Pod Save the World - Russian bounties with Rep Adam Schiff

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Explosive reports that the Russia military has been paying Taliban-linked militants to kill US forces in Afghanistan. Tommy and Ben try to figure out why Russia would do this and how the US should respond. China ends Hong Kong’s independence. The LGBT community is under attack in Chechnya. Social media platforms crack down on hate speech. A new strain of pig flu worries scientists. A reexamination of Belgium’s racist, colonial history. Congress tries to weaken encryption. The humanitarian situation in Yemen worsens, and progressive Democrats call out Israeli annexation of the West Bank. Then Congressman Adam Schiff joins to discuss reports of Russian bounties against US troops and the politicization of the US intelligence community.

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Ben, we got a really excellent, timely show today. Our guest is the House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff. He is on to talk about these explosive reports that Russia has been paying Taliban-linked militants to kill coalition forces in Afghanistan. Always great to talk to him, one of the most effective members of Congress in the institution and someone who knows more about this. And probably, anyone else in the House right now. We're also going to talk about dramatic updates from Hong Kong that may crush the protest movement that has inspired so many of us over the last few years and any hope of democracy there. We're going to talk about social media companies, finally taking some steps to eliminate hate speech. Let's talk about gay rights in Chechnya, attacks on encryption here in the U.S. We're going to revisit some dark history in Belgium, talk about the situation in Yemen, and much, much more. But before that, if you, people have not listened to wind of change yet. You are only hurting yourselves. The final episode

is out on all platforms. It has been called one of the best podcasts of the year. I promise you will love it. And wait for this, Ben, bonus episodes are coming out next week, exclusive on SWATI. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't know that. Yes. Closely guarded secret until today, this was, this has been something that's been in the work. So I'm very excited to hear these and get excited. Wow, that totally changes my binge strategy for next week. Yeah, I'm ready to binge some more. One other thing, thank you to Ben. Thank you to everyone who has adopted a state as part of our adopt-a-state program.

Now that the training part is done, we'll be sending state-specific calls to action to everybody who signed up. If you didn't adopt a state, but you still want to do something to get involved, go to Votesaveamerica.com slash volunteer to find ways to phone bank or text bank or write letters and make an important contribution. Every little bit matters. We really appreciate everyone who's getting involved. So go to Votesaveamerica.com slash volunteer. Okay, Ben, so we're going to talk more about this Russia-Taliban situation with Congressman Schiff later.

But you and I also wanted to cover some pieces of this to give people context. So let's get into that. So for those who have not read these stories, the New York Times broke it. And the basic story has been confirmed by several other outlets while adding important new detail. So the bounties being offered by Russia to these Taliban-linked militants are believed to have resulted in the deaths of several U.S. service members maybe in 2018 or 2019. There's a couple of specific incidents that are being looked at. The operation itself is run by a Russian military unit referred to as GRU Unit 29155,

which we actually talked about on the show before. They are known for conducting super aggressive operations in places like Europe. There was an assassination attempt against a former Russian military officer turned double agent in London. They tried to foment a coup in Montenegro to try to keep them out of NATO. So, you know, basically stuff the CIA did in the 50s. I mean, sort of getting here. But look, if true, like, this is a huge deal. It's a major escalation for Russia.

And the evidence gets stronger and stronger. So U.S. and Afghan forces found a half a million dollars in U.S. currency in a Taliban outpost during a these bounties were discussed during interrogations of capture Taliban members. And then on Tuesday, right before we started recording, the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence found evidence of financial transfers from a Russian-controlled bank to a Taliban-linked account. So it sounds like this is pretty dead to rights. The initial controversy in Washington was about whether or not Trump was briefed on this, and we'll get to that. But let's start by talking about why Russia would do this and what the response would be. So, Ben, in terms of like why would

Russia do this. I've seen a couple theories. The first is that the bounties might be payback for a firefight with U.S. troops in Syria back in 2018. They killed a bunch of Russian mercenaries, killed a bunch of pro-Assad forces. Maybe this is, you know, revenge. Others have speculated that the Russians might want to mess up the peace talks between the U.S. and the Taliban and the Afghan government, maybe keep us bogged down in Afghanistan longer, though, like, I don't know, these peace talks are kind of bogging themselves down. And I'm also just not sure there's any way you're going to convince Trump to keep troops in Afghanistan at this point. Just Ben, you know, you spent eight years getting briefed on this stuff, learning about Putin's

thinking when and why he conducts external operations. What's your sense of why Russia might do something like this? So I think there are two possibilities here, Tommy. One is tactical and one is kind of strategic. On the tactical basis, I think the Russians do have a view that, you know, the U.S. provided support in Syria, for instance, to opposition elements that might have come into conflict with Russians. I remember in our last bilateral meeting with Vladimir Putin in 2016, he was complaining that we were not sufficiently separating out the opposition that we

supported from some of the more extremist elements in Syria. He used a colorful language to describe it, Tommy. He said, you have asked John Brennan, to climb up a spruce tree naked without getting a scratch in his ass. Which is, yeah, yeah, which is something that... Wait, was John in this meeting? No, he wasn't. It was me and Carrie and Susan and Obama. What the fuck?

But I do remember that. But so there is a possibility there, but I actually think the more likely point is that to understand Vladimir Putin, everything that that guy does, I think, is about avenging kind of the humiliations that Soviet Union and Russia, felt at the collapse of the Soviet Union and in the 90s. And he's basically made it his political project to kind of avenge the disillusion of the Soviet Union. And he thinks that, not incorrectly, frankly, that, you know, the U.S. armed all of the Afghan Mujahideen that fought against the Soviet Union in the 80s. And we kind of chased Russia out of Afghanistan with proxy forces that were

killing their guys. And I think he's probably looking at this and thinking the U.S. is getting out of Afghanistan, so we're going to chase them out in the same way they did to us. Again, I have no basis for that other than my kind of instincts about what animates Putin. But to me, those two possibilities that this is avenging, you know, perhaps some losses of Russian personnel in Syria and avenging what happened to them in the 80s would very much explain the mindset that could lead to this type of stuff. Yeah, that honestly makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about what, you know, an appropriate response might look like or what the range of responses could be. So we know that the administration did nothing, and that's a problem in of itself.

But, you know, they reportedly considered directly confronting Moscow. I imagine you could have Trump call Putin and say knock it off. They considered sanctioning Russian officials involved in this operation. One thing I didn't see mentioned in the reporting, which seems like a pretty obvious first step, is coordinating whatever you do with NATO or with the British allies who are also targeted in this operation. I guess they did brief them, you know, a week or so before this all leaked out. But if you're sitting in the situation room meeting, you hear about this kind of intelligence in these activities by the Russians. Like what do you think the menu of possible options might look like? And what kind of things do you think makes sense?

Well, look, I think, first of all, as soon as you saw this kind of explosive information, and I want to be very clear, just because Vladimir Putin may think he's justified in doing this, doesn't mean that the United States should agree that that's a justification. There's no justification for harming U.S. troops ever, and certainly not from a party, Russia, that's not even in the Afghan conflict. I think the first thing is the President of the United States would pick up the phone and say, what the hell are you doing? We are aware of these reports.

if you don't cut this out, there's a range of consequences that we can employ and deliver a very stern warning. And what are those consequences? You know, they can range from the United States, you know, imposing additional sanctions on Russia, on any entities that we can identify that have anything to do with this. They can frankly be warnings that, you know, if Russia goes down this slippery slope, that perhaps, you know, Russian forces that are in, Hot spots like Syria and Ukraine, like could be put in danger and you can be ambiguous about that. And again, I'm not saying we should do that, but that's, again, I'm a U.S. at the menu. And, yeah, I think you go to your allies and say, hey, this is not just us.

This is, you know, apparently British troops too. We might need to do something coordinated around sanctions in response to this. But, you know, ideally you'd throw a brushback pitch that just indicated that there's a lot of stuff you could do. And you can be vague about it, too, because there's cyber things that we can do and see if that has the impact. Another important thing here, Tommy, we've talked a lot about the Taliban peace deal. Well, they're involved in this, too, you know? And so I think you go to the Taliban and say, peace deal's off if you guys keep talking to the Russians, you know, full stop. And if you want to be in these peace negotiations, then you've got to tell all your goons to cut it out with the Russians.

And so we could come at it from that direction, too, as a force protection matter for our troops. So there's things you couldn't do here to try to brush us back to both the Russians and the Taliban. And what's clear is none of that is being done because Trump doesn't seem to care. Yeah. So last point on this. Like the big fight in Washington is about whether Trump was briefed on this intelligence or not. I mean, these guys are liars. So I don't even know why we bother entertaining this conversation.

But a bunch of outlets have reported that he was briefed, that this information was in Trump's presidential daily briefing or his PDB, which is the most sensitive intelligence product in the government that you're supposed to get every day. But it sounds like maybe he was given a written piece of paper with the intelligence. He never actually reads the intel, and he gets the verbal briefing, like once or twice a week, so he didn't hear it in the PDB process. But the Associated Press reported that both John Bolton and his current National Security Advisor briefed him on it as far back as March 2019. So, like, I don't know. It doesn't seem like anyone believes that this intelligence is a hoax. maybe there's a dispute among intelligence agencies about the strength or veracity of the information.

And we get into this a little bit with Adam Schiff later. But stepping back, I mean, when there's a dispute like this, right, and let's say there's a piece of intelligence. And the NSA says, this is credible. But the CIA says, we're not so sure this is right. How does that get refereed? And like, who makes the call about whether or not to give it to the president of the United States or maybe caveat it if you do?

So first of all, I've never seen a cover story fall apart so quickly because they came out and said, no, this was never briefed. And then in the New York Times report yesterday, they had dated intelligence products, right? So they said, no, this was in this PDB on this date in February. This was in this wire report, CIA report, which I'll come back to later in the spring. This was in these interrogation reports of capture Taliban. And just to break this down for people, the PDB is a written document. document, right, that goes to the present every day. So if it was in the date that they said that that means that Donald Trump was given this information in writing, the wire that they mentioned, this is an intelligence kind of collection of articles that is literally disseminated to like thousands of people in the government. Yeah. You got it, Tommy. I mean, like a lot of people get this. And so this is pretty why the receipts would have been not just a very small number of people,

they're out there. And what's clear to me is that people in the intelligence community, and I have no idea who they are. I learn about this in New York Times, like everybody else, but that they saw these denials and they're like, wait a second, this is bullshit. You know, you guys are just flat out lying. This stuff was briefed to Trump in his written PDB, not our fault if he didn't fucking read it. This was briefed to a lot of people at the White House, a lot of people across the government, and it's your fault for not doing anything with that. It's not our fault. We warned you. and that's, you know, very common of the intelligence community to do. The second thing I'd say is there are always disputes.

And it's not disputes, by the way. This doesn't mean people are fighting about it. It means that intelligence is developed in certain parts of the U.S. national security apparatus. So it might have started with, I don't know, you know, as the report suggested, Navy SEALs out in Afghanistan, hear something. And then you try to match that against intercepts. And then you try to match that against other human intelligence. And yes, in that process, you develop higher and higher degrees of confidence that something is true.

But it was very common that the President of the United States, when I was there, and I was in the PDB and got it for seven years, the president would constantly get reports that were not fully resolved amongst agencies. You don't sit on potentially explosive national security information because you want to sit around and wait like seven months to piece together a Rubik's cube of all the different agencies. So this also is a bogus effort to throw sand in the gears of this story. And it has nothing to do with whether or not the core thing is right, which is that we got this intelligence. It was briefed up the chain. It was briefed to the president.

It was briefed to his national security team. And they apparently chose to do nothing about the fact that they knew that there were these dangers to the lives of U.S. service members when that's their highest obligation as commander chief or national security advisor. That's the heart of this scandal, not what form the information was briefed on or how many intelligence agencies signed onto it. That's just a smokescreen for them to try to avoid the necessary accountability here. Yeah, it is an extraordinary dereliction of duty. I am glad that people like General Mattis and Colin Powell and other former senior military leaders have

come out and denounce Trump for being racially divisive. I would think that a story like this would be a moment when other leaders might come forward and say, if the president of the United States can't act on intelligence this clear to defend U.S. service members that he sent to Afghanistan, remember, he increased the force level over in Afghanistan. He's directly responsible for them being there. That is a dereliction of duty. You do not deserve to ever set foot in that office again.

There should be hearings. We should vote his ass out. I mean, if we hadn't already impeached him, I'd recommend that. This is an extraordinary, extraordinary bit of reporting. And I just wanted to emphasize that because we obviously talk about Trump a lot on the show. Frankly, we've been trying to dial all the Trump stuff back. Something like this, something like this is just so unbelievable is maybe the only word I can really conjure for it that I just wanted to emphasize it over again. Well, look, if his best defense is he doesn't read his intelligence briefings, that's the

best he can do, like, then he shouldn't be commander-in-chief. And by the way, he didn't read his briefings about COVID, too, and look, look where that got us, tens of thousands of additional deaths, because he moves slow. If he doesn't care about our troops and, look, look, even if you take the most generous version of this, he still was briefed about this a few days ago and has still done nothing, or said nothing. In fact, he said it was a hoax, so he's still done nothing to help protect our troops in harm's way. And frankly, I would think that the Trump voters, right, people who care about the troops, people who care about this kind of hard edge patriotism, frankly, people who went along with a phony Benghazi scandal for years that was predicated on the

notion that we didn't do enough to protect people in harm's way and then weren't forthcoming about it. Again, I think that was a bullshit charge for reasons that we don't have to fully unpack here. This is a hundred times worse than that, particularly if we've learned from these reports that troops might have died. And the last thing, Tommy, is, you know, it can be, people can roll their eyes about the Russia stuff. But, since this information was, you know, moving around the highest levels of the White House, he's invited Vladimir Putin to the G7 here in the United States. He's announced a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Germany, something we talked about, benefits nobody except Russia.

It's hard to get around the really chilling reality that he just doesn't seem to want to do anything that could in any way complicate his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yeah, it is glaring. Okay. We're going to turn. to talk about Hong Kong because there is some very bad news this week for anyone who lives in Hong Kong who cares about Hong Kong. On Tuesday, the Chinese government passed a law that will effectively end what little autonomy Hong Kong had left to rule itself. I don't think that the full details of that law have been released yet, or at least not as of this recording. But the expectation going in was that these new laws will create severe penalties for political dissent,

including possibly life sentences for promoting secession. Our friend, an agent expert, Danny Russell argues that the specifics of the law are really less important than the broader goal, which is to intimidate and silence opposition leaders and protesters than anyone who might speak out about China. That part appears to be working. I mean, the New York Times reported that prominent activists and pro-independence groups will stop protesting because of the new risk of getting thrown in jail or thrown in a Chinese jail. It's also not a coincidence that the Chinese passed this law a day before the anniversary of the date when the United Kingdom handed control of Hong Kong over the Chinese government in 1997.

The New York Times had a depressing piece about how Beijing, it's pouring investment money into Hong Kong in an effort to convince businesses that this new law won't impact them and that will continue to be commerce and it seems to be working. Ben, can you just help listeners understand what's happening here and what you think the impact will be for the future of Hong Kong? Yeah, so, I mean, as we've talked about Hong Kong in the past, what the Chinese government has been doing over the years, but you're really picking up in the last couple years, is chipping away at Hong Kong's autonomy, right? So the trigger for the protest was this extradition

bill, which said that if you commit a crime in Hong Kong, you could be extradited into mainland China, and that sparked the protest movement. What this law does, it skips ahead. You know, what everybody was worried about was a scenario where steadily China chips away at Hong Kong autonomy, and at some point in the future, there basically is none. This law, skips all the way to the end of that story and says de facto, you have no autonomy. And one of things, you know, usually China tries to keep up the facade that Hong Kong has a legislature and its own chief executive who make their own decisions. Carrie Lamb, the Beijing friendly chief executive, was on TV last night and basically said she hadn't even been briefed on what's in his law.

So they're not even pretending to kind of run this through the, you know, one country, two systems, you know, facade that they have been operating under. They're just saying, we're going to this, you know, we're going to make this move that essentially erases your autonomy because we can decide if anybody does something we don't like, we could throw you in jail forever for the rest of your life. And keep in mind, a lot of these heroic protesters, they're like 20 years old, Tommy. You know, so that's 50, 60 years of prison that they're being threatened with here. What did we do about it? I mean, I think, you know, first of all, the U.S. has suggested and passed a law that we'd sanction people who eroded Hong Kong's autonomy. Well, this clearly

blows right through that. And so if the Trump people are that serious about defending the rights of the people in Hong Kong, then they should be sanctioning Chinese officials involved in this and Hong Kong officials involved in this. Importantly, I also think we need to change our immigration laws to give asylum to people who are endangered Hong Kong, right? We've done this in the past. If there are people who have threatened with political persecution in Hong Kong, they should be welcomed here in the United States. So at least they have a fighting chance to wait this out and see if things change for the better where they're from. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a really good point because I think the UK has offered similar, made a similar asylum offer already. You know, on Monday before the vote, the Trump administration put in place restrictions on U.S. exports of defense equipment, of certain kinds of technologies to Hong Kong that might have a dual-use.

use. That might have a military use. The term you see thrown around is that the U.S. is going to end Hong Kong's privileged economic status. Can you explain what that means? And like, do you think what has been proposed here is sufficient? I mean, I know you correctly suggested that we should provide asylum for people. Instead, what you've seen is, you know, threats from Pompeo to sanctioned government officials or the cancellation of visas for Chinese students. But we're not seeing like really broad-based financial sanctions, for example. Yeah. And, you know, So there's a special status for Hong Kong where it's basically treated differently as a financial center than mainland China by the United States, which means it's much easier to do certain transactions through Hong Kong than through China. And this can get complicated, but basically, Hong Kong is this kind of transition point for transactions in U.S. dollars and for huge capital flows because of these special status that it's granted.

And look, if what China's basically doing is swalling up Hong Kong and making it a Chinese city, a fully Chinese city and not this somewhat autonomous city, then yeah. I mean, I don't know why it would continue to get this special status. And that's a complicated piece of business. It can't be done overnight with a light switch. But we should definitely be, you know, seriously looking at that. But again, above all, like, we could do all those things. But, man, we also just have to set a better democratic example here, right? Because part of what the Chinese are doing is they see this.

is their time to move. You know, right now the U.S. is discredited, democracy is discredited in the world, Trump is disinterested in these issues. They're probably looking at the polls and they're thinking, if we're going to make our move on Hong Kong, let's do it now in the remaining months potentially of a Trump administration, when democracy is on its back foot, rather than let the, you know, election go forward in the U.S. and see if there's kind of a bit more of a resurgence of support for democratic values and human rights around the world. And that's what's what you. should be chilling to people. It's it's it's it's not just our foreign policy and whether we have sanctions. It's it's who are we and whether we are a credible democratic example that is providing safe haven

for democratic activist inspiration and an example for them. We're not doing any of that and we have to do all of that if Joe Biden's elected. I'm going to jump to a section that makes us happy. So Facebook is under enormous pressure from advertisers because of their failure to pull down hate speech and their failure to police misinformation on their platform, especially when it comes to political ads. So you've seen major advertisers over the last few weeks like Ford, Clorox, Starbucks, hundreds of others have suspended ad spending. This is thanks to pressure from groups like the NAACP, I believe, you know, sleeping giants, a whole bunch of other great groups that have been really pushing on this. We've talked about this a bunch, but, you know, Facebook's refusal to fact

check political ads. It's indefensible. And then, you know, there's been all these reports lately about Mark Zuckerberg, basically managing his relationship with Trump instead of enforcing their own terms of service when it comes to his content. Interestingly, into this void have come other social media platforms who are taking action while Facebook kind of flails around. So YouTube suspended a bunch of prominent white supremacists this week. They have been terrible on these issues for years, but have been strengthening their policies since mid-2019. And I think it's important just to note that this is an extremely important step by YouTube, given how many people have been fed basically extremist content by the YouTube algorithm.

It's also an important source of revenue for a lot of these creeps. We've also seen Snapchat, Reddit, Twitch, effectively ban or suspend channels associated with Trump or that are well known for hate speech. So it is frustrating that it took us so long to get to hear, but it is good news in the ongoing effort to keep people from getting radicalized or, you know, the spread of fake news. And it's good news for all these groups that want to continue to pressure the fake of the world to do even more. Yeah.

I mean, you know, you see two things happen here that really matter. One is the pulling of ads. And look, that's finally hitting Facebook where it counts, which is the only thing Facebook cares about is its revenue, right? I mean, let's face it here. Like, these are not people, they hide behind their rhetoric about open internet and democracy or whatever, but it's about money and ads hit them where it matters. And I like to see more of it.

Secondly, though, there's this kind of reckoning that's tied to these. building concerns about tech companies tied, I think, to Black Lives Matter in a sense that people expect more, frankly, out of these tech platforms. And so they're increasingly tech companies that are taking it upon themselves to police themselves better, but also tech companies that are more open to regulation by the government, you know, and so what, because what we need to see is, look, I welcome all these voluntary steps. At a certain point, the U.S. government's going to have to come in and compel these companies to take these types of steps. That's not going to happen if Donald Trump is president, but it should happen if Joe Biden's elected president.

And it is just incredibly notable that Facebook is the massive outlier here. I mean, you've seen just about every other tech platform at least try to move in this direction. You know, and YouTube's owned by Google, and you've seen, you know, plenty of other tech platforms take these steps, social media platforms, like Facebook, for whatever reason, Mark Zuckerberg is so stubborn and frankly has a profit model that's gotten so tied up with complete absence of regulation and affinity for right-wing content, that he's really not even doing anything beyond the occasional public relations statement. Yeah. Speaking of global systemic problems awaiting Joe Biden, there's a new paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

that is warning about a new strain of flu in pigs that they fear could mutate and spread to humans. There's some evidence of infection in people who work in slaughterhouses in China. Current vaccines don't protect against it. I'm not flagging this to freak anyone. out or because there's some imminent threat here. But rather, it's a reminder that the next president, hopefully Joe Biden, is not going to only have to deal with the coronavirus, but also this broader lack of global infrastructure to identify and isolate and treat new viruses. And so I do think it's important to just sort of put a pin in stories like this. So we don't forget in the, you know, the big Russia Taliban scandal that, oh yeah, this other thing is waiting for us to solve it.

Yeah. And, you know, this is what we're trying at the end of the Obama administration, which is essentially you need two things. You need the U.S. to make much more investment in its own preparedness, and that's including resources to places like NIH and the CDC, but also that the U.S. needs to set up this global infrastructure through the World Health Organization, which Trump has walked away from, that can spot viruses, respond to them, contain them, contact trace them if they spread,

and stamp them out as close to the sources you can get, because there are going to be more of these. I mean, every few years there is one, you know, COVID-19 is just a particularly virulent one, but they're going to be more outbreaks, and we need to get on top of that. Yes, 100%. This next story, I want to say thank you to the intercepts, Mehdi Hassan, for bringing us to our attention. A friend of the pod, has been on the show a bunch and a great writer.

So he wrote about a new HBO documentary called Welcome to Chechnya, which documents the ongoing government sanctioned persecution of the LGBT community in Chechnya. I think we've talked about some of the reporting on this topic before. It came to light thanks to human rights watch and some really brave reporters at a Russian newspaper called Novaya Gazeta. It is a truly brutal, horrifying stuff. These reports, you know, include torture, you know, it's really an effort to kill or drive out the entire LGBT community in Chechnya. Chechnya is a small Muslim majority republic in southwest Russia. It's run by a brutal autocrat named Ramzan Kadyrov, who is basically just like minding the store in the most brutal way possible on Putin's behalf.

He took over from his dad who did the same thing. Previously, when Kadearov has been confronted about the literal torture of gay man, he said, quote, we don't have any gays to purify our blood. If there are any here, take them. He said this to a journalist on camera. This documentary that's coming out, it wasn't a public before we recorded today. but I look forward to checking it out. Everyone should check out Medi's peace on The Intercept because, you know, stepping back, being gay is punishable

by death in eight countries in the world. It's illegal in more than 70. This is the very end of Pride Month. Those kind of numbers are inexcusable and there needs to be a global effort to push back and raise awareness about this stuff. Yeah, you know, and even as there have been huge strides here for LGBT people in terms of rights,

there's been huge backsliding other places. Russia has been kind of at the vanguard of these anti-LGBT efforts, you know, particularly in the West. And we've seen kind of copycat laws. You know, Putin has essentially criminalized aspects of LGBT behavior. You know, Chechnya is usually a testing ground for where Putin is headed. And so this kind of, I think, further endangers LGBT communities across Russia. But we've seen that picked up in places like Poland and Europe where the Law and Justice Party, the kind of creepy right-wing authoritarian party there has really targeted LGBT people.

Just as we've also seen in some African countries, some very stringent laws, restrictive laws, punitive laws against LGBT people. So it's a reminder that the U.S. as we stand up for human rights around the world does need to prioritize this community that it is so vulnerable in so many places, even as they've made such great inroads here. Yeah, that's a really good point, Ben. And if you want to learn more about sort of the global effort to protect, LGBT rights. There's a great organization called Outright Action International. We've had Jessica Stern from their team on this show before. They're doing incredible work, so highly recommend it. Ben, so there's this piece on CNN.com by Carl Bernstein that I wanted to raise with you. It's about Trump's phone calls to foreign leaders. So Carl Bernstein of Woodward and Bernstein spent,

he says, four months talking to his sources about these calls. The thrust of his reporting is that in hundreds of calls, Trump was so thoroughly unprepared. And now, maneuvered by these other leaders that it convinced his former secretaries of state and defense and national security advisors and his chiefs of staff that he was at danger to U.S. national security. It also says he was vicious in particular to women like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, former British Prime Minister Theresa May called Merkel stupid. He told her she's in the pocket of the Russians because he's always projecting. I'll be honest, like, look, it's an interesting report. I'm a little sick of this kind of story because we've

heard this stuff for years, or when John Bolton decides to, like, you know, cash in on these kind of stories. But the thing I wanted to talk to you about is there's a piece in the report that says President Erdogan of Turkey sometimes calls Trump twice a week or more unscheduled, and there's just a standing order to patch him through. And officials said that these unstaffed, like unscheduled calls were directly tied to the decision Trump made to abandon the Kurds in northern Syria and just let the Turks attack them. Everybody hopefully remembers that.

So it was horrible. So Ben, I just wanted people to understand how unusual that is. I was trying to think of a foreign leader Obama called frequently during, you know, a defined period of time or something. I bet he talked with then Russian prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, like a dozen or more times over the course of a year when they were negotiating the new start arms control treaty. But, you know, those calls involve hours of prep and coordination by staff and briefing packets. and verbal briefings. I mean, can you help listeners understand what goes into these calls and when a White House would decide that it would be beneficial to do a leader-to-leader call versus like Erdogan calling Trump

while he's on the golf course? So first of all, there was zero leaders, none, who could just kind of call the switchboard and get Obama on the phone. And by the way, none of them tried. I mean, they didn't, so it's not like Obama didn't want to talk to them,

but there's a process where their staff reaches out to us and proposes a call, or we reach out to them and propose a call. And then there's a process. Well, what's the agenda for the call so that the two leaders are prepared to discuss whatever it is that is, you know, bringing the call about? I think, you know, Angela Merkel is probably the leader who talked to the absolute most. And there were times when you talk to her a lot in the Eurozone financial crisis, some of the issues in the second term, obviously around ISIS and refugees and other things. But even then, you know, every two weeks probably,

And what's so chilling about the Erdogan piece is, yeah, there's the example of Erdogan calling him being like, hey, withdraw your forces from Northern Syria so we can go in and slaughter the Kurds, and that happened. But there's massive corruption in Turkey. The Erdogan family, it's kind of set up like the Trump family. There's a son-in-law, literally a son-in-law. There's a Jared Kushner of Turkey who is seen as kind of the heart of the corruption and the ill-gotten wealth of the Erdogan family. and there have long been suspicions that the Trump family and the Erdogan family could have lots of business deals. There's a Trump Tower in Istanbul.

There's other potential investments. What do we not know about what these guys are talking about? Because I can guarantee you that Donald Trump is not wanting to talk to Erdogan twice a week to discuss, you know, the Middle East peace process or, you know, geopolitical tensions. Does anybody really believe that's what these guys are talking about? So what kind of deals are being made? And this is what we see stuff when it pops up above the surface. The corruption that we don't see with MBS of Saudi Arabia, with Erdogan is probably staggering and something that we're just clearly not going to be able to uncover while Trump is in office.

But I hope that people continue to look at this stuff after. And importantly, Tommy, SDNY, the Southern District of New York, was apparently looking at some of this stuff. And Trump shit-canned the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. work, right? So there's a lot of smoke here. We're very close to the fire. Yes, agreed. And I can't even imagine what will be learned when he is finally gone. This is another good news story or relatively good news. So the Associated Press reported that for the first time in Belgium's history, the King expressed regret for Belgium's brutal racist colonial rule over the Congo from 1865 to 1909. This conversation was reignited by people who are rightly outraged by statues of former King Leopold II that are all over Belgium.

People want them pulled down as they should, as they should be. King Leopold II forced Congolese people into slavery to extract their resources. There are some estimates that he was responsible for the death of up to 10 million Congolese people. The letter, this regret came at a letter to the current Congolese president. It stops short of an apology, but there's a broader movement in Belgium to revisit that country's colonial past and reform their history classes to provide a more accurate rendering of Belgium's brutal colonial history. It's very similar to the conversation we're having now thanks to Black Lives Matter, thanks to protesters here in the U.S. who are pissed off about these disgusting Confederate monuments and whitewashed history classes. And I just wanted to raise it because, you know, this is incredible activism.

these are activists pushing a discussion forward, and they deserve an enormous amount of credit for how much they've changed the conversation in a pretty short period of time. Yeah, and if you want to feel good about something, it's the fact that, you know, despite what Donald Trump has done, clearly America still has some degree of moral leadership in the world,

not from our government, not from our president, but clearly the Black Lives Matter movement has inspired similar movements that you've seen. We talked to Rekiah Diyah. about the Black Lives Matter movement in France. Now you see this movement to take down these statues in Belgium. It shows you that the way for the United States to claim back some degree of our leadership

in the world, particularly in this space, is going to emanate from what people are doing in the streets as much as what people are doing in the White House. And to me, that's a very hopeful thing, that the BLM movement can be the starting point for how the United States thinks about restoring some degree of moral leadership post-Trump. And everybody should check out if you want to know more about this. King Leopold's Ghost is an amazing book by Adam Hothschild. I mean, just read this book and you will understand why there should not be a statue of this man anywhere. Yes, that's a great one to add to the reading list.

I want to talk quickly about an important bill in Congress that folks should be really quite concerned about. The Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill that would force technology companies to allow police backdoor access to our phones. So that would mean they would be able to unencrypt your phone even if you didn't give them the password. It would also effectively ban end-to-end encryption that secures messages that you send on services like Signal or WhatsApp. The bill is from Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton, and Marsha Blackburn. So if you're listening to me and you're like, I don't know all the details of this stuff. What are you talking about? Just ask yourself, do you want the send the troops into the streets guy to be writing laws about your privacy, right?

Do you want the police departments that we've watched abuse suspects lie, you know, on the record, kill, you know, black suspects who are fleeing, you know, like just horrible, horrible abuses we've seen to have unfettered access to your private data? Do we want Donald Trump's intelligence officials to be able to hack into all of our messages? Right. Like, I'm not saying that all police or all intel people are bad. But when you provide them absolute power to always get into your phone, to read all of your messages, then you are. never going to get to abuse. We've talked about how Obama was wrong on this before. I don't want to relitigate his views on everything we ever talk about, but, you know, I think he was wrong when it came to fighting efforts to, you know, put really strong encryption on private data. But this is

something I think people need to understand is out there and talk about. And really, we need every Democrat in the Senate to oppose bills like this and others that are like it. Yeah. And look, Obama was wrong. He's trying to get into one phone. This is, you know, This takes that and turbocharges it. And look, Tom Cotton is not subtle about his kind of authoritarian tendencies here. You mentioned morning put the military in the streets. Like, we should be moving in the opposite direction on privacy. We should be strengthening privacy protections, strengthening data protections,

so that people can trust that their information is secure, including from the government. And people should just think about this. Like, just imagine if any law enforcement agency, And agencies, you know, like ICE, you know, agencies that, you know, that's to say to be generous have not exactly demonstrated a lot of respect for people's civil liberties in this country could just fish around in your messages and take something out of context that you said, right? I mean, you know, you could be texting, you know, burn it all down or, you know, you could be saying things that are totally euphemistic. You don't actually intend to go do them. Right. But, man, you know, if someone could read every single.

one of your, you know, WhatsApp or signal messages and put that in whatever light they want. Like, then we're, we're like having conversations like in Hong Kong about like what the government can do here. So this is dead on arrival as far as I'm concerned. It should be. And people should just the mindset that is even

leading people like this to introduce these bills needs to be defeated. And by the way, won't go away, even if Trump is defeated because Tom Cotton will immediately be a frontrunner for the 24 Republican nomination. if that's a case. So put a pin in this. Yeah, put it in this one. Two more quick things. Ben, we've talked about the Saudi-led civil war in Yemen before and the just awful humanitarian consequences. Unfortunately, COVID, the

pandemic has really exacerbated the problem there. And a top UN officialist warning that millions of children could die if the world doesn't step in and pledge more money to help. There are two million children under the age of five in Yemen who are malnourished. There are hundreds of thousands of those who are severely so and on the edge of not making it. And COVID is just ravaging those who catch it because they don't have a, you know, healthcare infrastructure. So I wanted to mention this because, you know, not only can we lobby our government and others to do more to help, we can also support nonprofits and NGOs like the IRC or save the children. We'll put another link to a full list in the show notes of the

show if you want to see more options. But it's just it's something I've started to see people try to raise awareness about online. I'm really grateful to all those who have done so. and want to continue to just, you know, highlight this problem for the world. 100%. And, you know, find charities like IRC and save the children to support. Keep the world's attention on this. You know, again, like a theme on this episode, this U.S. support of any kind for this should end on day one of the military effort.

For the military effort. And there needs to be an enormous humanitarian effort. We can't get distracted from the world's most. vulnerable people because of our own COVID challenges here. But yeah, this is a really truly horrifying story. But hopefully the kind of activism we've seen on this can both change policies, but also offer some support to these people. And I should note, again, worst mistake of the Obama administration to go along with this

at all. And of course, Trump, you know, turbocharged it himself and things have gotten much worse. But this just needs to end. Yes, agreed. Last thing, we talked about Israeli plans to annexed terrorist. in the West Bank without negotiation or any kind of land swaps or any kind of agreement. We talked about it a bunch of times. A dozen members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, a bunch of other

progressive badasses have signed a letter that says that the U.S. will not recognize annex territory as part of Israel if this happens. And they're threatening to put conditions on U.S. military funding to Israel to ensure that U.S. funds don't support annexation. I thought this was a great letter. I'm incredibly proud the members of Congress who put it forward and people like Matt Duss, who is a top foreign policy advisor to Bernie Sanders, who cares deeply about this stuff. We just also note that Joe Biden does not support conditioning aid to Israel if annexation occurs. I would love to see him change that position. I would love to hear him loudly condemn annexation and do so with a carrot.

and a stick approach that makes clear there will be a cost for proceeding. So, you know, the Israeli government can't do what the Chinese government is doing, Ben, and just sort of sprint to complete this process before the election so that it becomes irreversible. But shout-outs all the members who signed this letter. Yeah. Meanwhile, I saw APEC put out a statement,

you know, attacking this effort, attacking AOC. What is the defense? I mean, how can you defend giving unfettered military assistance to a country that is just annexing other people's land and displacing them from their lands. And how can you credibly look yourself in the mirror and say, I'm for a two-state solution, but no, I would never be for conditioning any U.S. assistance, even in an extreme circumstance of annexation.

What is it going to take? Because you know what? We're going to wake up, and it's going to be like the 1980s when the U.S. was refusing to stand up against apartheid in South Africa. This is where this is headed, you know, and like this gets really uncomfortable fast for people. And yeah, I would love for there to be. Let me be very clear. I would love for there to be a strong, uninterrupted U.S.-Israel partnership without conditioned aid. But an Israel that is not annexing Palestinian land. And if the Israeli government is going to do that, then how, I mean, how can Joe Biden say he's against annexation?

but he's for no consequences if annexation happens. It doesn't make any sense. And we saw in the recent congressional election of Jamal Bowman, right, great shout out to Jamal Bowman, friend of the pod here, that, you know what, Democratic voters don't understand this either. You know, one of the challenges that L.A. Dengel had among several was that he went along, you know, with opposing the Iran deal. He went along with this kind of complete blank check for whatever Israel is doing. And that's not where voters are in the Democratic Party. And yet it's still seen as kind of radical for politicians to take positions that the voters agree with. And by the way, I think a lot of Jewish-American voters agree with here. And so to me, I'm really glad to see such prominent progressives doing this and raising these

issues. And I think that the angle race should be an indication that that's the direction of party's moving. And by the way, just to get ahead of all the haters, that's not BDS. You know, that's not saying we're going to lead like a boycott movement of Israel. That's just saying we're not going to give assistance. It's going to be used to annex Palestinian land. That's a common sense position. And at a time in this country where we're saying black lies matter, we have to reckon with whether or not black and brown lies matter in our farm policy.

And that's what this is about. I think one of the problems with being involved in politics, especially professionally, is you can allow political considerations around an issue to become an excuse to prevent you, from saying or doing the right thing. For example, many people, many great Democrats I support and admire, including Barack Obama, did not come out in favor of gay marriage

until well after they should have, despite the fact that it was self-evident that gays and lesbians should be allowed to get married, just like anyone else. To me, this is a similar issue, where people fear the politics around U.S.-Israel relations, and they allow to blind themselves to the reality that annexing someone else's territory,

taking away potentially 30% of what is left over from an already carved up Palestinian state is immoral. And so, yes, like you, I am so proud of progressive members of Congress and Bernie Sanders for standing up and signing this letter. I'm proud of the work J Street has done to sort of unwind the political fear around this, to get people to say occupation and to state as fact what's happening over there. And I hope all of our friends and colleagues will follow suit because the truth is pretty obvious. It's not hard to see what's happening. Yeah. And the last thing I'd say to get it, what I was indicating before is like, what is the line?

Yeah. Right? So I would like people who are not for conditioning any assistance related annexation to answer the question, is there anything? Right. That would, you know, if they annexed every single piece of the West Bank and Gaza, would you condition aid? Like, like, and if not what, like, what are we talking about here? Like, that to me should be a responsibility of people who oppose this position. Fine. You know, there are people who have different policy views.

Maybe there's an argument you made, but I would love to hear what is the line that you are willing to draw that after that line is crossed, there's some consequences. Yeah, we can all see the goalpost shifting. Come on. Let's just stop playing the game. Okay. When we come back, we're going to have Ben in my interview with Congressman Adam Schiff. We're going to talk about the explosive intelligence that Russia was paying bounties, the Taliban-linked militants. the briefing he just today got about it. And then, you know, some broader concerns about the way the intelligence community is being politicized. So stick around for that. We are so excited to be joined today by Congressman Adam Schiff. He's the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a great Democrat from California. Congressman, thank you so much for doing the show.

That's great to be with you again. So we're going to start with these reports that Russia has been offering bounties to Taliban linked to militants to kill U.S. troops. President Trump has called these reports a hoax. He claimed that he wasn't briefed on the information because it wasn't seen as credible. Have you seen this intelligence and do you believe it's credible? You know, I certainly can't go into details of what I've seen or have been briefed on. But I have to think that if he's on the phone with Putin four or five times during the course of the period we're talking about and inviting Russia back into the G8.

And they're not telling them about this. I think it's just plain negligent. This is something that whether they had high confidence, low confidence, medium confidence, should have been briefed to the president. Now, can we believe that the president wasn't believed, was not briefed? I don't know how much we can believe, frankly,

that this president has to say. But I do think, given the seriousness of it. And as you know, even where there may be less than full information, you wouldn't withhold it. You would share the information. You would give the president the caveats that it deserves. But this is something that a president responsible for the troops and their safety and well-being should have been informed about. Yeah, agreed. Speaking of briefings, so normally a bipartisan group of leaders in the House and the Senate, including the heads of the intelligence committees, are briefed on information like this. They're often called the gang of eight. Instead,

the administration held a Republicans-only briefing on Monday. Another briefing for Democrats on Tuesday. Some Democrats came out of that briefing saying it wasn't substantive. It included the wrong people. Do you agree with the characterization that nothing of substance was offered in the briefing today? Do you have a sense of why they are dividing these up by party? And, you know, instead of doing it the standard way? I don't know why it was done separately and by party. That really doesn't make sense to me. And I think it should be done jointly so that both members of both parties get the same information.

You don't get sort of one take for one party and one take for the other. So it's certainly not desirable to do it that way. I also concur with the judgment that the wrong people were in the room. We didn't have the agency heads with us that could brief us on the substance of the allegations. that we could probe in terms of any reservations that the agencies may have had about any of it, or explore those issues. So I don't think we have the right people in the room. It's why we're going to need to make sure I think both the Intelligence Committee,

but also the whole Congress can sit down with the intelligence leaders and find out, what do we know about these allegations, what are we still trying to find out, what are the repercussions of this. I wouldn't say that, you know, nothing of substance was said. We got the White House take. We got information about the White House process. But in terms of the merits of the underlying allegations, we didn't get very far. So, Congressman, just stepping back for a second here, you know, I saw the statement from D&I Radcliffe recently confirmed, which, you know, whatever the underlying basis of the intelligence is, recognized there are a limited.

on what you can say about that, it seemed overwhelmingly preoccupied with delivering essentially kind of a political message for Trump. The initial statement kind of said nothing about, you know, essentially what the intelligence community was trying to do to address this. It kind of just tried to create a political narrative that Trump could use. And this follows a period of time and the intelligence during this period of time, the intelligence community was being led by Rick Grinnell, who had never even been confirmed. My question is, how worried are you, that the leadership of the intelligence community, the office of the director of national intelligence, doesn't seem to be playing it straight on just about anything these days, certainly anything that

implicates Trump's political fortunes. It seems like even from Dan Coates, who at least played it straight on most issues, this feels like something we've never seen before from the DNI's office. What is your degree of confidence that the director of national intelligence will tell you things straight, will not put Trump's political interest ahead of the facts? And how does that grow out of what Rick Grinnell was up to when he was in that office? Thanks, Ben. You know, I had a lot of confidence in Dan Coates. I was impressed with the job that he did and the degree to which he was willing to be candid with us, even when, you know, what the intelligence agencies had to say contradicted the presence of a narrative of events. Grinnell was a complete and polar opposite. Grinnell was a

through and through political, part political animal, part political troll, and no part intelligence community leader. That was, I think, really the low point in terms of intel leadership, you know, probably in decades. So in terms of what we could expect, well, he was there of nothing, except, you know, a partisan spin coming out of the top of the intelligence community. What remains now, what kind of a D&I Ratcliffe will be? I think it is way too early to say. I'm, you know, sure there are people who were very partisan individuals in Congress who, when they became the head of agencies, were able to shed their partisan affiliation and understand that the role was now very different. Whether Ratcliffe will be able to do that or not, I don't know. I certainly

hope so. In the Congress, I can tell you he was a rabid defender of the president. The president could effectively do no wrong, and he was willing to say or do anything to support the president. But, you know, that's how you get a job in the administration, that and appearing on Fox. So, you know, it's truly for me to say whether that's going to change. You know, I will tell you that I have profound concerns on particular issues. And Russian interference in our elections is at the top of the list, that we may not get the full information in a timely way that we need from the intelligence community. And for that reason, you know, we had a hearing last week with technology industry leaders

because we may get more timely information from the private sector, about what they're seeing in terms of foreign influence operations on social media than we get from the intelligence community. So too early to say with Ratcliffe, some disturbing continuing signs in terms of willingness to speak truth to power. We can't get a worldwide threat's open hearing scheduled yet with Ratcliffe. And they're very sketchy about if and when they will ever do that. and that to me doesn't vote well for a position in which you really need to speak the truth,

the power, regardless of whether the president or Congress from that matter likes to hear what you have to say. Yeah, and you anticipated a follow-up I was going to ask, which is, you know, your work over the last few years, particularly obviously in the impeachment proceedings, dealt at the nexus of kind of two big questions. One, Donald Trump, you know, essentially using the foreign policy of the United States to serve as political interest. And two, this deeply strained.

and alarming relationship with Russia. And we've heard in the past indications that he doesn't like to be told information that goes into this space. So we heard from the former Secretary of Homeland Security. There was a report that she was told not to bring questions to him about Russian interference. That could have foreshadowed, frankly, his own team not wanting to press this issue of Russian bounties with him. As we look ahead to the possibility of, you know, if not the extreme likelihood of further Russian interference in our election. And we've seen reports that Rick Rennell, when he was there, tried to prevent that information from being shared with Congress. What can be done? I mean, you mentioned the technology sector, but there's a lot of dimensions. There's the cyber threat

that's at DHS. You know, there's what state and local governments who administer elections are going to have to do. What can be done to give the American people confidence that their election is being protected from Russian interference if the U.S. intelligence community is not going to be sharing that information or can it be trusted to share that information with people like you? And certainly the president can't be trusted

to take that seriously. Well, and you're absolutely right, Ben, in fact, the issue you raised that had been, I think, mentioned by the former secretary of DHS, that they're afraid to brief Trump on things like Russia that he doesn't want to hear about

that would confront him with facts he doesn't want to know, I raised that at the White House today. And I gave them a chance to respond to the concern that many of us have, that if the president wasn't brief, then who knows if he was? We can't rely on what they say, but if he wasn't, was this a function of the fact that no one wants to tell the president things that he doesn't want to hear when it comes to Russia? And when it comes to Russia, he doesn't want to hear anything,

but they're our great friend. And so, you know, you could very well have a situation in the cabinet where one member says, well, I don't want to tell them, you tell them, well, I don't want to tell them, you tell them, okay, I don't tell them, okay, let's put it in writing. You know, if he doesn't read the presidential daily briefs, it does a little good to put anything in writing. And if you can't confront the president with information that contradicts his pre-form judgments, then you put the country at risk. In terms of what we can do about election security between now and November, we are doing everything we can to pry from the intelligence community, whatever information they have. We are trying to go directly to the sources of information. Grinnell tried to prevent any agencies from talking directly to us on this subject and tried to route everything through him.

We are trying to put an end to that practice, and it's too early to say whether we'll be successful with the new director in being able to speak plainly and directly to the agencies involved. We are putting money in to make sure that people can safely vote by absentee ballot. We're in the Heroes Act, requiring paper trails, requiring early voting, and doing everything we can to secure the November vote. But I will tell you, Ben, you put your finger on the thing that keeps me up at night, which is the president is now on an almost daily basis and aided by his Craven Attorney General every day discrediting in advance the votes of millions of Americans who vote by absentee ballot. And it's clear why he's doing this. He's desperately afraid he's going to lose, and he's trying to undermine the votes of millions.

In the same way, he falsely claimed after the 2016 election that millions of undocumented people vote, he is already claiming in advance there will be millions of illegitimate absentee votes. I think this is an open invitation for Russia to meddle again to amplify his false statements about the sanctity of voting by mail, which is going to be so important during the course of a pandemic. And I worry that if we have a close election, that the combination of what, Trump and Barr are unethically doing right now to discredit the election can be amplified by hostile power to great and chaotic effect in the United States. You know, the one thing that we can all do beyond what we're trying to do in Congress to respond to this is to make sure that

every single American is registered to vote and every single American in fact votes and that the result in November is not even close. It is a landslide repudiation of this president. and everything he stands for. That's, I think, our best security. Yeah. Amen to that. VoteSafeamerica.com for those listening at home who want to find a way to help out in addition to voting. One more question for you on the quality of the intelligence itself and sort of what comes next. I mean, the most charitable way I could look at this controversy over this Russia-Taliban connection intelligence is maybe there was some dispute over the strength of the information. maybe they were still trying to run down the veracity of this intelligence. Subsequent news leaks

lead me to believe that actually the intelligence case here sounds to me quite strong. But I wanted to just raise that with you and ask the question, you know, was this intelligence potentially disputed among different agencies? Could that be why it didn't get the attention or the response it merited? And then do you think hearings are going to be necessary and appropriate to really get to the bottom of what happened here? Well, that is clearly the message they're pushing out, that we didn't show this with the president because they were dissenting views.

That's what is being publicly reported. Now, I can't comment on whether this is what they're saying privately because I don't want to betray those conversations. But that's publicly what they're pushing out. But, you know, the reality is that, and we've heard similar, of, in my view, dodges in the past, that unless you have everything signed sealed and delivered, unless you have something in writing from Vladimir Putin and attested to with his blood,

well, then you can't really be sure of it, right? After all, as the president told us in Helsinki, well, the Russians strongly deny it. And if you heard Peskov yesterday, he denied it strongly. Well, therefore, I guess it must not be true. If the Russians deny it, well, then, you know, case closed. No, you brief the president and you make sure that the president understands the limitations of the intelligence. And if it's serious, you do everything possible to erase whatever doubts that you can so that you can arm the president with the information he needs to make good judgments.

And so we are, I hope, going to have a briefing of the Intelligence Committee this week and get further insights into these allegations, the strength of the evidence behind them, whether there were differing interpretations of any reported intelligence. So we do hope to get those answers and hope to get them soon. And one last follow-up for me, Congressman, on that, as someone who was a consumer of intelligence for eight years, to look at the documents, and I know you can't get in specific documents, but I want to talk generally, to look at the documents reported on and by the New York Times. You know, it referenced the Presidential Daily briefing. That's a written document. It reportedly mentioned the wire, which I received for eight years and thousands of people in the government received. It referenced interrogations with. with Taliban officials, again, there'd be written records of that. What is your capacity?

I think in a normal Congress with a normal administration, all of those documents except for the presidential daily briefing would be totally accessible to you as chairman of the Intelligence Committee and as a member of the Gang of Eight. Do you believe that, you know, it sounds like there are receipts from whoever is raising these concerns. do you feel like you have the capacity to get documents and try to establish at least what the facts were about what was briefed? Because these are widely disseminated intelligence reports when I was there.

But I don't know how those types of things are being treated today. You know, without getting into particular documents, I can tell you we have made a request for any documents they have on the subject of these bounties. and underlying intelligence that undergirds any assessments so that they may have made. And so we have requested exactly what you described, but we, you know, apart from the PDB. And so will we be able to get it? I would certainly hope so. You're absolutely right. In a normal world and a normal illustration, we would be able to get it.

I am confident we will get some of it. can I be confident that we've gotten all of it? You know, honestly, given the politicization I've seen during the course of the Trump administration, I don't know that I can assure you that I have that confidence. But I will tell you, we will try. And, you know, with respect to other intelligence streams, for example, on the Ukraine issue, where we knew there was underlying intelligence material, where we knew because documents were footnoted, and we requested them that they were not forthcoming. And so the intelligence community at times has been instructed by the administration not to fulfill its statutory requirement of keeping the Congress fully informed on significant intelligence activities.

Will they selectively return documents to us now? I don't know, but I can't foreclose that possibility. Well, Congressman, thank you so much for doing the show and for all the work you're doing to try to hold these guys to account. We really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. We're a great admiration for your continued leadership in one of the tougher positions in Washington. Yeah.

Well, thank you. I appreciate the great work you do too. and in particular all the fabulous photo registration and GOTV yet to come. Thank you, yeah. Knocking on wood here. Amen, yeah. All right. Thank you again, Congressman.

You bet. Be well, everyone. Thanks to Congressman Adam Schiff for doing the show. Thanks to you, as always been. Got any big July 4th plans? You know, social distance in your own home maybe with a beer or two? Well, I'll say that the fireworks go off like every night in Venice as it is. It's a weird thing in Venice.

So maybe there'll be more, but yeah, that's about all I got going on here. Hannah and I were, like, thinking about going to the beach, but then they shut it down like two days ago. Yeah. Which is that a good idea? Like, Mark Ambuner, who we all used to work with, he's a great reporter, you know, who used to cover the Obama administration, the White House intelligence issues. He pointed out that, like, isn't banning people going to the beach into pools just going to mean that everyone hangs out inside.

This seems, I don't know what's happening here in L.A. It doesn't seem like we're doing a great job. Yeah, because why restaurants can be open and not beaches makes no sense to me. And I'll say I've gone to the beach the last three weekends with my kids because it's the only way, only place they go. Of course. And it feels very safe. You know, you're just, you're not close to people.

You're outside, you know, like they're digging in the sand and going in the water. Like I, I, so this. is the one closure that I've opposed in this whole circumstance. Yeah. Well, happy July 4th to everyone. Yeah. It'll be quite striking to see whatever bullshit ceremony Donald Trump goes to or attends or speaks at where he pretends to support the troops who he refuses to protect in Afghanistan so he can go fuck himself for that. But you listeners, you guys are great. We love you. Yeah, we love you. All right. See you then. The executive producer is Michael Martinez.

Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Chris Basil. Kyle Seglan is our sound engineer. Special thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Malconian, and Milo Kim, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.