. Israel policy, which he talked about with John Favreau and POTS of America. We'll talk about Mike Pompeo. update on our troop presence in Afghanistan, quick check-in on Boris Johnson, Trump's Global Corruption

Network, and U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Later in the show, I'll talk with the intercepts Glenn Greenwald about some of the amazing reporting the intercept is doing in Brazil, and why it has led President Bolsonaro to literally threaten to throw him in jail, so it's pretty serious, scary stuff happening down in Brazil. I feel like we're going to be checking in on Boris every now and then. Yeah. Yeah, Boris went to Scotland to visit a friend of the pod, Nicholas Sturgeon, so it didn't look like it went all that well. He was booed. But let's start with our new director of national intelligence. So long time Republican Senator Dan Coates is out. Coates famously mocked Trump's decision to invite Putin to Washington at some live event, probably the Aspen Security Conference

or something. And reportedly never really hit it off with Trump. I'm honestly surprised he lasted this long. He's a fairly reasonable human and his boss is not. Trump has chosen a Texas congressman named John Ratcliffe to replace him. I'd Google the guy. Let's start with the basics of what the DNI does. So the DNI oversees the intelligence community. That person is responsible for putting together the president's daily briefing each morning. DNI also advises the president and national security council during situation room meetings.

Ben, a couple questions. Did I forget anything? And like, when you think about who was at the table at those NSC meetings that you sat in a million times, where did you rank the DNI in terms of importance and influence in those debates? So it's kind of interesting, little-known fact for the worldos that highlights my age. You know, one of the things I did for the Democratic co-chair of the 9-11 Commission is help formulate his proposals for the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission and then advocate to pass him into law. And the biggest recommendation was for D&I.

And so I wrote a lot of congressional testimony for my then boss, the co-chair of the 9-11 commission, Lee Hamilton on this. Here's the idea. The idea is that the head of the intelligence community, used to be the director of the CIA. And what 9-11 showed us is that we have intelligence in lots of different places, right? So the CIA collects intelligence, but so does the NSA. So to all the military intelligence agencies.

So does the FBI. There's over a dozen intelligence agencies. And so what you want is somebody at top of all that infrastructure who can make sure that information is coordinated, information is shared to use the cliche that the dots are connected. So if we have phone intercepts about a terrorist plot and then human intelligence from the CIA about a terrorist plot, that's all put together so that someone's looking over the budget of the intelligence community to figure out where resources should go. Which all of this was a huge problem before 9-11. A huge problem for 9-11. And the DNI, I think, you know, largely help solve that, help break down some of the walls between agencies and coordinate both intelligence collection and analysis.

Which leads to your second question, what is the role of the DNI in the room? So in every single National Security Council meeting, for instance, where President Obama was sitting at the head of the table, Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State are there, the DNI would always lead off the discussion by giving a dispassionate fact-based analysis of here's the situation. So if it's a meeting on Iran, the DNI would kick it off and say, here's the state of the Iranian nuclear program. If it's a counter-IS meeting, it's here's the state of the ISIS campaign. And by the way, if that information is bad, if that information highlights that our policy is not working, the DNI says it anyway. You know, he's not making recommendations about policy. He's reporting facts. And I was in the presidential daily briefing every morning where the DNI would literally come in every morning or his deputy and give the president a briefing and the same thing.

If he had to brief the president, wow, your policy is working great. That was good news. But if you had to tell the president, hey, what you're doing on this issue? not working, then we heard that. And Jim Clopper never putting any spin on the ball. And you knew he was just telling you, here are the facts that we're seeing out there, here are the trends that we're seeing out there. He wasn't going to shade that to make Obama feel good about things. No, nor was Robert Cardilla, the deputy. Those guys, they delivered a lot of bad news to people who didn't want to hear it. So, yeah, like, as you described, you really want someone in this role with a technocratic,

nonpartisan, just the facts or approach. So this guy, John Ratcliffe, is not that. Not that guy. Not that guy. It's almost comically bad. He has almost no relevant experience. So he's been on the Intelligence Committee for less than a year before getting elected to Congress in 2014, so not that long ago. He was a U.S. attorney in the mayor of a town of 9,000 people outside Dallas.

Ratcliffe claims he was a prosecutor on a major terrorism case. But this morning, ABC News reported that there's actually no record of him actually working on those trials. So we'll have to vet that out. So, I mean, you probably wrote this statute, Ben. I mean, the law establishing the DNI position says the director must have, quote, extensive national security experience, end quote. So there's some discussion about whether Ratcliffe is so inexperienced that you can mount an actual legal challenge to the nominations. That's kind of wild.

But like, what is the guy? Okay. Basically, he's just an attack dog for Trump against the Mueller probe, who has been happy to promote right-wing conspiracy theories and traffic in other like Trump defense and fever dream madness. So, I don't know, we talked about some other, like, scarier options, like Devin Nunes, but this is really pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And again, like, this is complicated stuff. And so there are two reasons why the person needs expertise. One is you don't want it to be politicized, right?

The DNI was actually created not just after 9-11, but after the Iraq War, where we saw the risk of politicized intelligence. So the idea was get someone who's kind of an intelligence professional who can help manage us dispassionally. Which leads to the other point, which is, this is kind of. complicated stuff. Like, understanding what the NSA does, understanding how the CIA operates and has human spies and sources all of the world, understanding what the defense intelligence agency does, understanding how the FBI collects intelligence and putting all that together. This guy is totally unprepared to do that. Like, he doesn't know any of that. He doesn't know what the CIA does, what the NSA does. If you look at who's been D&I before, Jim Clapper worked most of his professional

life in the intelligence community, right? Before that, you know, Denny Blair, our first D&I had been an admiral and worked a lot with military intelligence. John Negroponte, who did this for Bush, had a lot of background working with intelligence at the State Department. So he's not qualified. And if you look at his testimony or now his testimony's questions at the Mueller hearing, they're literally insane. I mean, he, you know, he's yelling at Bob Mueller about how he's violated every principle, how he's, Trump shouldn't be above the law, but he had this weird fox quotable line where he's like, Trump shouldn't be above the law, but he also shouldn't be below the law. And like, what does that even mean? He seems to traffic in the conspiracy theories

that the deep state was out to get Trump. So like literally he's been hostile to the very workforce that he's now supposed to lead. Yes, he's probably better than the whack job nut conspiracy theorist, Fred Fliescher, we talked about. But he's pretty bad. And frankly, he should not be confirmed. And we shouldn't assume confirmation. The Democrats should all. oppose this. And frankly, Republicans, Senator Burr, who's the chair of that committee, has at times been kind of an advocate for the intelligence community instead of just a total hack? Like, I shouldn't think that it's a foregone conclusion. It's likely that he'll get through because the Republicans don't have a spine. But this guy should not be the director of national

intelligence. Yeah. There were some T. Leaves readers who thought the fact that Burr waited a day to put out any kind of statement on Ratcliffe, maybe that showed that he was unhappy about the nomination. It's worth noting that last week, that, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report that said election systems in all 50 states were targeted by Russia in 2016 in an effort to mess with our elections or lay the groundwork to do so in the future. Also last week, Mitch McConnell blocked election security legislation that had bipartisan support. So, you know, that's one thing we'd want a nonpartisan D&I focus on in a serious way. And I actually think Dan Coates had just put someone in charge of working on this issue full time. And if you think Rackcliffe's going to come in and just clean house, like that's disconcert.

Yeah, I mean, let me quickly leave you three scenarios. One, the DNI has to go in, and in a National Security Council meeting like I was talk about, open the meeting by talking about the status of North Korea's nuclear program since Trump launched his diplomacy. We know from reporting that North Korea has continued to build nuclear weapons, perhaps more than 10, since the Singapore summit. Do we think Ratcliffe is going to do that and speak truth to power? Two, there's some incident in the Straits of Hormuz, you know, that something happens to a tanker. And the U.S. has to make the case to the world that the Iranians are responsible.

Do you think the rest of the world is going to trust this guy when he basically makes an argument potentially to go to war with Iran? No. And three, God forbid, the Russians hack our elections. Does anybody think this guy is going to give it to you straight and say the Russians are interfering in our election to help Trump get elected, which is clearly what's going to happen again? Based on his performance of the Mueller hearing, he still doesn't think that happened in 2016, even though that's the high. confidence judgment of our intelligence community. So this is a big problem and the election interference question is going to be one of the obvious places where the rubber hits the road here. Yeah, totally great. Well, we will keep watching this one because I agree with you.

Like, I don't think this is a foregone conclusion that this guy gets confirmed. Okay, the next subject I'm going to talk about is these major protests and the brutal crackdown on those protesters in Moscow. To do so, we're going to be joined by GQ's Julia Yafi, who is an expert on this stuff. Julia, thank you so much for doing the show. So nearly 1,400 protesters were arrested in Moscow this weekend for protesting election authorities that are preventing opposition candidates from running in local city council elections, I believe. Some videos from the scene showed that the Russian police were brutally violent. People were badly injured.

There were broken arms, cracked skulls. It was a pretty frightening scene. I know that opposing Putin can be dangerous, but were you surprised by the scale of the crackdown by the cops? You know, in part, I wasn't. I was more surprised by the scale of the protest. I think this is, it seems like the mood continues to shift away from the Kremlin, especially in Moscow. But the crackdown was kind of par for the course in terms of the way the Russian police have always cracked down on these things. They have gotten a bit more vicious. And I should point out, this is one of the first few times we've seen the Russian National Guard, the, Roskwadde being put to use. It was created ahead of the 2018 presidential elections, quote-unquote elections in Russia. And it was yet another security agency that was added to the pantheon of many, many Russian security agencies. And it was basically people were like, what is this for?

And it was basically the Kremlin getting ready for potential protests around Putin's re-election or coronation. or coronation. And at the time, the Kremlin pushed through a raft of laws through the Russian parliament that basically allowed these guys to shoot into crowds. Wow, that's awful. So this was kind of mild in terms of what they're allowed to do, but you could see that the Kremlin took a zero-tolerance approach here, that basically not an inch, you can't even get on the ballot, you can't go out and protest in your city, you've got to abide by the rules. Yeah. So could you explain when and why candidates were banned from running in these local races? And why do we think Putin is so worried about what are essentially municipal elections?

Yeah, there used to be some room for this in Russia. There was even some room for this in the Duma a little bit. Like one of the guys who was trying to get on the ballot used to serve in the federal parliament. I think the space is tightening as Putin's rule goes on and on and on and on. and on and on. But again, I think it's this kind of zero-tolerance approach, and a lot of people say that this comes from Putin's KGB background, that you take no risks. You don't allow an inch. You don't let people get comfortable with any kind of idea of participation in their self-government. But this is crazy. This isn't even, they're not trying to get into the mayor's

office. They're not trying to even get into the federal Duma. This is just a city council that given the centralization of power in Russia has basically no authority and no powers to do much. This is, and even still, these candidates were not allowed to even register to be on the ballot. What I should add, though, is these independent candidates had a separate set of rules governing their entry into the race. They had to collect a different amount of signatures. they had to have a basically, like you could have almost no fake or erroneous or kind of botched signatures. And still, these candidates met these super stringent restrictions that apply only to them. They don't apply to the people in the ruling party or in the so-called loyal opposition,

like the communists, for example, who are on the Kremlin payroll to be the opposition. And they were able to pass this hurdle, and still they were not allowed on the ballot. So, again, zero tolerance, not an inch. This power is for us only. You have to just sit back and let us do our thing. Julia, you know, like you, I think one of the notable things here is actually the scale of the opposition and the courage of these people in the face of a zero tolerance policy. And there has been a sense of kind of rising discontent with Putin in some quarters. The leader, insofar as there is a leader of the opposition, you know, has really.

been Alexei Navalny in recent years. He was recently arrested as a part of this crackdown, and now we've seen reports that he has severe swelling of his face, skin redness. It has all the hallmarks of potentially the Russians using toxins to poison people, although they say it's an allergic reaction. I think just to start for our listeners, can you just give us a quick background on who Navalny is and why he has emerged in this role? Sure. So Alexei Navalny started off as a lawyer and opposition activist and then really found his own as a blogger documenting official corruption. And he would write these long and very detailed posts with documents and, you know, real estate records and financial records, the stuff that could be super boring. But he wrote about it in a super engaging way and gained a huge following that way.

And when protest broke out in 2011, 2012, he would have been the most natural leader of the opposition. And he kind of was a little bit reluctant to take that mantle. Since then, he has really stepped up his game. He ran for the mayor's office in Moscow in 2013 and nearly forced the Kremlin-picked incumbent into a runoff. People say that he would have if the election weren't forged. he also has switched, I mean, he still blogs, but he has switched to YouTube, which is also a really interesting development in Russia. The state completely, almost completely controls TV. And it used to be the main way that Russians get their news and their information and they really trusted TV.

And it was just kind of a really trusted way of indoctrinating people and keeping them passive. But the younger generation, understanding that this is just, you know, garbage fed to them from Kremlin never even tuned in and started finding other avenues. And through the web, they kind of became YouTube stars. So you have a lot of political TV being produced on YouTube. It's where everybody goes to get their political TV. And Navalny created his own basically channel, his, one of the people running, for example, Le Bois Sobol, who is a really incredible young woman who has been on hunger strike, by the way, this hasn't gotten my much attention. She has a young daughter and she's, I think, on her 16th day of her hunger strike.

She has her own show and that, Biden has his own show. When I was in Moscow in March of 2017, he had put out a video against former president, current Prime Minister, Dimitri Medladyev, outlining all the ways he has, in his years of government service, you know, gotten all these villas and chattos and incredible kind of real estate wealth. And the video was watched tens of millions of times. And on the back of that, and I've said, everybody go out and protest. And people came out and protested, not just in Moscow where everybody, or not everybody, a lot of people hate the Kremlin.

They love to protest. People came out all across Russia's 11 time zones and over 90 cities. So he has turned YouTube into this amazing organizing machine and propaganda machine to get his message out there because state TV will not let him on. he's blacklisted, people will not even pronounce his name on TV. You know, he's like Voldemort. Again, this do not give an inch, do not give them an ounce of legitimacy, just keep them marginalized.

But tens of millions of people watch his stuff online. And in 2018, he tried to run for president. He was not allowed on the ballot, but he ran a really impressive campaign. He traveled all over Russia, which, again, is huge. opening campaign offices in cities all across Russia. Hundreds of people were volunteering in every city showing up, even when the police would show up and try to arrest him. And he very consciously, by the way, this is an interesting point about him.

He spent about six months at Yale at a leadership program over a decade ago. He watched a lot of House of Cards, and he very consciously modeled his presidential campaign on an American presidential campaign, you know, meeting and greeting voters, shaking people's hands, taking questions, having town halls. The kind of thing that Putin doesn't do because, you know, the traditional Russian leader, the Tsar, the general secretary has to be far above the people and above the fray and doesn't, you know, get his hands dirty hands, shaking the dirty hands of the pleads.

Yeah, he just plays hockey and gets to score like 10 goals against, you know, the national team, right? Yeah. So, and again, he has still, it's it, people were wondering what he's going to do after he wasn't allowed on the ballot in 20. And he has shown that he is still a really potent political organizing force in Russia, even as kind of the news, I hate to use this term, kind of tightened around him. You know, he may have been poisoned. He's now seemingly doing okay and back in prison. He has been arrested. I think he has lost count how many times.

What do you think his next play is? You know, where does he take this movement that he's built? I don't know. I think he's kind of playing for time, and that would be the smart thing to do. These are all young people. 40s, Putin is in his 60s. He's going to turn 67 this year, and most Russian men don't live past 60s, so he's really already beating the clock. So I think there's a kind of play for the post-Puton era and trying to use this time now to organize, to get people used to protesting, to get people

used to asking questions of their government, to holding them to account, to going out in the street and demanding what they want, to just get getting used to thinking about elections is something anybody can participate in, as something that, you know, anybody can go and really cast a vote for. You know, it's something very Western about it. And I think he's trying to get people used to this idea so that when Putin has gone, I mean, this is my speculation, but that when Putin has gone, that somebody new can take the mantle of power or can at least vie for it.

We can hope. Last question for you. If this kind of crackdown happened in Iran, I can own. only imagine the way Mike Pompeo would would rip his shirt open and denounce the regime. I really hope he wouldn't. Honestly, I'm almost positive. He would. It would be glorious.

Have you seen the Trump White House comment on this brutal crackdown on dissent in Moscow? I saw Pompeo duck the question, but that was sort of all I'd seen. I mean, let free him ring, right? He was kind of like we have nothing else to say, which was such a departure from where the U.S. has generally been. And I find that to be the most disturbing thing. It's just watching the protests, I also just want to add a friend of mine who is the editor-in-chief of TV Rain, which is basically the last independent TV channel in Russia, was called in for hours of questioning. There's now a criminal case that's being opened against protesters, and there's a fear that journalists will be charged with crimes for inciting these unsanctioned protests.

So that's a fear as well. And watching that, I was thinking, this is the guy, you know, this is all overseen by the guy that Trump really admires, that Trump asked for advice on camera how to deal with pesky journalists. You know, and it just chills down my spine. This is that I didn't come to America for this, you know, that we have an American president who is cozing up with exactly the wrong people. To be honest, I don't understand why he doesn't like the Ayatollahs. They're also authoritarian. It's true. It doesn't really make sense.

He loves NBS. He loves Kim Jong-un. He loves Duterte. He loves Putin. Erdogan, Bibi. You know, he wants to run his country like this. And I just kept, again, because I've been back in the States for a while now, I was watching the protests unfold and thinking, this is what he would like to do. Yeah.

This is what Trump thinks should be done with people who disagree with the people in power. and Pompeo not commenting on it just sealed the impression, just made my blood run cold. Yeah, it is profoundly depressing, it is weak, it is pathetic leadership from the very top in the U.S. I don't think it's pathetic leadership. I think it's very purposeful. I think he thinks that- It can be both, right? Right, well, I think that he thinks this is what leadership looks like.

It's how guys like Putin lead, and that's how he wants to lead. So I think this is actually very purposeful and not, you know, a sign of weakness. This is a sign of this is their line. This is their ideology. We want to be like Putin. Yeah, I agree. Thank you for helping us understand what's going on. Everyone should check out your stuff.

Follow you on Twitter. Read everything you write about what's happening in Russia because you will learn something every time. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for joining it. So playing off that conversation with Julie about Vladimir Putin, Ben, in the past, we've talked about how Israeli Prime Minister

Bibi Netanyahu has put up campaign posters featuring gigantic pictures. of him and Trump together. Actually, technically, it was a resized photo that made them the same size because BB's actually tiny. Well, BB has a new version of that type of campaign photo up just in time for this crackdown in Moscow.

It's a picture of him and Putin. So great timing. Yeah. And, you know, it just goes to show, you know, BB is a far-right politician and wants to be seen as in the club of Trump and Putin. And he's not subtle about it.

And again, like, you know, it gets to the point that, like, this is not like a normal Israeli prime minister. And a lot of people in the United States kind of want to pretend like, well, no, this is like it's been in the past, you know, no, this is something new we haven't seen before, which is an authoritarian leader who's trying to turn Israel from being, you know, a vibrant democracy that is also a Jewish state and new being essentially an ethno-national state with an authoritarian leader. Yeah, and luckily some people in the Democratic Party who aren't us are noticing this and acting accordingly. During John Favre's conversation with Bernie Sanders for our Patsive America candidate interview series, Bernie said that he would use foreign aid to Israel as leverage to push the Israeli government on policy. That is new and it's a pretty bold stance at a Democratic primary. He also criticized Saudi Arabia in that interview called him a vicious dictatorship. And he talked about how U.S. policy has to be a more regional approach.

It can't just be like, you know, Israel's always good, Iran is always bad, we need to think bigger. So, you know, look, Bernie's really leaning in here, and I thought it was fascinating. Well, I mean, yeah, the question becomes, how much are you willing to tolerate? And let's say Israel moves to annex the West Bank, as they've indicated they would. Like, are we going to continue to provide this level assistance to a country that is literally annexing the Palestinian territory? Mayor Pete said he would consider conditioning aid in that instance. And at what point do you also try to put on the table whether the U.S. needs to provide some recognition for a Palestinian state, you know, if Israel is doing that? So I think all these things should be on the table and debated as to what can we do to try to encourage Israel or press Israel to move in a more constructive and less destructive direction.

And what can we do to support the Palestinian people, whether that's helping the humanitarian situation in Gaza or helping kind of revive essentially the possibility of a Palestinian state? Because if we just kind of continue with the status quo where we mouth words about a Palestinian state but, you know, basically offer a blank check to Israel and never criticize what they do, where that's leading is the total either de facto or real annexation of their territory. and the Palestinian people essentially being either stateless or living as fourth-class citizens in Israel. Yeah, it is the trajectory. But it's good to see Bernie, you know, like everybody should be asked these questions and should have to answer.

And by the way, if they don't agree with that, then they should explain why and what they would do differently. And what they shouldn't be allowed to say is, well, I'm for Palestinian state, but I would make absolutely no changes to our approach to this issue, right? Which is how a lot of people try to have it in American politics because they don't want to pick the fight with the Israeli government. government and APAC. But you have to be for something. And if you're for the status quo, then you're for the direction that now is moving in. Yeah, I'm cool with offering whatever answer you think is right, but spare me the platitudes because we are sick of those. Another thing we want to update you guys on. So last week we talked about Trump just kind of casually mentioned killing 10 million people in Afghanistan during his pool spray with the prime minister of Pakistan,

totally normal meeting. So here's an update on our actual policy. So on Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Trump had ordered him to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the 2020 election. So I let's remember this timeline issue first. And first of all, like the secretary of state isn't in charge of the troops. So that was weird. I want to get to that bigger picture thing. That's the weirdest part about this whole thing.

But so, I mean, there's so many things that are weird. So first, it was a little jarring to see the troop withdrawal timeline explicitly tied to our presidential election. You know, that's supposed to be not okay. You don't say that part out loud. No, no. So second, we should all just remember that, you know, all the Republicans back in the day who said you couldn't announce a timeline for troop withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan because they thought it was the worst thing in the world. They claimed it ruined your leverage in a negotiation that it would let your enemy wait you out. Those people are now silent. So I don't know, what do you make of this timeline that just kind of got blurted out at a event of the economic club? Yeah, the problem with it, I mean, there's so many problems. I have no problem with timelines. We see.

at them. You're right that, like, Lindsay Graham once again would have, like, lit his hair on fire on the Senate floor and booked himself on every Sunday show for the next 52 weeks to rant and rave about timelines. And there would have been a lot of, like, hand-wringing columns about how irresponsible this is. Brett Stevens would have been real upset. Brett Stevens would have wanted to sink the Taliban Navy although it doesn't exist. So put aside the hypocrisy element. The main problem I have is the incoherence of the policy because essentially

it feels like our Afghan policy where we have actually increased troops under Trump, right? So let's be very clear. He said he'd get us out of these wars. We've increased troops, we've increased what the troops are doing. Our military has kind of been given

a lot of leeway to do that while Trump seems to want to say he's ending the war. And then meanwhile, you've got, you know, the State Department trying to negotiate something with the Taliban in between that.

So that's the problem. None of this fits together. You know, like either we're getting out and we should have a plan to get out or we are staying in and, you know, we're, you know, continuing to do what we're doing. But what we have now is a, an actual policy that is an escalation of the war in Afghanistan from how we handed off to Trump with a campaign promise that he wants to fulfill. And I just don't know how those two things fit together. And it's going to make either one of those things worse. You know, the drawdown doesn't make sense if at the same

time the troops there are doing more fighting and the having more troops there are fighting doesn't make sense if the president of the United States is also saying, I need a timeline to get them out by the election. We should have a policy to end this war in all elements of our policy, the diplomacy, the military peace and whatever timeline is set should be a part of that. And I don't feel like that's the case here. Yeah, totally agree. Okay, to the point you flagged earlier. So Pompeo seems to be serving as this like hybrid kind of secretary of state, but not really, but really like a hybrid secretary defense slash national security advisor. I mean, the State Department put out a press release that said Pompeo had, quote,

dispatched the chairman of the joint chiefs to cobble to discuss the peace process. Pompeo doesn't sit above the chairman in any org chart. I mean, it's sort of ad hoc and confusing. And I just don't get it. Well, the first thing is, this will be the one time we do this today. If Hillary Clinton had dispatched the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, like we would have all been in prison. But the point here is what this shows to me is the extent to which they have just completely

marginalized, neutered, humiliated the position of Secretary of Defense because the person that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff actually has a chain of command relationship with is the Secretary of Defense in the President of the United States. And Bolton and Pompeo seemed to want to have not just a junior partner, a non-entity in that position. And so we've talked about how we had this seven months without a confirmed Secretary of Defense. Now we have some lobbyist in there. What it tells you, they see that position as some guy who basically runs acquisitions and arm sales and, you know, all this money that Trump is throwing at DOD. And it has no voice whatsoever in the foreign and military policy of the United States. That is something that is run by John Bolton and Mike Pompeo to, in my view, lunatics. Bolton is slightly more lunatic, but like Mike Pompeo, like literally was one of the farthest

right kind of freedom caucusy Benghazi hats in the Congress before you secretary of state. The fact that this guy is dispatching the term during chief staff has no historical precedent in American history and just shows you that the most extreme ideological voices in the administration are running the foreign policy. Yeah. Like I would be cool with having a super powerful secretary of state if that meant that diplomacy and the people who worked in the State Department were seen as the most important asset we had and that, you know, they're pushing for more negotiated solutions to problems or whatever.

But that doesn't seem to be the case at all. No. And it seems like, you know, Bolton and Pompeii are also doing their own self-promotion and inflation, right? So you'll recall John Bolton announced the deployment of aircraft carriers to the Gulf. Right. And he made weird videos saying that the Venezuelan government, government was about to fall, which didn't happen. And now you've got Mike Pompeo saying he's dispatching that, like they're playing at Commander in chief in a movie, you know, or something. It's so fundamentally unsurious. And yeah, once again, where are all the, you know, professional national security experts in the Republican Party who would be literally lighting themselves on fire if this was any other

administration? Yeah. So you mentioned armed sales. I'm going to jump to sort of a depressing update. So in June, the Senate voted three times on, I think, a bipartisan basis to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Trump vetoed the resolutions. And unfortunately, on Monday, the Senate failed to override that veto. This is the second time Trump has vetoed a measure that would upset the Saudis. In May, he vetoed a resolution that would have gotten U.S. troops out of the Saudi-led war in Yemen. So I guess the take home is, if you're a Saudi prince and you're listening, Trump has your back. Like, that's the only thing that seems to get him to veto something.

Yeah, well, he got their back with that bizarre statement defending them after they brutally murdered Jamal Khashoggi. He got their back in continuing support for a war in Yemen that is killing thousands, tens of thousands of children, potentially leading to a famine that, you know, is the largest humanitarian crisis in the world today. He got their back on these arm sales. I mean, to me, it shows the complete subservience to the Saudis. it shows also a complete lack of respect for Congress, right? So just like he repurposed the money for the wall overruling Congress, he's ignoring these repeated efforts by Congress to insert themselves in this relationship. And lastly, like if anybody wants to guess where foreign election interference might come from next time,

in addition to the Russians, the Saudis have a ton of money. Clearly, we've talked about the potential for corruption that they're, you know, sinking money into Trump's hotels and potentially, God knows what deals are cutting for investments in Trump properties on the back end of his administration. I worry, you know, about the Saudis, you know, playing in the election space. I think that's something people need to watch. Mueller uncovered some real shady stuff with Emirates who are basically the kind of junior partner of the Saudis in the 2016 campaign. We could see a repeat of that on steroids because here, you're Saudi Arabia. You know if a Democrat wins. They're probably going to do this.

They're probably going to cut off arms sales and support for the war in Yemen. So you have every incentive in the world to get Trump reelected. That is a very troubling dynamic to me. Yeah. So let's dig it to that dynamic a bit because according to ABC News, when Trump was preparing a major energy speech during the 2016 campaign, a top advisor of his, a guy named Tom Barrack who spoke at the convention, was seen as like a peer to Trump, he previewed those remarks with officials in the UAE, who also shared it with.

officials in Saudi Arabia, which is just bizarre to say the least. I mean, Tom Barrick later had Paul Manafort incorporate edits to a campaign speech from the UAE. All of this caught the eye of the House Oversight Committee because that kind of private business and campaign overlap is totally unethical. But I mean, even just stepping back, you have to ask yourself, why on earth would a candidate feel the desire to vet a campaign speech by a foreign government? What do you get in return? the question and maybe that's your point. Yeah, well, and like this isn't subtle. Like the Saudis and Emirates have been pouring money in American politics for years, mainly the foreign policy establishment. They fund all these think tanks. They put former officials on corporate boards, you know,

signaling that there'll be a reward if you do what we like when you're in government or their lavish speaking fees. And so there's been this kind of soft corruption that has been very insidious and I think has corrupted American foreign policy in the direction of what Saudi Arabia and the way you want, which includes confrontation with Iran. a whole host of other things. The fucking speech was called America First Energy Policy and it's being written in the United Arab Emirates in Saudi Arabia.

Like, let's just pause on that insanity, right? Like, it's wild. Like, literally, and by the way, everything is bad about that. Like, an energy policy is going to have to deal with climate change. If you're handing it over to the people who have the biggest interest in continued, you know, reliance on fossil fuels, you would send that speech to Saudi Arabia, right?

Well, also, we used to entire platforms are written on both sides about weaning us off of foreign oil. Since Jimmy Carter, we've been trying to get off foreign oil, right? And now we're trying to get back on it. We're basically saying, hey, we want to make sure that our energy policy vets with the Saudis. Like, we've been trying to make ourselves independent of being reliant on the Saudis for oil. And we had gotten there. We'd actually achieved the goal of much higher energy independence and an energy policy

in the direction of clean energy. These guys are taking us all the way backwards. And the only reason that they would do this is corruption, literally. And people have to understand. Some this may be happening right now. And we have had reports of the Saudis sinking money into Trump hotels, paying huge markups that are driving the profit margins for Trump's hotels. We also know these people know how to move money around, right? And we saw in Mueller a lot of smoke around was there a Saudi and Ameri money kind of swishing around that could find its way, say, into the inaugural committee.

They have ways, they have so much money because there's. They're sitting on trillions of dollars. Carve out after carve out. Carve out after carve out. This money can find its way into Kushner real estate properties, Trump real estate properties, campaigns. They can launder it into U.S. hands to support them. And lastly, Donald Trump and Jared Kushner know that the day they get out of office, like there's giant checks coming into them from the Saudi Samarades to reward not just them,

but to send a message to future presidents that if you do our bidding, we will take care of you on the back end. That is so corrupting. And it's the opposite of what Trump told everybody. He said, I'm finally going to stand up to these countries. Remember, he said, I'm going to force them to pay their share. And instead, he's just like subcontracting out our entire farm policy to a bunch of oil-rich, autocratic Gulf Arab leaders. Yeah, and to his boyfriends, son-in-law. It's pretty bad.

It's pretty bad. Okay. From one kind of bumbling, blonde idiot to another. So last week we talked about how the new British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is now the dog that caught the car. when it comes to the Brexit negotiation. So on Monday, he was roundly booed. Boris went to visit with Friend of the Pod and Scottish First Minister Nicholas Sturgeon.

He also immediately engaged in some brinksmanship with the EU by saying he would leave the European Union with or without a deal by October 31st. One of his closest political allies said that a no-deal Brexit was the most likely outcome, which crashed the value of the pound sterling, I think the lowest point in 28 months. So, I mean, just this train is.

coming. It remains to be seen if the UK citizens are going to get flattened by it, but it is coming. Yeah, look, the deadline is October 31st. Boris made all these promises during his campaign. Now, we've seen he can break promises, but essentially what he said is, you know, it's October 31st. We're not extending, and I'll do the no-deal Brexit. And then his demands on the EU are never things that they're going to meet. So, for instance, Theresa May accepted that the UK is going to have to pay essentially a fee to leave. Boris said he won't pay. There's been this question of the border of Northern Ireland, right? And whether that would be a hard border or whether that would stay in the customs union.

And Boris wants the EU to essentially concede that he get rid of this backstop that can allow for goods to flow across that border. The EU is not going to agree to the terms Boris has set. Boris has said he will do no deal Brexit if they don't agree to those terms, and he said he won't change the deadline. So like the train is moving here towards crashing over the cliff on October 31st. And again, to be clear about the consequences here, there have been recent reports, not only would this plunge the UK into recession, but again, as it was highlighted by the visit to Scotland, Scotland is not going to be happy about the UK crashing out with no deal. Northern Ireland could be destabilized, could have to return. turn to direct rule by the United Kingdom instead of having the agreement that they've had in place where they have some of time. No trouble with that historically. No trouble with that. There could be

violence on the Irish border. And there could be a breakup of the United Kingdom. Yeah, Boris could be the last prime minister. Scotland could leave the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland could try to leave the United Kingdom. And he could be sitting there as essentially the prime minister of England and Wales, right? And so this is a man who's having to confront the false promises he made. And, you know, the last thing I'd say about this is like, I keep reading these profiles how his hero is Right? And I'm sure every right-wing leader's hero is, you know, Churchill and some other people. I mean, Churchill, there's lots to admire there. But you know what? Like, standing up and saying you're going to be resilient and you're going to stand up to the Nazis and fight them on the beaches, that's not what this is. Like, negotiating your exit from the European Union is not World War II. Like, it's not an historical analogy. What they need is either someone who has the guts to stand up and say this is a mistake and we should stay in the EU or they need some deft and not. negotiator who can figure out some way to make this deal work while mitigating all the damage. Boris is none of those things. He's just a guy saying, I'm like Churchill, and I'm charming,

and I delegate a lot of responsibility, and I've made all these promises, and we'll crash out of the EU because that's what Churchill would do somehow. Well, he's going to take the whole country down with him. Rory, do you get a Churchill vibe from Boris? Yeah or nay? That's a nay from the folks. Rory's our intern. He's from the U.S. UK. Yeah, yeah, maybe share some of Churchill's attitudes towards block and brown people. That's the part of the podcast where I yell at someone without a microphone 20 feet away from me. I like that when I listen to a podcast.

I do. I feel like I'm in the room. Well, it's a fun vibe in here. We got a good crew. You got some cameras. Very energized. Very energized group of people. Yes, very, very.

You could see it. Last thing we wanted to talk about, we have a little clip of our friend Donald Trump on the South Lawn doing a quick press conference. He's asked about the efforts to pass through Congress legislation that would protect us from future foreign interference in our elections and Mitch McConnell's role in stopping them. Let's take a listen. Mitch McConnell is a man that knows less about Russia and Russia influence than even Donald Trump. And I know nothing.

He's such a moron. Can I just echo you? Start. Why the helicopter? So, okay, let's talk about that. Yeah, it's so annoying. The noise you hear in the background is Marine One. So Marine One has like two massive turbo shaft engines that sound like jet airplane engines because I think they basically are.

Like instead of thrust coming out the back, it turns a shaft that makes a rotor spin or whatever. But like you're basically of an airplane, a jet airplane parked on the South Line. You fire the thing up and turn it on so it's running. So once the president gets in, they just turn it. and the rotors and you're out of there. So I used to mock Trump for doing these mini press conferences on the South Lawn with the helicopter on because you can't hear them. It's so annoying.

But then I realized it's genius. You can't hear the question of the reporters. He ignores anything that he doesn't like. So he just literally screams idiotic things like I know nothing about Russia to this gaggle of the press and there's nothing they can do about it. And the thing about let me just fact check this. So in September of 2016, when the intelligence community had found that Russia was interfering in our election to help elect Trump,

President Obama went to the leadership of Congress, laid it all out for them. Like had John Brennan and Jim Clapper and the gang laid all the intelligence out and say, what we would like to do is take this out of politics and let's have a bipartisan letter signed by the House and Senate leadership, Republican and Democratic, right? So at the time, you know, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell was the man who refused to sign that letter. He refused to sign on to even like a fairly anodyne statement saying, we reject efforts to interfere in our elections. He cared more about Donald Trump winning than whether or not Russia was interfering and engaged in assault on a democracy. So Mitch McConnell knows plenty about what Russia did in our election. He's been briefed on it even before the 2016 election.

And every time he said to make a choice, whether it was that letter in 2016 or whether it's the bills that he's been blocking on the floor of the Senate, he sides with his gross, unpatriotic, disgusting political interests to try to profit from Russia interfering in our election to hold on to his corrupt power rather than doing anything for the good of the country. That is the character of that, literally the man who has done more to corrode American democracy than any human being, including Donald Trump over the last decade. He knows plenty and he just doesn't give a shit. Yeah, Mitch McConnell's allegiance is to the Republican Party, not the United States of America. He is unpatriotic. He's un-American. He's one of the most craven human beings to ever serve an elected office. We need to defeat him.

Check out our Get Mitch or Die Trying Fund. if you want to try to support a bunch of Democrats running in Senate races all around the country, who if we win, if we can pick up some seats, it would mean that Mitch McConnell would no longer be the majority leader. He would no longer be able to block everything. The next Democrat elected president tries to push through. He would no longer be able to jerry rig the rules to shove like 25-year-old right-wing judges into every court in the country.

The man is a cancer on our body politic and we need him defeated. Yes, that would be very good. With that uplifting ending, we'll go to a quick commercial break, and when we come back, my conversation with Glenn Greenwald from The Intercept. On the line from Rio de Janeiro is Glenn Greenwald. He's the co-founding editor of The Intercept. Glenn, thank you so much for joining the show. It's great to be back.

I never got my Pots of America copper T-shirt or whatever I was on it the first time, so I'm hoping this time will be different, but I think you're proud of me. I sent like five of them to some address in Rio. We have to connect after the show because... Someone has them. Someone has them. I'm going to hunt them down. Yeah, someone is like buffing their car with some fucking t-shirt.

Anyway, Glenn, so recently Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, threatened to put you in jail. He claimed you were allied with criminal hackers. He falsely claimed that you married a Brazilian citizen to avoid deportation because everyone gets kids to avoid legal problems. That's the obvious thing you do. So clearly he's a sociopath and you've been doing some amazing. reporting. Can we start at the beginning and just ask you to explain what the car wash investigation is and what you guys found? Sure. So the car wash investigation has dominated Brazilian politics for the last five years, and it actually began as something pretty

inspirational, which is Brazil has operated by systemic corruption for decades. And I don't mean the kind of corruption that occasionally happens in Washington where, like, a member of Congress was bribed. I mean, like, just anyone who wants a government contract for, decades had to pay hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars into a Swiss bank account of politicians. And it was just the way it was always done. In Brazil, the young democracy, it re-democratized in 1985 after a 21-year military dictatorship. So you have this new generation of people instilled with democratic values and these young prosecutors and this judge decided that even though this is always how it's been, it's actually not okay, and began

prosecuting and investigating and then sending to prison, billionaire, and people from the most powerful politicians, and most people, including me, were supportive of it until it started to look really selective. Like, they seemed to have a lot more interest in left-wing politicians than right-wing politicians, and it ultimately started to look like it was really a means of doing what Brazilian elites haven't been able to do since 2002,

which is defeat the Workers' Party, which is the party on the center, left created by Aguula de Silva. And so there were a lot of questions being raised about whether this really was an anti-corruption probe residing above partisanship or ideology or whether it became something corrupted, something that was really just a pretext using anti-corruption as a means to install a kind of far-right ideology by destroying the left-wing infrastructure that has dominated Brazilian politics for so long. Yeah. So you talk about a president, former president of Lula de Silva was convicted of corruption, money laundering.

That meant he was ineligible to run in the presidential election, right? And so the current president, President Bolsonaro was basically able to win. Would you say he was only able to win because Lula wasn't able to run? Or how important was that to his ultimate election in 2018? I mean, Lula, you know, it's hard to say. I mean, on the one hand, Lula is a singular gigantic figure when president. Obama visited him. I don't know if you were on that trip. I was, yeah. He said, this is, you know, the best and most popular politician on earth. He left office, which was an 87% approval rating. You know, he brought millions of people out of poverty. So he's a giant in Brazilian politics.

He was leading all polls by 15 to 20 points because he was a term limited out of office in 2010 and planning on running again in 2018. On the other hand, it's kind of like a Trump dynamic in 2016 where, Um, Brazilians are suffering in mass. Um, they hate the political establishment. They feel like it failed them with good reason.

And kind of for the, you know, you sort of have a certain number of Trump voters who voted for him because they're just fascist and racist and then a certain number who voted for him because they were just desperate and wanted an outsider. That was the same for Bolsonaro. So Lula was leading all the polls, but I kind of feel as though there's a possibility that even if he have been able

to run. Bolsonaro, which still might have just been his moment, but certainly removing Lula from the race by convicting him on very dubious charges was the key to Bolsonaro's victory. And then Bolsonaro turned around and made the judge who found Rula guilty his justice minister and made him the most powerful person in the country. And that's what our reporting has been about. Right. And so this justice minister, Sergio Morrow, was sort of almost deified politically, right? I mean, he was seen as this white hat crusader cleaning up the city. But you, I believe, on Mother's Day, came across this massive tranche of documents, of text messages, of videos, and photos. What kinds of things were, did you guys find in that tranche?

Yeah, I mean, for years, you know, no one in the media questioned, Sergio Amoro, no institutions were willing to challenge him because he was, as you say, deified. You know, you would walk by buildings, and there'd be murals of him on the wall. And that's not healthy for anybody. And so this huge archive that was sent to us by a source on Mother's Day contained essentially the last five years' worth of internal communications between Sergio Amoro, the prosecutors who prosecuted all of these politicians, including Mula, everything from their phone, essentially, photographs, videos, chats, audios, just a map, you know, in terms of just sheer size, it was bigger than the, it's bigger than the Snowden Archive. and the two key incriminating facts that it didn't just reveal but has proven, you know, with many reports now and we're partnering with some of the biggest media outlets in Brazil, is that number one, the whole time that they were prosecuting Lula and other left-ling politicians, Sergio Amaro, the judge, who has the same obligation as the U.S. judge to be neutral

and was in fact plotting with the prosecutors behind the scenes on how to build and construct the very accusations that he was then pretending to neutrally judge. So he was telling the prosecutors, call this witness, use this evidence, don't do this. He was essentially the chief of the prosecution because he was so desperate to convict Ola because he knew that would be the feather in his cap, and it would be the key to destroying the left. So that was one of the key revelations that shocked even his supporters, like Great Wing Magazine, the first week of our reporting, called on his resignation, even though they spent five years defying him. And then the other was, you know, we just found explicit conversations among the prosecutors saying that their goal was to make sure that PT lost the election or the Workers Party lost the election in 2018.

So everything they've spent all these years denying that they were collaborating together, the judge and the prosecutors, that they had political and ideological goals, was all proven to be lized by this massive trove of the material that we've only just begun to report. I mean, what you guys uncovered is staggering. It's so rare that you have people just copping to their criminality and text messages. How have, I mean, you mentioned how even right-wing supporters of Sergio Amora reacted with shock to these revelations. Is there any recourse for people who feel like they were misled or had an election rigged against them? Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting. You know, when I say the Brazilian right, I'm really talking about kind of the establishment Brazilian right, kind of like, I don't know, maybe like the Jeb Bush right. Okay.

You know, there's, then there's the Trump right or the Bolsonaro right, which is, you know, they don't care at all about any of this. But certainly a lot of the people who ended up being convicted as part of what was clearly a corrupt process beginning with former president, Lishita Silva, you know, is absolutely now initiating processes to say that their convictions are to be annulped and they ought to be immediately released from prison on the grounds that they were convicted by a corrupt process and a corrupt judge. Yeah. So let's talk about Bolsonaro for a minute. I mean, we've talked about him a few times on this show. He is misogynistic. He's homophobic. He's got fascistic tendencies. I mean, you called him a wannabe dictator on Twitter. I think that's particularly scary, given how relatively young Brazil's democracy is, the geopolitical importance of Brazil as a nation's, fifth biggest country in the world, I believe, with some like 220 million residents, massive natural resources. I mean, how worried should we all be that Bolsonaro, will be able to fully solidify control and return Brazil to its relatively recent history as a military dictatorship? Well, this is why I was always kind of, you know, resisting the tendency of the Western media to understand Bolsonaro is the Trump of the Tropics, in part because Brazil's institutions are so much weaker than, say, the U.S. is or Western European institutions, which are, you know,

centuries old as opposed to just a few decades old, and Brazilian institutions were there for much more fragile. Half the Brazilian population actually lived in a dictatorship. Bolsonaro himself was in the military during the military dictatorship, and he spent 30 years on the fringes of Congress explicitly advocating for a return to military rule, saying that Brazil was better off under military rule than it was under democracy. So he's been an explicit proponent of restoring military dictatorship. He's also kind of different from the kind of modern

extremist right wing like Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farge and Donald Trump in the sense that he doesn't focus on Muslims or immigration, which is what drives their movement, xenophobia and that kind of hatred. He really is like a throwback to the Cold War type of tyrant

that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union used to support, murdering dissidents, jailing reporters, and anti-LGBI animus is a major part of Bolsonaro's movement, which isn't true for the new right in the U.S. or Western Europe, because there's a huge evangelical movement in Brazil that dominates politics. So the combination of all those things has obviously made what we're doing very dangerous. It's sort of the first test case of whether they're going to tolerate a free press.

The fact that I'm a foreigner, that I'm gay, that I'm married to a leftling, social, member of Congress, you know, has kind of made me the perfect villain in their eyes to personalize the story. And that's really what the whole, that we're kind of at that crossroads, where our Brazilian, you know, Bolsonaro spent the last three days explicitly threatening me by name to imprison me. And so the question is, our courts and media outlets and other, you know, civic institutions strong enough and capable enough to withstand those kinds of threats to return to authoritarianism. And we kind of knew when we started this, but it was more than just about the reporting about these revelations. It was really going to put to the task that question of what

kind of country of Brazil is going to be. Yeah, I mean, you touched on this. But in Bolsonaro, I think he's described himself as proudly homophobic. There was an openly gay lawmaker named Gian Willis, who was so systematically bullied and threatened that I believe he went into exile in Europe because he feared for his life. Your husband, David Miranda, now serves in that seat. Can you talk a little bit about, like, what life is like for the LGBT community under Bolsonaro? And how are you and David dealing with living together in the country as prominent gay critics of an administration that, as you said, is, like, really a throwback fascist? Yeah, I mean, you know, when Dave, I mean, the irony is when John fled and John, you know, was a courageous figure he was the only openly gay member of Congress in Brazilian history for 12 years. And he was bullied, you know, physically by other members of Congress.

He would walk in the hallways and generals or police officers who are serving his members of Congress would, you know, bump into him with their shoulders, push him against the wall, call him faggot. But it really escalated when the Boltonar movement really got strong last year over the Internet. And when anti-gay hatred became a central part of it, he was getting, you know, death threats of the kind, not, you know, always. I hope you die. Like, we all get the pictures of the front of his house, photographs of his mother's license plate, to the point where he fled the only country that he ever lived in or knew because he feared for his life and he's now in exile. In Europe, and my husband ran for Congress in 2018 and was just by an amazing irony, he'd the next in line to automatically take that seat because of his vote total.

And so they got rid of the only LGBT member of Congress, but the person who took his place happened to him by husband, who, you know, we started getting really intense death threats and elevating our security back then four months ago. And as you might imagine, because of this reporting about the most important person in Bolsonaro's campaign, it has severely intensified and severely escalated. Yeah. And look, David, your husband, has a pretty amazing story in his own right of, you know, all the success he's had in his life despite, you know, being born into extreme poverty. So he's an incredible person that people should check out. Bolsonaro is such a terrible human being that I think sometimes I don't talk enough about his terrible policy positions.

For example, he's rolling back efforts to prevent logging and mining in the Amazon rainforest. This could have a catastrophic impact on efforts to combat climate change. Can you just talk a little bit about some of what he's doing and how big an impact do you think it might have on efforts to prevent climate change? Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. Like his insanity, just kind of like Trump has sometimes overshadows the incredibly destructive policies that they're actually implementing. You know, we spend so much time talking about Trump's racist tweets that sometimes we overlook what the agencies are doing as part of his administration. So one of the first things they tried to do was, for example, there's a history of police going into favelas, which are the poor overwhelmingly black areas of Brazil. and just randomly and indiscriminately having shootouts with drug dealers and killing tons of innocent people.

And his big policy proposal was to give them full impunity, the police for any innocent person that they killed. But the Amazon is obviously something of 25% of the oxygen that we breathe on this planet comes from the Amazon. And the Brazilian government has been incredibly commendable over the last 20 years about protecting the Amazon. Bolsonaro and the oligarchs who now support him, who are critical to his movement, have the exact opposite intention. They want to de-forced all of it. They want to privatize it. They want to strip it away. They want to sell it. They want to exploit it. And it's a major, major environmental threat. You know, when he was at the G20, Uncle Merkel brought it up, and Boltonaro said to her, keep your nose out of our business. The Amazon isn't yours. It's

hours, and that's very much their attitude, and it's a major threat to the Earth's climate. Yeah, it really is. I really appreciate your time. I'll just do one last question, let you go. We're recording this on Tuesday for release Wednesday. I know you guys are doing a big event tonight. I just didn't know if you wanted to talk about that at all. And then if people listening want to support the work you're doing, support the Intercept,

how can they do so? Yeah, so, I mean, we're having this huge event tonight in defense of press freedom in solidarity with the Intercept. We have, you know, like, major journalists from around the world of every ideology. Kath Biner, the editor-in-chief of The Guardian, Chris Hayes at MSNBC, Tucker Carlson at Fox News, tons of people who have recorded videos in defense of our press freedom against Bolsonaro threats. We also have right-wing politicians in Brazil who have done the same. And I think it's one of the untold stories that although they have personalized the reporting to me,

over the last three years, we built a team of Brazilian journalists in Brazil, who are all in their 20s and early 30s, who are doing incredibly courageous work under amazing risk. We've had to close our newsroom on many occasions because of very credible press. And they've done most of the reporting, and they deserve a huge amount of attention in credit. And, yeah, you know, we actually do, especially in Brazil, rely on reader. donations, and this is work that we're going to continue for at least another six months to nine months, so anyone who wants to support it can do that because we intend to bring as much transparency as possible to what they're doing. Well, in all seriousness, like, thank you for

what you're doing. It is truly courageous, incredible work. I also just want to plug the really cool homeless-run animal shelter that you guys have created in your, I guess, what, you're one minute a week of free time raising two kids and fighting with a fucking fascist. But check out. I believe it's your... Yeah, one of the worst things I haven't been able to visit there because it's true or all my security doesn't let me go there. So I miss my homeless run dog shelter. So I'm looking forward to the day that I can get back there. Yeah. I mean, people probably know you as the guy who, you know, helped report out the Snowden documents and who gets into flame wars with people like me on Twitter and on occasion. But you've also adopted like 20

dogs and started a homeless run animal shelter. And that's your pin to tweet. So people should check that out. But anyway, enough of my kissing your ass. Thank you for the work you're doing. Stay safe, and I really appreciate you doing the show. Thank you very much, Tommy. I really appreciate your giving time to this issue. Thanks, much. It's important. Thanks, Glenn.

Bye-bye. Thanks to Julia Yoffie for joining the show today. Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for calling in from Rio de Janeiro. Thanks to you, the listener, for listening to all we have to say. World is out there. We're always grateful. We are grateful to you. Thanks for tuning in.

Talk to you next week. See you guys. Ponte of the World is a product of crooked media. The show is produced by Michael Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seiglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narn Malkonian, and Milo Kim, who film and share these interviews on video each week.