Pod Save the World - Raining on Putin's Victory Day parade

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Tommy and Ben cover the latest news from Ukraine, including more money and weapons from the US, the First Lady’s visit to Ukraine, intelligence leaks and Vladimir Putin’s underwhelming Victory Day speech. Then they cover the historic election in Northern Ireland, more dumb scandals in the UK, protests and violence in Sri Lanka, a depressing election result in the Philippines, the CIA’s message for Brazil and more Trump officials write books. And then Ben talks with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo about sanctions against Russia and the global economic impact of the war in Ukraine. With our constitutionally protected right to abortion under attack, abortion funds are working nonstop to make sure people can still access (and afford) abortion.Visit votesaveamerica.com/roe to learn more, donate, and take action. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome back to Pot Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. And we're in studio. You don't have COVID? I'm in the country. It's all good. I don't have COVID. I did get a terrible sunburn yesterday, Ben. That's the elephant in the room. Is that what's happening in your forehead? I got torched sitting outside at a lunch.

Yeah, that's not never good. I mean, it's a higher risk for me with no hair. I also got the sunglasses one. So like right here and like sort of between my eyes, upper nose is pale. But the schnaz itself looks like I've been drinking with Boris Johnson. for 48 hours. That's a good excuse, Sunburn. Anyway, I'm glad to be healthy. It's good to see in the studio. We got a lot of news today.

We're going to cover the latest from Ukraine. There's money and weapons flown from the U.S. The first lady visited Ukraine. Vladimir Putin gave an underwhelming speech, I kind of think. And we got Intel leaks galore. Then we're going to cover historic election in Ireland, some scandalous scandals in the U.K., protests and violence in Sri Lanka,

the very depressing election results in the Philippines. The CIA has a message for Brazil and then more Trump officials write books. Lastly, there's a little something I want to try it with you, Ben, that I was calling like the beat sweetener round of applause. Yeah. More than that later. And then, Ben, you did this week's interview. What do we got here? Yeah, this is a good one.

Big shot U.S. officials here. Yeah, Wally Adayamo, who's the deputy treasury secretary, one of the most important people that you might not know about. And he's also kind of in charge of the accounts that we follow in this. show, Nash Gerti, particularly Ukraine. So he really walks us through what they're trying to do with sanctions, what more they can do, what the knock on secondary effects are. We talk about things like the global wheat crisis and how they're trying to backfill things that have been undercut by sanctions. We talk about kleptocracy and how this could hopefully be a first step towards more aggressive action against that. So we cover the landscape with Wally. It's really good.

People love that guy. He's good. He's like, I said to you, he's like one of these people who's like incredibly smart, but is able to explain things like a human. So if you want an explainer on all these economic aspects of the war in Ukraine and all the ripple effects, check it out. That is a cool job. Deputy Treasury Secretary, you're in charge of so much stuff.

And your boss is just like dealing with the economy or whatever. See all the global national security stuff and the meetings. Yeah, you're in everything. Two quick things. Next month, Ben, Potta of America's back on tour. Go to New York and LA, folks who want to get tickets or more information, go to crooked.com slash events. Far more importantly, we've all probably seen by now that the Supreme Court appears to be attempting

to eradicate abortion rights in this country. We here at crooked are trying to fight back. If you go to Votesaveamerica.com slash row, R-O-E, you can donate. We'll split your contribution between more than 80 abortion funds. And for more analysis on upcoming Supreme Court decisions, check out the strict scrutiny podcast every Tuesday or wherever you get your podcast. their emergency episode on the leaked ruling was incredible, and I highly recommend it.

Ben, word on the street is your book is coming out in paperback. Do you think your sales can top Megan McCain's? I mean, we could sit the bar like a little bit higher. 287 copies. Yeah, I don't know if I could evoke the same passion from Steve Schmidt. Steve Schmidt, Twitter 13. Like 48 hours straight? The book is out in paperback on May 24th.

I desperately want all of you who haven't purchased it to check it out. It is now in the price range. When I was the age of many listeners this podcast, I waited for the paperback. So I hope that's what some of you guys have been doing. But Primer, again, I know people have heard about it. But after the fall, one of the reasons I want people to check it out is it kind of is my backstory to most of the stuff we talk on the show about. I'm really trying to break down the rise of authoritarianism around the world. And I look at Victor Orban, who since I wrote this.

this book has only further consolidated his own control over Hungary while further serving as the model for the American Republican Party. And that's what I talk about in my book. I talk about Putin and Ukraine and Russia, how we got here, why Ukraine is so central to Putin, why it's kind of the logical endpoint of what Putin's been up to for 20 years. And Alexei Navalny is one of my main characters. And he's obviously now been sentenced to additional time in Russian prison. then I have China and the Hong Kong flavor and tragically Hong Kong has been kind of swallowed up

since this book came out. And I take about the United States and how kind of tenuous our democracy is. And so I say all that because if you want a backstory about how we got here, how the world got so fucked up, that was what I set out to write. Unfortunately, I think the trend lines that I'm wrestling within the book have only continued in some cases have gotten more extreme. But I really hope people pick it up. We got to represent on that paperback best seller of us now, right? Beat all the McCain family. All the, yeah. And yeah, hopefully I'll be able to see some of you guys out at events. It's great. Yeah. Hitting the road. Yeah. Hitting the road.

That's, oh, I love hitting the road. I was trapped in my house for two weeks. Hitting the road feels good. If you've read it, you can recommend it. There you know. Tweet about it. It's Father's Day coming up. Like a little dark-tranism reading around the father-to-day. For your autocrat dad. Here's a little plug for me, for the video team. Check on my YouTube show. Tommy gets red-pilled.

We did an episode on Woke Disney. There may have been a blue phallus, depending on what you saw. We did Putin, his rhetoric, why Republicans love him. End of plug. So I watched one recently that was like some guy who was saying that, it was like, Mickey and Minnie were, like, dancing, and he claimed was a penis. And that guy's running for Congress. The guy's running for office.

Yeah, yeah. Go to our YouTube, the Crooked Media YouTube. I said crooked.com. That's the wrong plug. I plugged my own show wrong. Yeah. That's embarrassing. Anyway, lots of stuff going on.

I want to talk to Ukraine? Let's do it. All right. Lots of updates since last week. So on Monday, President Biden signed into law a bill that will make it easier for him to expedite weapons shipments to Ukraine. It's called the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend Lease Act of 2022. Pass unanimously in the Senate, 417, 3,000.

10 in the House. The 10 no votes were all the right-wing Republicans you'd expect. The law builds on the concept that President Roosevelt used to help allied countries in World War II, and that is separate and apart from the $33 billion that Biden requested in funding. Biden also lifted Trump-era tariffs on Ukrainian steel to help their economy, and leaders of the G7 pledged to phase out Russian oil during a virtual meeting over the weekend. But a new package of European sanctions is being held up by concerns from Hungary and Slovakia. Again, Ben, very surprised to hear that Victor Orban would run interference for Putin. No, what a shocker.

Yeah. In Mother's Day, First Lady, Jill Biden, made a secret visit to Ukraine where she met with Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Bono and the Edge also visited Ukraine over the weekend. With or without you in the Key Metro. It's a little weird. Busy week. I'm not sure that's what I would pick.

If you had the whole YouTube catalog, would you do with or without you in the Keynester? A lot of kind of dark options. Yeah. You know who else was there, though, a group of American diplomats. return to Kiev, they're planning to reopen the U.S. Embassy in the next few weeks. So, Ben, you know, a lot of stuff there. Do you think there's like an NSC greatest hits album down in the Situation Room and somebody threw on the Len Lease track? Like, how did we get there? Well, it's usually a Marshall Plan. I mean, I don't know how many times in the last 20 years I've heard,

like, we need a Marshall Plan for this. Right, for everything. So I guess we need a lend lease. Look, you know, in the 33 billion swelled to 40 billion, right? Six point eight billion more from Congress. And then Biden said he would decouple it from the COVID funding that they were asking for. And here's like, I want to throw up a red flag here. It's concerning me. Please do. Because I support providing this assistance to Ukraine.

And as we talked about last week, we're in like a long haul. I think that's clear from where we are. And so this kind of funding allows you to plan, you know, over the next six months. And it's crazy. It's only six months. But that's what it is. I think what I see that concerns me is both in terms of American foreign policy and in Congress itself, the war in Ukraine is so big that I'm a little worried that is anything else happening, right? Yeah, me too.

Just in terms of the funding, this money to put in perspective is more than like we spend on fighting climate change around the world. You know, it's more than the State Department's budget in some years or it's about the same. and and again, that may be necessary, but the fact that they're already like trading out the COVID funding, right, and saying, oh, this critical few billion dollars that could help save a lot of lives in this country, you know, we can't possibly wait to spend this money in arms. And then you see the reporting that, well, maybe they're not going to do the Iran deal because they don't want to take on the political fight of getting rid of the Trump era sanctions entirely. it does just kind of feel like we're really all in on this thing. And again, I think that's justifiable in a lot of ways, but kind of have to walk and chew gum. Like we're to keep fighting the pandemic. We have to keep fighting climate.

And so I think, you know, having been in government myself, I know how much you can get totally overwhelmed with something for a couple months. But you also can't like really take your eye out the other stuff. And for Congress, they're the laziest branch of government, right? Because the executive branch actually has to work. They work three days a week. So they come in. They're like, okay, all we have to do is pass a bunch of money for Ukraine. We can deal with like the pandemic later, right? That to me is like I worry that this kind of is taking over everything else, you know. Biden asked for $33 billion. Congress is working on a $40 billion package. If that passes, it'll be it'll put total money for Ukraine over $50 billion. Yeah. And like you said, they were going to try to couple of this with the COVID aid, but the Democrats got scared because they didn't want to get forced to vote on Title 42, which is that Trump era provision being used to deny all asylum requests at the border. So they split it. But again, yeah, like you said, like we're going to shovel money out the door to buy weapons and not buy therapeutics testing vaccines as we head into another COVID surge. Are you crazy? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know you're in a weird place in Washington when I thankfully don't watch. the Sunday shows, but when the Lockheed Martin CEO is on to meet the press. I can't believe that happens. For those who don't follow us that closely, Lockheed Martin is one of the biggest arms producers in the world. And like when that guy feels like he can crawl out from behind the rock and have like a big public profile, like it, the military industrial complexes on TV.

The military industrial complex is literally on television. It's kind of an unsettled marker of where we are at, you know. Our democracy may be slipping away. Like a lot of of stuff is tenuous or a lot of plates spinning in the air, but like the Lockheed guy. You texted that to me on Sunday and I was like, is this a joke? Did you like mock this up on Photoshop? Like wars happen and who's making a lot of money right now? Oral companies and arms dealers. And I just like let's just try to get some funding for clean energy and pandemics too. Yeah. I think the, uh, those things didn't go away. I think the world hit a record for the most carbon in the atmosphere in history. At the same time that people are like, well, we better start drilling and we

Goetter start, you know. So let's try to channel this energy into the clean energy transition that denies people like Putin the money they actually use. There we go. Anyway, so the first lady's visit to Ukraine was interesting. It was powerful. Here's my question for you. If the first lady visits Ukraine or can safely visit Ukraine, do we think that increases pressure on Biden to go? I mean, obviously, she was in far western Ukraine. I think she was like a couple miles over the Slovakian border. But I don't know. Biden went. You probably want to visit Kiev. He'd probably want to see Zelensky in person, that Uppsianni a little bit. But again, if Bono and the edge can make it to the subway, like, I don't know, what do you

think that that means for Joe? I think that, like, so what is the value of this? I mean, symbolism, like that. Well, there's more than that in some ways, I think. First of all, the symbolism is important. It's expressing solidarity. The fact that the first lady of Ukraine, who's been in hiding, like we've not seen her beyond kind of social media that she came out.

I think that shows how important is to them that people are in their. corner. I think more fundamentally, you mentioned that the U.S. diplomats going back, and it's only a handful right now, but kind of normalizing that Kyiv is the capital, that Russia does not control this country. Like, that's the actual substantive value and kind of drawing a marker that you have failed to conquer Kiev, you've failed to dislodge this government, we're dealing with them through normal business, and, you know, that's just a new norm. Now, the flip side of that is, is that the Russians can fire missiles at Kiev whenever they want. So the Secretary General of the United Nations is there and they lob those missiles in.

I'm sure from having dealt with the Secret Service myself on things like Obama visiting Afghanistan, their answer is going to be no, right? They're going to be hell no. Yeah. And so you would have to overrule the Secret Service to do this. And that happens, by the way. I mean, they weren't particularly thrilled about Obama's visits to Afghanistan. They made them work when they were told that, you know, he wanted to do it.

So I think it does, like, but the thing is you want to be sure that you're going for a reason other than just going, right? Like, I think that there's a big risk. Yeah, I think the thought has to be like, this is a part of some plan. Like, we're going to make some particular announcement while we're there or there's something that we want to get done in terms of a piece of business that comes out of this, that's beyond just what we say. Because, again, this is going to be around for a while, this war. You know, that's all indications of the last few weeks is that this is heading for a more protracted phase. And so I think that the visit is the kind of thing that you do when you have a very particular point you want to make if you're going to take on all that risk. Yeah.

You fly with like a Patriot missile battery with you. I don't know. I can't, yeah. I mean, it's risky, you know, you'd have to do it secretly. It'd be hard to do in Kiev. You might. But I noticed that Jill Biden, it was not in Lviv either. kind of a town in eastern.

A tiny little village. But the reality is that the nature of intelligence is, I don't know how you could keep it secret from the Russians either. Right. So you're basically banking on the fact that the Russians won't try to like. Decapitate. Yeah. Yeah.

The U.S. government. And I think that's a pretty, I'd like to say that's a safe bet. But I'm sure that their voices in the service. Kamala's going to nuke your ass, Vlad. Yeah. Don't do it. Yeah, exactly. Speaking of intelligence, Ben, there's been a bunch of stories over the last week or so

about U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine. It started with the New York Times running a piece with the headline. U.S. intelligence is helping Ukraine kill Russian generals, officials say. To me, that headline felt a little bit hyped. The White House pushed back on it pretty hard. What it sounds like is happening here is the U.S. are providing Ukraine with intelligence on Russian troop movements. The Ukrainians use that information to attack Russian units.

In the process, they have killed a bunch of Russian senior leaders who are on the front lines because the Russian military structure is stupid, for lack of a better term. But it's not like, we're not like, hey, like General War Crimesovich is like in this village, like fucking drone's ass. But, you know, that story opened the floodgates. There's now reports that U.S. intelligence was used to target and sink. The Moscow, the Russian ship that went down a few weeks ago. The White House then leaked that Biden called some national security officials and yelled at them about leaks.

Always fun. So it's never good when there's a leak about the dressing down that people got over the Never good. Been there, done that. So, like, I feel for the White House here because a few weeks ago, months ago, they were getting yelled at in the press for not sharing enough intelligence. Clearly, those reports at the time were wrong. But I did wince when I read the stories and worry about Putin reading something that he might decide warrants retaliation. I don't know. How worried were you when you saw some of these reports? Well, I think, first of all, in the substance of it, none of it is particularly surprising, right? I mean, when you look at the performance of the Ukrainian

military. First of all, let's be clear in terms of killing Russians. Like, the Ukrainian military has been trained by the United States since 2014. It's been heavily armed by NATO and the United States in particular. So at a minimum, like, we are supporting the military that is targeting Russians, killing Russians. And then when you looked at their performance, you know, they clearly had tremendous insight into what the Russians were doing. And frankly, some of that intelligence we were releasing publicly. But I mean, I don't think it's a surprise to anybody that we're sharing this information. I think what happens in any White House is there's a drumbeat of people on the outside demanding that you do things that you are already doing. Like, that

happened. There wasn't like a day I was working in the White House. There wasn't some issue where there's a demand for something that the U.S. wasn't quietly doing. It's exhausting. And so you get a lot of people in there who feel like they have some reason to put this out. And yeah, on the general question, it comes out sideways because we may say, like, their Russian military units here, and here's where they are. We don't necessarily know that the Russians are moving their generals up to their front lines like that. And so you could see how that kind of came out sideways. I have to think that Putin is generally aware and already suspects that the United States is doing all the things that we've seen in these leaks. However, in a world in which

whether it's silly or not, optics kind of matter. It puts him more on the spot when all that stuff is being publicly revealed, right? So even if he already thought we were doing it, I do think that there's an escalation risk if he feels like we're kind of rubbing his face in it. Yeah, the humiliation. Yeah, that he needs to do something back to save face. So, yeah, it highlights the kind of tightrope we're on where we actually probably are more into this war than people know. I mean, you and I have speculated here what kind of training might be going on. Right.

What's the CIA? Yeah. We have no idea, to be clear. But like that stuff inevitably comes out. It always comes out. And, you know, that over time is going to kind of create this increasing friction, obviously, with Russia. Yes, it will.

Last Ukraine thing. So a lot of folks were watching to see what happened on May 9th during the Victory Day celebrations in Russia. That's when they commemorate the Soviet Union's victory over the Nazis in World War II. to 27 million Soviet people died in that fight. And again, it's important to clarify not Russian, but Soviets, because that includes Ukraine and other countries. I would say the speech was underwhelming, like Putin trotted out a lot of the same rhetoric.

It's a fight against Nazis. He said he's preempting some sort of NATO attack. He said that Ukraine is planning to build nuclear weapons. But he did not officially declare war on Ukraine. He didn't mobilize more troops for the fight. Those two actions would have been a big deal. It would have increased Russia's military capability. One interesting thing I saw then was there was there.

supposed to be scheduled flyovers of military aircraft. That got canceled at a bunch of these events. They said it was bad weather. There was not bad weather. You could see the weather. I wonder if they're paranoid about like the Russian, the Ukrainian opposition shooting down a plane or something like could have been interesting. Or they need the planes in Ukraine because they're so short, you know.

That's a good point. That's a very good point. The Washington Post reported that people in Ukraine were kind of relieved on victory day. There was less shelling in eastern Ukraine than usual. Zelensky released a far more compelling. minute video. It was him delivering remarks to camera as you walked down a street in Kiev talking about Ukraine's sacrifice in World War II. And he said Putin was following Nazi philosophy and that quote, soon there will be two victory days in Ukraine and someone will not even have

one left. Yeah. Guys got good lines. Pretty good shade. Would you make of the contrast to these two speeches? Well, first of all, you know, the Putin speech was interesting and I think it was a bit of a a tell. The couple of things people thought he might do in advance. One was this idea of a mass mobilization calling up all these conscripts, right, essentially a mass draft. There was some real risk in that for Putin, though. That could stir up public opinion, concentrating a bunch of poorly trained, under-equipped people and giving them weapons can be the scenario that can lead to some instability, right? A little uprising, so you maybe wanted to avoid that.

But then the other scenarios, was he going to kind of declare victory and say there was all this push in Maripo? And was he going to say, like, essentially, we won, which could have been an effort to kind of freeze the conflict. So in some ways, it's bad news he didn't try to do that because it indicates that he wouldn't be satisfied declaring victory with the parts of the Donbos in eastern Ukraine and whatever parts of Maripo or a lot that he controls. And you've seen even in the days, well, the day or two since, they've been moving more against Odessa, which as we talked about, if you look at southern Ukraine from east to west, you have Mariupil, and then Odessa, and then the next kind of lily pad is Transnistria, that breakaway part of Moldova, right? And so the absence of him declaring victory kind of seems to suggest that they're going to keep grinding it out in the Donbos and in southern Ukraine

so that when they might try to declare victory, they just occupy more territory or at least depopulated, tragically, more territory. So that's not great. And Avril Haynes, the director of national intelligence, testified somewhat to that effect, that they don't see, they see Putin as still having greater aims than what he currently has. And so all the signs, unfortunately, point to a Putin who's been a weekend and who can't, you know, it's hard for him to dress up what has clearly been an overwhelming performance as far, but not a Putin that looks like he's looking for an off ramp. Did you see Avril taking questions? Avril Haynes. Tommy Tuberra?

He's like, can Putin stop the run? He's like, guys, just a fucking idiot. Unbelievable idiot. Yeah, it was like one of these great first lines or intel person was like, can you tell us whether or not Russia tracks what our Secretary of Defense is doing? And she's like, yeah, they track all our Cs.

officials. They got NYTimes.com over there. What are you talking about? I got C-SPAN. Last dude, also notable Ben, in Poland, protesters through red paint. on the Russian ambassador. Yes.

Tough day for that guy. Mirroring what the Russian goons did to their anti-war critics. Yeah. Yeah. And then the programming guides of a number of big Russian TV providers were hacked on Victory Day to say, when you try to figure out like what time Dynasty was on or whatever, it said, blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of their murdered children were on the viewer's hands. So that's clever.

Compelling hack. Yeah, that's a good hell. Okay. That is it for our Ukraine section. Let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about a major election in Ireland. All right, we're back, and we're going to talk about Northern Ireland because there's a pretty historic election in Northern Ireland last week. Sinn Féin, the political party, won 27 seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Their main rival, the Democratic Unionist Party, or DUP, won 24 seats. So it's a big deal because that means there's a nationalist majority in Northern Ireland for the first time in decades. and there could be the first ever nationalist first minister of Northern Ireland. But the process for making that happen is complicated. Getting from election to government is complicated. I'll explain why in a second. Just some quick background first though, Ben. Sinn Féin is a primarily Catholic left-wing party that wants Ireland to be united and independent

from Britain. Sinn Féin has ties to the IRA, historically speaking, it's a paramilitary terrorist group. But over the years, they've transitioned from, you know, guns to government is what they always say. The DUP is mostly Protestant. It wants Britain to remain part of the UK. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement created a set of institutions and power sharing arrangements in Northern Ireland that ended decades of sectarian warfare between the two sides called the troubles. End of background. So now these various political parties have to try to come together after this election over the weekend and negotiate a power sharing agreement.

If they can't come to an agreement in six months, they have to call a new election or they may have to call a new election. Brexit is the elephant in the room here. To get Brexit done, Boris Johnson created something called the Northern Ireland Protocol. which puts these customs checks on goods that come into Northern Ireland from mainland Britain. That pissed off the DUP and other unionist parties who say, hey, these customs checks divide them from the rest of the UK. We want to be united with the UK. And the DUP says they won't be part of a coalition government unless the Northern Ireland protocol custom checks are scrapped. But for that to happen, Boris Johnson would have to have some political courage. You would have to take on

the European Union. Doesn't seem like he wants to do that. So the long and short of it is things are up in the here at the moment. The DUP lost votes to a more hardline unionist party, another party called the Cross Community Alliance that doesn't define itself as nationalist or unionist made big gains in the election, which could be a sign that there's a growing group of people that want to move on from this like sort of old school sectarian fighting. Some people are saying it might be time to rethink all of these power sharing agreements that came up as part of the Good Friday agreement to reflect demographic changes because there's a lot more Catholics now than there used to be. We'll see. But then, Brexit is the gift that keeps on giving. That's my takeaway.

Yeah, I was going to start there, too. I mean, because first of all, it's kind of huge milestone that Sinn Féin is the biggest vote getter in an election in Northern Ireland. And like you said, they've come a long way from the IRA days. They've been a peaceful political actor for a long time since, obviously, since at least a Good Friday Accords. The Brexit point. So, you know, Brexit created an unsolvable problem, which is if you put a kind of hard border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland, you really stir the pot in Northern Ireland amongst the people that liked the fact that, you know, you had this kind of soft integration between Ireland and Europe and Northern Ireland. So avoiding that, you put the customs line between

Britain and Northern Ireland. Then you're pissing off the DUP and probably pissing off everybody in Northern Ireland's somewhat pissed about Brexit. They hit a sausage. They don't want the British sausage. Give the guys their food. The bottom line is like if the Brexit argument, one of it was like this is going to be a better deal essentially for the United Kingdom. Like you can see how much the United Kingdom itself is at risk.

Scottish nationalism has gone up again since the, since Brexit. Now you have like a party that wants a United Ireland as the leading party. And who are doing well in the Republic of Ireland. Yeah. They're on track to win a majority there in the next few years. So this is like all on the table, you know, and we can act like it's not. But I mean, the future of the United Kingdom is very much on the table in the next 10 and 20 years, right? And that may seem like a long time, but it's not in the context of how long there's been the United Kingdom. And that both Scotland and Northern Ireland, suddenly you have these questions

that had been somewhat managed before Brexit. Well, congratulations, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage and all you English nationalists, you may have just completely screwed the unity of your country going forward. Good work. I think the one question that I have in Northern Ireland is I'm talking to some people there. There's a lot going on here. So some of this is the old conflicts about core identity. But they're also generationally, I think, are some people who are like, and you mentioned

this, but like I'd rather just have like a politics that solves my problems in Northern Ireland. Yeah. You know, rather than fighting about who's Catholic and Protestant or, you know, rather than about, you know, England and Ireland, like, it's also a place that, you know, could use good governance and economic growth. And so I think there's an opening, too, for some people to just kind of put themselves forward as trying to move beyond the sectarian differences in the politics of Northern Ireland. But that's hard to do when, you know, you have such a weighty history. Yeah, there's probably some young people that just, like, don't really care

about, like, Jerry Adams' legacy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, speaking of Boris Johnson, And him screwing the pooch. I mean, we've talked about his addiction to partying during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Had a lot of fun with that. But Ben, I need you to dust off your Meet the Press T-shirt because this scandal. It's now a Lockheed Martin ticket. It just got this scandal, the parties, it just got both sides. Yeah.

You hear what happened here. Labor leader, Kier Starmer. He's been hammering Boris Johnson for his partying. But it turns out he was spotted drinking a beer as he ate takeout food during a campaign meeting in April of 2021. So is that some like labor party office? I guess they're like 15 people there after a day of campaigning talking about whatever. They're eating Indian takeout. They're drinking a beer standing up.

I don't know. Was it a good idea? No. Was it a violation of the rules at the same level as like 15 birthday parties at number 10 while, you know, the queen sat alone at her husband's funeral? Yeah. No. So but because Keir Starmer is a self-flagellating liberal, we always have to prove how fucking goody-two. shoes we are and righteous and how much we love the rules. Starmer said he would resign if he's

fined by police because he called on Boris Johnson to do so. Of course, Boris Johnson is not going to resign. But, you know, Starmer also insists he did nothing wrong. So I don't know, Ben, it seems so clearly different than Boris throwing like hundreds of ragers at number 10 Downing Street. But here we are. Here we are. Now it's both sides. I just, I'm astonished at the capacity of the inanity and stupidity of American politics to replicate itself constantly in the United Kingdom. And it happens in both directions, I guess. But it's the same thing here where, like, Republicans can violate every fucking norm to the endpoint of, like, a violent insurrection where people are trying to hang the vice president of their own party. And then, like, a Democrat will get, like,

four Pinocchio's from a fact checker. And it's like, oh, look, both these parties are like. Susan Collins calls the cops because someone wrote in chalk outside her house. That's a good example, right? Like, yeah, like that we're now self-flagellating about the people who wrote in chalk in front of Susan Collins' house as if that's analogous to the insurrection. Or they're like inconvenienced elito. Yeah, I don't know why Kirstarmer felt compelled to play into the idea that there's any analogy between serial partying and lying about it relentlessly too. I mean, that's just constantly lying about it, lying about the parliament, lying about what you knew about. videotapes of people laughing about how they were lying about it, you know?

Right. And then this guy orders some fucking curry at, like, the office. And it's like, oh, man, I'll step down if like, you know. He does an IPA in 2021. And it's also, so like, one, it's like playing into like the idea that these things are at all analogous. And Boris, by the way, didn't resign. So the idea that labor might be, lose its leader at a time when it had momentum because

of some curry is insane because you know the British right-wing media will be reckless, right? Yes. Yeah, Murdoch's not going to let this go because you're doing the right thing. No, all these tabloids. And then, like, to give it over to law enforcement, assuming that there may not be any bad actors in that chain of command. Always upstanding. As someone who was in the White House when, like, it got delegated to James Comey to handle the Hillary Clinton matter, like, that's not always, like, the right call. Go with God, Keir. Oh, not good. Did you see that the Queen Elizabeth II did not preside over the opening of parliament today. This so-called Queen's speech where you lay out the government's legislative agenda,

she missed doing it for the first time since 1963 when I believe she was pregnant. Charles delivered it. The pal said she was having mobility problems. No surprise there at 96. But I don't know. I'm worried about this. I mean, another thing, you know, I hate to be ghoulish, but yeah, I mean, all signs point to the queen not being in the best.

condition here. I believe she had COVID and was just okay. Maybe she was. I mean, you know, but the thing that people should check out here is that Charles gives his speech. And for some reason, they think it's a good idea for him to be like draped in so many metals. Gold and metals. And there's like a crown next to him. And he's talking about the imperative of driving down the cost of living and dealing with inflation. And I'm like, dude, like, can can somebody get some political advisors in Buckham Palace. It's not us, but like, no. Job one is like when you're giving a speech about inflation, don't be draped in gold

next to a crown with jewels on it. Mark Landler had a funny line. I mean, it's a weird speech, right? Because it's a political speech prepared by number 10, like the state of the union, but like the queen or in this case, Charles gives it. So it sets the agenda for the new parliament. But Mark noted that like last year you had the queen of inkling talking about like the 5G buildout across the things.

Kind of weird stuff. Anyway. Okay. More to put like tone shift, more depressing story. So scary development in Sri Lanka this week, where eight people were died in clashes between pro and anti-government protesters. So the prime minister resigned. Protesters are calling on his brother, the president, President Roger Paxa, to do the same.

Instead, President Roger Paxa said, no, the military and the police now have more power to detain and arrest you. and you put in place a curfew. So Sri Lanka has been having a very hard time. They've seen massive protests because of an economic crisis in the country that has created food shortages, rising prices, power blackouts. The backstory is, you know, economic mismanagement over years and years and years, compounded by COVID and then just worse and worse economic conditions.

The country has been kept afloat by assistance from India, some from China. They're belatedly asking for an IMF loan. Sri Lanka is like 22 million people in the country. You know, you look at the major, not the cap, there's two capitals in Sri Lanka, apparently. One of them, Colombo is like where most people live. It's like five, six million people. There's like burned out buses in the streets. There's fighting.

A former minister's house was like burned to the ground. The president's trying to form a unity government. That's why his brother, the PM says he resigned to sort of like create some space for, you know, an opposition leader to come in, not looking like it's going to work. I don't know what else to say here, Ben, pretty scary stuff. Well, this family, right? So like you had brothers who were. president prime minister but that family has dominated Sri Lankan politics for the last 15 20 years

and they're all over the place too their other brothers in different ministries and they've been the autocratic flavor in Sri Lanka they're more than likely on the take part of their economic mismanagement is going into these debt traps to China they're like a central node in the belt road initiative. So it's a pretty good sign that like China doesn't kind of come riding on a white horse to your assistance when you need it. But I think the bottom line is like so long as this family essentially is trying to cling to power, I understand why the opposition doesn't trust that. And unless there's a more comprehensive small D democratic solution here via like a, you know, a new election, it's hard to see how.

some window dressing unity government is going to paper over the fact that people are fed up with like having a essentially ruling family in this country. Yeah. Speaking of which, I mean, as we anticipated last week, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the late kleptocratic dictator by the same name, won the Philippines presidential election in a landslide. He got about 30 million votes. His closest rival got around 14 million votes, so just an ass kicking. Sarah Duterte, the current president,

Rodrigo Duterte's daughter also crushed her opponent in the race for vice president. So we've got the worst possible family dynasties joining force here in the Philippines. The Duterte family, remember, likes to indiscriminately kill people and then call it a drug war. The Marcos family likes to steal from the people. Yeah, they let a military dictatorship and still billions. Yeah, I mean, I think there was an anecdote in a piece in the post today about how when the Marcos family arrived in Hawaii at customs in 1986 when they fled the country. they had literally, you know, suitcases full of cash and gold and pearls

and just like unbelievable. So this is very depressing. But it's also, I mean, we should talk about this broader trend here, which is right-wing governments across Southeast and East Asia are just taking hold. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot that's not great here.

I mean, first of all, for the Marcos family to kind of rehabilitate itself this dramatically, you know, part of that is is the information environment. There's enormous disinformation in the Philippines. And Facebook, if you want like kind of, you know,

place one where Facebook has given the wrong people control over information, the Philippines is it. But clearly they're also striking some populist right-wing cord that is working in some places. So if you look across like that region, you have, from South Korea, you have like a real right-winger who just got elected president or just took office as president, which could indicate some bumpier days ahead between South and North Korea.

You've got, you know, all the way on the other side of the spectrum, you've got the military coup in Myanmar, which continues to lead to kind of grinding oppression and violence. In, you know, Malaysia and Indonesia, other democracies that, you know, have been kind of stop and start, you see some warring trends building up of a shift in Indonesia towards potentially more autocratic politics or the military playing a more sort of role. So it's just, it's not good. I mean, like this, I think that we may be living through because we have, like, Biden's there and Trump's out here and, you know, Macron beat Le Pen.

You know, it's easy to kind of feel like, well, it looks like we're dodging the big autocratic bullet, but like in a bunch of other places, this trend that we're seeing everywhere. Like if you look at Sri Lanka, that's part of the South Asia trend with Modi and the kind of ethno-nationalism there. And then, you know, Southeast Asia, you've got these corrupt nationalist far-right types. You know, the geopolitics is still like in a bit of the spiral, you know. It's real confusing how you can just loot a country and then just rehabilitate your record. Maybe Hugh Hewitt will run like a Nixon grandkid over here. Yeah. Well, it, it, it, It makes you wonder, like the pendulum swung hard against the Marcos's of the world around, you know, the 80s and 90s.

And we're just in this phase where it's just swinging back in the direction. Like what people are looking for is, and again, this is a big part of my book, people are looking for like that sense of traditional identity. Yeah, nostalgia. Yeah, the strong man at least represents how I feel as a Filipino or as an Indian or as an American. in. And I would argue that those leaders don't deliver and they steal from you and they risk getting you into wars. But it may be that we have to experience that for a little while longer before the pendulum swings back. Yeah. A couple more things before we get to Ben's interview. So the Reuters reported that last year CIA director Bill Burns told Brazilian officials

that President Bolsonaro should stop undermining confidence in Brazil's elections and electronic voting system ahead of the October elections. Now, I too worry that if Bolsonaro loses, he will pull a Trump or Trump plus, Trump worse, and refuse to accept the results. I think the world of Bill Burns, who's a career diplomat, that Biden appointed to run the CIA,

I think he's one of his better picks in national security. But here's my question. Do you think, Ben, that the CIA is the right messenger to talk to Latin American leaders about the integrity of elections? Is that not leading with our chin a little bit? No, I would not have sent the CIA director to do that. Maybe Tony.

I watched this. space because yeah that this is the big test election year wise in bolsonaro versus lula and bolsonaro you know by all polling data it suggests he should lose but you know he's the guy with the history in the brazilian military who doesn't seem like he wants to step aside but yeah like i i really the summer of the americas is coming up here in la cuba's not invited well yeah and their latin america policy writ large seems to be playing all the wrong greatest hits. Like you mentioned the CIA director,

like going down to warn about elections, right message, wrong messenger, and I love Bill Burns, I should say, obviously. Cuba not getting invited to the Summit of the Americas, like after we brought them back in the full new bomb years, like what is going to be accomplished by that other than isolating the United States? And pissing off everyone else. Pissing off everybody else,

making the summit not about what you should be talking to them about, which is like clean energy. and migration, but rather another fight about why Cuba and Venezuela and these other countries aren't even invited. Meanwhile, like Venezuela, we keep acting like this policy of recognizing another government is working when it's been moving in the wrong direction. Like, and I don't, from the Biden people, like, I don't know what there are a lot of America policy is.

Like, do you, could you, like. I know. I mean, I do feel like there's a lot of fear. It's a lot of American politics. It's a lot of like tough on Cuba. Like, you know, and then it's all American politics and then like Florida politics. Florida politics and then a lot of, or Bob Menendez politics. And then a lot of like this is not our top priority.

So we're going to send somebody else, you know. And there were some reports that some U.S. official got dispatched to then as well to see if they could get them to increase oil output too. So like you're right. It's all over. Yeah. Like I need to put a framework over this thing. Like I get it. Like you've got Ukraine.

But it kind of ties it. what I was saying earlier about like Ukraine overtaking things. Like this is a lot of important things happening in the Americas like in Mexico and migration, Central America. There's got some weird Bitcoin autocrats. And then we have a bunch of, you know, left-wing governments that are not going to want to join us in the Cuba fight. You got this existential struggle for democracy in Brazil. You know, like this is something that demands a bit more attention, I think. Yeah, our Bitcoin president in El Salvador, President Buckeli, he's been, so he tweeted like eight or nine times that he bought the dip, bought more Bitcoin as the price went down.

I believe I saw someone sum up his investments in Bitcoin with El Salvadorian treasury funds are down about 30% overall. Yeah. So he's just pissing away money on Bitcoin. So that's great. Yeah, it's not where I want to put like pension funds. Me either. So you mentioned Mexico, which brings us to you.

Mark Esper, Trump's former Secretary of Defense. He just wrote a book, great. In this book, he discloses the following. One, Trump asked him multiple times if the U.S. could launch missiles into Mexico to take out the drug cartels and then somehow keep it secret. The quote was, we could just shoot some Patriot missiles and take out the labs quietly. You know, your classic quiet missile attack. Not to be a nerd, but the Patriots are in air-to-air system, ground-to-air system, excuse me. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, fire metal warehouse Mexico. Good idea. Esper also said Trump wanted to shoot protesters during the George Floyd protests. And he says that Stephen Miller proposed sending 250,000 U.S. troops to the southern border and also suggested dipping ISIS leader Abu Bakr all Baghdaddy's head in pig's blood and parading it around to warn other terrorists. So good stuff.

I mean, what I've been struck by apart from the crude profiteering and grifting of Mark Esper, is it in these interviews, and even in some of these book passages, it's always like, I was really surprised that this happened. And you're like, did you... Everyone called him Yesper. Yeah, did you not, like, know who you were working for? Like, you were shocked to walk into the Oval Office and find that the president was actually Donald Trump. The Mexico thing is interesting to me because it's so insane.

And, like, the idea that, like, you're going to bomb labs, like to what end like that no one was going to know about it well the idea that they thought that any of this is going to accomplish something like the hundreds of thousands of troops of the border like basically like going to war with Mexico because that's what kind of this amounts to right

like completely militarized border and then you start bombing targets in the country with no legal basis obviously but put that aside because they don't worry about that this is what is on the table because these people want to come back to power and like this is their agenda. Like, their agenda is, like, embalming the heads of terrorists and bombing neighboring countries and militarizing our borders, you know, like, and this is what they want to do if they get back

in the government. So, like, let's not lose sight of the fact that we're not out of these woods yet. The book is called A Sacred Oath. Oh. We need a complete and total shutdown of these self-righteous book titles until we can figure out what the hell is going on. The last few secretaries of defense include duty by Bob Gates Worthy fights Worthy fights by Leon Panetta A Sacred Oath by Mark Esper All of these sound like

Lobbyists for Weapons Manufacturers All these sound like kind of Like like straight Like back in the days of straight to TV movies You know or Or like a Like a wannabe James Patterson kind of book

You know? Yeah or like You know sort of YA Christian fiction Yeah You know, it's a sacred oath. It's about, you know, waiting for marriage or something like that. I will say that Ash Carter, inside the five-sided box, lessons from a lifetime of leadership in the Pentagon.

It may actually weirdly be the least self-regarding title. Yeah, I did interview him about that book on this very show and didn't read it. Last thing. I want to close with a new segment. We can come up with a better title, but I was thinking we might just call it like the beat sweetener round of a plus. So for people who don't know, a beat sweetener is when a reporter writes a puff piece

or just like a glowing profile about some newly powerful officials so they can gain access down the road. It's like it's why the new chief of staff always gets some sweet profile in every paper, right? Get your calls returns. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal went into this classic genre and wrote an exclusive a couple days ago about how the Saudi government, government will allow some of the $2 billion check that they cut to Jared Kushner's new private equity fund to be invested in Israeli companies. Now, when I read this exclusive, nowhere

mentioned in the story was the name Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist who was brutally murdered at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's direction or how Jared helped MBS avoid any accountability for this murder. So Ben, clap it up for the Wall Street Journal. That's a beat sweetener right there. That's good stuff. Yeah, I mean, you've got to feel really good about basically writing public relations material for someone who's monetizing their government service to the tune of $2 billion from corrupt Gulf autocrats who are basically buying a protection racket in Washington, D.C., through their association with not just Jared, but the Abraham Accords. There's no surprise that they'd be investing money in Israel. Like, this whole thing was a business deal, not a peace deal. And the Saudis were always in on the deal.

Like, did anybody really think that Bahrain and the UAE were these independent actors? And the idea that, you know, we're supposed to just kind of completely look the other way that this person, Mohammed bin Salman, murdered and dismembered, Jamal Khashoggi, continues appoint this war in Yemen that's killing all these people, continues to suppress opposition. And we're supposed to just like feel good about Jared's investment portfolio? The idea that like Saudi investment in Israel is really, like, companies is just sort of like de facto a good thing. Like what if it's an evil company? What if it's the Pegasus Pride? Like what if selling NSO groups selling spyware? Well, they are. Right.

That's what they're in essence. It's a big part of the deal. And like the thing is, is that like, this is the asymmetry of all this, that it's so expected that Jared Kushner ran his whole government service as a grift that the idea that he's getting literally billions of dollars from a deeply problematic government that had enormous interest before the U.S. government and will again, if Donald Trump, Jerry Kushner's father-in-law is elected, and if they can just kind of pay in to the tune of billions of dollars, that that's not mentioned in this story. Never mind, Jamal Khashoggi, but like the potential, or what about the fact, again, that Jared Kushner walked out of the U.S. government, having had access to the most sensitive set of covert operations and intelligence the U.S. government had, wouldn't the people that just paid him $2 billion would like to know some of that information? I bet they would. Not in the glowing profiles in the Wall Street Journal.

Well, now here's a twist for you. I reread the story today just to, you know, get myself acquainted, angry, all over again. After we angrily tweeted about it, the story seems to have been updated about three quarters the way down to include Koshoggi's name in a little paragraph. What happened, Democratic concern about it, presumably Elizabeth Warren on the show. So clap it up for your tweets. Our tweets matter. Hey, wait a second. Now I feel better.

Tweets matter. Thanks for the update. That's all we got. Wall Street Journal. That's good. Yeah. So that was gross. I'm glad there's a business angle on, you know, kickmex for covering up a murder.

Well, here's the issue on this, because it's interesting. This is a Wall Street Journal. There is a ton of money that runs through Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and a ton of American businesses are all tangled up there, right? And the Wall Street Journal, that's their audience, right? And so you understand why they want to beat Sweden the Gulf, right? Because they'd like to, you know, they've written a bunch of stuff in the past that felt that way about the Saudis and Emirates. But, this is how it happens. This is how you kind of whitewash what happened to Jamal Khashoggi. He's like, well, there are these other interests. And over time, we're tired of writing about Jamal Khashoggi and some of our more influential readership just wants to move on and focus on the business angle. Yep.

You know, that's how you end up with like Prime Minister Kushner in the fifth Trump term or whatever. I know. Before we go to your interview, I forgot that Don Jr. tweeted. I'm still trying to figure out the recent media outrage about my father possibly wanting to target Mexico. Mexican drug cartel manufacturing facilities in Mexico. Is that supposed to be a bad thing?

You're trying to figure out a lot of things, Don Jr., but firing missiles into a sovereign country. It's supposed to be a bad thing. It's probably a bad thing. And by the way, I don't think you have the intel on every fucking meth lab in Mexico. No, no. Highly unlikely. I mean, if you saw Breaking Bad.

I loved it. You could take out one and I think they can figure out how to make it pop up. Yeah, but there might be just an innocent, you know, innocent-ish. Well, you shouldn't do it. Yeah. Well, you shouldn't do it to be in my thing. Let's posit that it's a insane idea to be a bit. There we go. Okay, that's it for the news portion, ranging set of topics here. When we come back,

we'll have Ben's interview with Wally Adyamo about sanctions and Ukraine and all the things that the U.S. government is doing to kick the shit out of Putin economically. Stick around for that. Okay, I'm very pleased to be joined by the deputy secretary of the treasury, Wally Adayamo, who's also, full disclosure, an old friend and colleague, or is it old? I don't know. It feels like it. While he was a deputy national security advisor for international economics and the Obama administration, he was president of the Obama Foundation. But now he is helping to run the largest economy in the world. So thanks so much for joining us, Wai.

Thanks for having me. We had to be here through Ben. So, you know, this is a great opportunity to do kind of a deep dive on Ukraine. And your piece of this is enormous at Treasury. And obviously, the sanctions have been, you know, one of the principal tools of U.S. policy. I'm going to go into kind of where that's headed and what the secondary effects are. But just to start, I mean, how would you describe the kind of baseline impact of what you guys have done and what you're assessing as the impact on the Russian economy and beyond?

So, Ben, I think the most impressive part about our sanctions have been the fact that it hasn't just been the U.S., but it's been the U.S. plus Europe plus a number of Asian countries. And I think that's led to a significant impact on the Russian economy. And we have our own data, but their central bank governor, once you testified in front of the Duma, made very clear that they're facing a significant recession because of our sanctions, probably the most significant recession since Russia defaulted on their debt over 20 years ago. Inflation is near 20%, which means the cost for goods and services in the economy is tremendous. And fundamentally, what it's done is it's put the Kremlin in a position where they have fewer

resources to prop up their economy and free resources to also invest in their military industrialized complex. And our goal is going to be to retain the ability to continue to constrain the availability of resources for the Kremlin to do both of those things because we think that that will help us limit their ability to project power in the future, but also limit their ability to resupply their military as they're fighting the war in Ukraine. So, and just one more thing on the inputs, because I was struck in the central banks governor's testimony in Russia that you mentioned, she acknowledging, you know, factories may have to shut down because they just can't get inputs. And a lot of these inputs to their economy are in their

tech supply chain, which presumably is important to their capacity to sustain the, you know, modernized military. How are you guys going to guard against their capacity to get those inputs from other places. You know, presumably we and the Europeans are on board with the sanctions regime. Is there, are you guys going to have to do some work with China and others to deny Russia from just kind of shopping around for those inputs? So I think it's a great question, something we thought about when we started to think through how we would design the architecture of both the sanctions and the export controls and lots

of the technology things that we prevented them from getting access to have been prevented through export controls. And what we decided to do is focus in on the most. important technologies that were critical to building things like missiles or top-of-the-line computers or quantum computing. And the truth is much of that technology is either built here in the United States or by some of our Asian allies. So the Taiwanese, the South Koreans, the Japanese.

Bringing them into the alliance that implemented these sanctions was critical to our ability to deny them access to those top-of-the-line technologies. And China, one of the things China is investing in today is trying to. to upgrade their semiconductor industry because they don't have those technologies. So China's likely to in some ways provide Russia with access to some of the resources they're not getting from the West. But there are things that China can't give them what they don't have and they don't have these things.

So the key for us is making sure that we've maintained the alliance that extends beyond Europe to our Asian allies and partners as well and ensuring that Russia, which has become really good at setting up front companies, can't use these front companies to purchase those things from unwitting suppliers, and that's a place where we're focused on increasingly. And, you know, there was some focus recently on, like, potential semiconductor shortages at large. People may not be following this, but, you know, describe what you guys are trying to do with Congress right now to kind of backfill or develop more of a indigenous semiconductor

industry. How does the war in Ukraine interact with that effort, and where does that effort stand? Yeah, and I think right now the name that, I'll call it as the Competes Act because it's going through many different names. But one of the things that COVID-19 taught us was that supply chains were a place where we needed to invest heavily in this country, especially for the supply of high-end technology, like semiconductors. You look at the cost of a car that went through the roof during the pandemic because we just didn't have enough semiconductors to put in new cars. So Congress has rightfully decided to design legislation

that will create incentives for building up domestic production of semiconductors that will help us grow an industry that's going to be not only critical to our economy, but critical to the economies of our allies and partners. And I think what the war in Ukraine has taught us even more is about the importance of something that I think Secretary Yellen calls friend shoring, which is the idea of how do you build supply chains for critical minerals and other things that you need in our country that rely on countries that share your values, where you trust in contracts, where you know the supply will reliably get to your country because ultimately making a semiconductor requires a bunch of inputs.

And those inputs come from around the world. And a lot of the inputs that people use in their economies were coming from Russia or Ukraine. You look at the cost of food now and the cost of energy. Lots of that's being driven by Russia's decision to invade Ukraine. And it's forcing a number of countries to think through how do we find alternative suppliers. Yeah, I mean, just one of many ripple effects from this war that people should watch. You know, because one of the things that brought this to light recently was just, you know, there's a semiconductor input into every anti-tank javelin with missile that we're providing Ukrainians, and that's a lot. So in terms of where you can turn the dial-up, the obvious place is European purchases of Russian gas.

That's kind of the through no fault of Euro and kind of the whole and the sanctions regime in that Europe needs. that gas, they're basically, you know, sending hundreds of millions of euros, or, you know, I guess it's payment in rubles to the Russians every day. So the goal of, you know, damaging the Russian economy is working and choking off some revenue, but there's still this one big glaring revenue input to the Russian economy. The Europeans have set varying targets to kind of wean themselves off of gas. I mean, what is the potential to upgrade the same? sanctions regime by cutting off or slowing down the flow of gas. What's the timeline that you guys are thinking about? And then how do you mitigate the potential recession impact or negative economic

impact of Europe doing that? Yeah, and I'm happy to get to that, but I want to pick up on something you said about javelins and the need for semiconductors. And the truth is that the Russians also need semiconductors for their precision missiles. And they've used so many of their precision missiles today. And our goal now is to make sure that the semiconductors they need to rebuild their precision missiles to use in Ukraine around the world, they don't have access to. So I think a big piece for us is doing what you just talked about, which is cutting off their revenues, but with the money they have remaining, making sure they can't use that money to build up their military industrialized complex is the second real focus of sanctions and export controls. But you're right, their biggest

source of revenue for Russia is commodities, both energy and also other things. that they mine from the ground. We're in a totally different position than Europe, as you know. We're a net energy producer. But the Europeans have done a lot. Like you think about the fact that right away, Chancellor Schultz decides that they're going to cancel Nord Stream 2. A few weeks ago, they decided that they're going to stop importing Russian coal, which is a big

deal for Europe because they're very dependent on Russian coal. And they're working through a process of finding a way to cut off their dependence on Russian oil as quickly as possible. and then Russian gas as well. Russian makes a lot more money off of oil than they do off of gas, but Europe is far more dependent on Russian gas, which I think it's going to take them longer to wean themselves off of. Part of what we're doing is we're trying to help them

by providing them with alternative suppliers. One is going to be the United States, trying to get them as much LNG as we can from the United States, but they're working closely with other countries around the world to try and get the LNG surprise that they need going forward. My expectation is as soon as they can, can, they're going to make announcements around the idea of what they're going to do to wean themselves off of the oil in the same way they made an announcement with regard to coal.

And the goal has got to be to make sure that as they wean themselves off of it, they find not only alternative supplies of gas and oil, but something that I know we both care about is we all invest in this clean energy transition. Because the thing we know is that the challenge, of course, is that you could do something where you reduce the amount of oil that you purchase from Russia, but it drives the price of oil up and Putin could make more money buying less of it. And that's exactly the opposite of what we want. What we realize that over time, the way that we prevent both Europe but our country also from being dependent on what happens in Russia or in the Middle East is by moving to clean energy as soon as

possible, not only because the climate implications, but also because of the energy security implications for each one of our countries. So my sense right now is that over the course the next several months, Europe is going to take a lot of actions to put themselves in a place where they can be more energy independent from Russia, but make a lot of investments in their economy, both to find alternative suppliers, but also to move towards a clean energy future. Yeah, I mean, because it seems like, you know, everybody's impulse is to rush to take more stuff out of the ground. But as you point out, ultimately, that's not the long-term solution here, not just for the climate, but for Russia. So getting into some of the other effects beyond sanctions,

there's obviously, you look at Ukraine and, you know, it's completely decimated. And, and yet they're also still in a war. So you can't really move to, you know, reconstruction of a country that is still being destroyed. How do you just introduce us to this challenge of how is the United States and our allies and Ukrainians, how are they even thinking about the combination of how do you sustain a country and meet humanitarian needs in the midst of a war? And do you begin to think about reconstruction, even though they're still in the midst of the war? It's a great question. It's one that we are spending a lot of time on working closely with the Ukrainian government. I think one of the things we fail to recognize, which I think is an important thing to remember, is that we have

Ukrainian government that has control of large swaths of Ukraine because of the bravery of the Ukrainian people, but also because of what we've done to support them. And I think the key for us is as long as we're going to keep providing them with military support, but one of the things the president called for in his latest supplemental proposal was $7.5 billion of budgetary support for Ukraine. And he's also called on our G7 allies to provide commiserate support to Ukraine to help them get through this period where they're fighting Russia in the east and around their country and to help defeat Russia. But at the same time, to start thinking about what does it look like for us to reconstruct this economy?

A few weeks ago, the Ukrainian finance minister came to Washington. I had a chance to meet with him, and we pulled together a bunch of business leaders to give him a chance to talk to them about what he's doing with the Ukrainian economy and to start thinking about what rebuilding looks like, not just with public money, which is going to be critical to this. The United States, of course, is going to play a huge rule as our allies, as our institutions like the World Bank. But ultimately, what Ukraine needs is a functioning private sector and getting companies

who have donated to the humanitarian effort to start thinking about what does it look like for me to move my manufacturing from another country like Russia into Ukraine or to move my company there is something that he wants to get people thinking about because I think once they are able to end this war and end Russia's in this. invasion, they need to be in a place where they can invest in rebuilding the economy. That's going to be costly, but it's also present some of an opportunity to attract foreign direct investment into the country and want to be helpful of them in that. One issue that I hear a bit from like European progressives to, it's kind of a obviously

related but tangential point to the process you're describing is Ukrainian debt forgiveness. They have an enormous amount of debt. we in the past have kind of given aid in the form of loan guarantees. Is that the kind of thing that's on the table? And what is the kind of scale of that challenge? I think that ultimately you're going to think through what it looks like for you to rethink Ukrainian debt. What we've done during the Russian invasion is instead of giving them loan guarantees, as we've done previously, we've actually given them grants. Yeah. Because the reality is that you want to give them something that gives them the most flexibility and you don't want to build up their debt to GDP at a

moment where they have less revenue coming in. So the United States committed to giving them grants. But I think what in talking to the finance minister, what he's made clear to me is that he'll take grants, he'll take loans, he'll take whatever the need of the moment to keep the country going. And I think when the war is over, when the invasion is over, then we're going to have to think about what rebuilding looks like. And part of that shared sacrifice, I think, is going to be us thinking through what we do to potentially look at their debts and what can be forgiven and what can be extended in order to give Ukraine the ability to grow their economy going forward. Yeah, no, definitely put a pin in this. And if they're pursuing EU membership, you know,

a lot of this, I mean, the EU has mechanisms to provide support to poorer members, but not to completely destroyed member states, but they'll obviously have a big share of this. I wanted to get it a couple other kind of knock-on effects of the war. You mentioned earlier the wheat issue and the fact that you've seen food prices go up in a lot of countries in the Middle East and Africa that were dependent on Russian, Ukrainian wheat in particular. Is this going to, is this a resource question? How can countries try to mitigate potential famine type conditions or massive inflationary pressure on food from places that are. are just not going to have the same inputs of Russian and Ukraine and wheat. Is that a resource question? Are there other things that can be done? So I think the most important thing from my

perspective is just to like make sure that we let everybody know what's causing this. And in talking to the finance minister from Ukraine, what he said is that they have the capacity to plant the wheat, to grow the wheat. They want to export the wheat. The problem is that Russia is blocking the port, blocking their access to getting the food to the people who need it. So that's the first point. So that's one of many reasons we need this invasion. end because it is the fastest way to making sure that agriculture of all kinds can get back to the market. And you're right that this is creating challenges, not just in our country where you're seeing food prices go up and we're doing everything we can to bring down the cost, but real crisis

in countries that have less ability to mitigate it. You look at Egypt, which recently had to go to the IMF to get more support because they have less money to pay for bread. And I think the most important thing from our perspective is that we want to do everything we can to mitigate the pain and suffering of people due to this war, not just in Ukraine, but in other regions as well. During recent meetings of central bank governors and finance minister, Secretary Yellen brought people together to think through what can we do together, which includes additional money to not only help with the purchase of food for these countries, but also to try

and improve supply because ultimately if there's more demand but there's less supply, prices are going to just keep going up. So a big piece of this is like helping countries, who need to purchase, but also helping countries that can grow more get access to fertilizer. So they have the ability to grow more. And then trying to make sure that what happened during the beginning of the pandemic doesn't happen here, which is hoarding. And hoarding could be one of the worst things that happened in terms of countries, seeing that there's a crisis coming and being unwilling to share goods, agriculture goods,

to other countries. So working hard within the G20 and the UN to do this, it's a major area of focus, not just for us at the Treasury Department, but clearly for the rest of the U.S. government, including the Department of Agriculture and USAID and the State Department is working not only with the G7, but throughout the G20 and throughout the U.N. to try and work with those countries that have access supply and those that have demand to make sure that we're meeting it. And there's some countries that have huge storehouses of grain and trying to get them to sell that also is a big part of what we're going to attempt to do over the next several months.

No, it all makes sense. And I want to ask about one other kind of knock on it, more from sanctions, which is there's been this huge focus on oligarchs and, you know, we're seizing yachts and we're trying to, you know, cash out the yachts to pay the Ukrainians and all good. Nobody feels that. Nobody's shedding a tear for these guys. It does raise these bigger questions, you know, in the time that you were out of government, you know, there was this kind of building sense about the need to do something around the next between kleptocracy and oligarchy and authoritarianism. And the Russian oligarchs are always kind of the center of. that murky universe. But you saw in the U.S. at the very end of the Trump administration,

Congress, getting rid of beneficial ownership rules that allowed for kind of anonymous front companies. But in talking to the people who really dig into this, you know, seizing yachts is step one, but there's still this kind of world out there that people like Putin used to finance everything of offshore, you know, tax havens and company, you know, and company, you know, You alluded to earlier front companies and what is the current strategy of the U.S. government and capacity to really kind of in a more methodical way, both find the wealth of people like these Russian oligarchs. You probably have it in 10 other names and kind of think about what other tools might be needed

to kind of begin to get at this flow of illicit finance that many autocrats and just generally bad guys around the world, you know, prey upon. You're totally right that this is an issue that matters to not only Russia, Ukraine, but to our democracy and democracy in general. And I think that Russian oligarchs perfected the ability to hide their wealth, not so much from us, but from the Russian state and Russian taxes initially. And I think that what we've done during the invasion of Ukraine is to take this as a chance to go after not only those individuals, but also their networks. Because ultimately, the thing that is supportive of these oligarchs and of President Putin and other kleptocrats like that is a network of facilitators. And trying to find the information about these facilitators, track them, go after them is critical to going after these kleptocrats. And what we've done is setting up this thing called the repo task force, which has allowed us to go after these oligarchs.

But more importantly, it's given us access to information. we simply didn't have as readily in the past about where they're moving their money. Most of these oligarchs want their money to be in places where they can use them easily. Countries that have deep, liquid pools of wealth. Many of those countries are like the United States, the UK, Switzerland, and our goal has been to create a task force that includes them in order to build a coalition that allows us to get access to that information and then use our various tools to go after their networks and the individuals.

I think what Congress did at the end of the Trump administration and passing the beneficial ownership legislation gave us the ability to do more domestically, which was critical because there were too many places in our country where people were able to hide wealth that created challenges for us. But I think what we've done with during this crisis has been using this as an opportunity to get other countries to step up their game in order to create better beneficial ownership rules in their country and then improve the nature of information. sharing because what you'll do often if you're one of these wealthy oligarchs is you'll set up the front company in one country, open up the bank account in another country. By the time you're tracing them, you're going from country to country. It's hard to know where the trail ends. But by building out this repo task force that includes G7 countries plus, we put ourselves in a position where it's really hard for a wealthy person or a kleptocrat to be able to find a place to store their wealth that they want it to be in that we don't have access to information in. By doing that, we're

better position to go after them. The key now is going to be making sure that the information exchange works well and that we're able to expand it beyond just Russian oligarchs to other kleptocrats who are using these financial systems to take wealth from their people and to hide it in our countries. And is there a, I mean, some of this wealth is, like you said, it had been stashed here. Some of it is kind of serviced, right? In New York, but in London in particularly, notoriously, provides all manner of services to oligarchs, right, whether it's financial, legal, public relations. Is there anything to be done about that? Or is it a reputational risk thing? Or could these people get actually caught and then the web of sanctions? Like, how do you look at how

much our own economies have kind of developed these outgross that support kleptocracy? Yeah, I think you're right. And the term I use for these individuals are facilitators. Yeah. And what we do to go after the facilitators. And I think maybe two weeks ago, we did. a sanctions package that included what we call the network of supporters, which included these facilitators. And I think there's a lot we can do to go after those people who are facilitating this stuff explicitly. The challenge we have is when it's implicit, when it's behind a front company or two. And I think what we need to look at is whether we need additional authorities to go after some of the facilitators that are less obvious than the person who is simply moving

money from account to account for people. Those people we can go after. The key is finding them and identifying them. So the information exchange helps. But you're right that there's a lot going on in terms of corporate formation and things of that nature that are being helpful to them. I think it's a place where we want to take additional action. We have tools, some of the tools we can use to do that now. And we're looking to do that when it comes to Russia and oligarchs who are using certain trust companies or companies in foreign jurisdictions to do that. And we have tools to do that. But we will need help, I think, from Congress. And we need to think through what that legislation looks like. Yeah, well, all supportive of that here. So just ending on a kind of

personal note, first of all, for some of our listeners, might be surprised at kind of how in this you are at Treasury. You know, people think of Treasury as like domestic economy. I mean, what share your time do you find ends up getting dedicated to natural security foreign policy? And how has that kind of gone up since the war in Ukraine started? So when I started, Secretary Yellen asked me to spend a Great deal of my time on national security issues. Everything from the committee on foreign investment in the United States sits at Treasury to all the sanctions work that we do, to a number of things we do with international relations. And I'd say in the beginning, I'd say anywhere from 30 to 40% of my time was devoted to the national security portfolio. Today, I'd say it's more than 50% of my time is spent working on national security issues with some days it taking all of my time. But Russia, Ukraine has become one of the primary responsibilities that I have thinking through. Not only what we do in the United States, but as you know from working on these issues, a lot of time spent talking with our international counterparts, thinking through how we can coordinate. And I think the most important thing that the president asked us to do in November when we started to see Russian troops build up was to go out and have conversations with our allies and partners.

And those conversations take time, but they're important because what we found is that the impact of our actions have been so much greater because we've done it not alone, but with all of our allies and partners. And what's a day like for the Deputy Treasury Secretary? How varied the topics? What's it like? It starts very similar to the day for the Deputy National Security Advisor. I used to start out with intelligence in the morning and try and collect information. The difference is that I also have domestic responsibilities a lot of time working on how do we improve the IRS. How do we make sure that America's economy is the most competitive?

But while I've been here, I've went out and I've talked to people about how we build more housing in America, how we invest in infrastructure, how we invest in jobs. And ultimately, I think of these are competitiveness issues. They're all national security issues because so a lot of the issues are varied in terms of because the economy in America is the biggest and the strongest in the world. But ultimately, lots of my time is spent on national security issues. Well, look, Wally, we're glad to have you in there. I think people get a sense. They may not know your name, but they should because you're doing really important work,

and you have a lot of work ahead of you. So thanks so much for swinging by Crooked World Headquarters here. Well, thanks for having me, Ben. It's always great to see you, and thanks for everything you're doing to help people better understand these issues. Thanks again to Wally, Adiyama,

for joining the show. Who else will be thanking this week? Mark Esper. Mark Esper. Yesper. For really dropping an epic book. Anybody who heard this and pre-order that paperback? Ooh, that's good.

That's good. Not the Marcos family. No, not the Marcos family. Not Keir Starmor, if you have to resign for this stupid beer nonsense. Yeah, it's the most expensive career he ever bought. Maybe Lambe will take his place, though. I mean, you know, I... They just got into a place, too, where, like, Starmer was...

And then they're on the offense. Yeah, they're on the offense. So it's disappointing. I mean, I feel like these are dark topics, but I feel like I'm ready to just weather this turbulence. You know what I mean? Long time to the midterms. Yeah, you know, then I'm ready to weather that turbulence. I'm just ready.

Prepare yourself. Just buckle up. Steal yourself, World Tose. We got each other and we'll get through this. And that's it for this week. Talk to you guys next week. See ya. Ponset of the World is a crooked media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seguin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, and Amelia Montuth, who upload our episodes as videos at YouTube.com slash crooked media.