Pod Save the World - The Pentagon documents leak

Episode Date: April 12, 2023

Tommy and Ben discuss the massive leak of US intelligence documents and the potential global implications, a new White House report on what went wrong with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, the potential repeal of the Iraq war authorization for use of military force, President Macron’s controversial visit to China, Biden’s visit to Ireland, Israeli forces attacking worshippers inside the al-Aqsa Mosque, Lionel Messi’s potential move to Saudi Arabia, and Twitter’s idiotic understanding of state-run media. Then, Ben is joined by New York Times international correspondent Valerie Hopkins to discuss the imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and the dangers facing journalists and critics of Putin in Russia today. 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 POTSafe the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. How's the jet like? It's pretty bad actually. Europe is like plus eight, plus nine? Yeah, and look, this is another one of these things where you feel age a little bit, but we were gone for two weeks, right?

So the first night I woke up at three in the morning was just up. And now I'm on day three and I've gotten it up to five. Oh, that's pretty good. Basically, I'm usually pretty early, so I'm almost there. Yeah. I'm with you. The baby had us up at three last night, but we fell back to sleep eventually. Yes, baby's a good plan to be able to manage jet lag.

Yeah, just anything. Yeah. But listen. The permanent jet lag. As long as the shot-to-knifted pop is still coursing through your veins. Yeah, it really is. My wine intake, let's just say, went up dramatically. Good.

As it should. Yeah. My oldest daughter said to me finally towards the end, towards the end, I was drinking more wine too because I was about to lose access to it. Yeah, right. And she's like, Daddy, if you keep drinking wine, you're going to get drunk. And I was like, Daddy, why your teeth purple? Don't worry about it.

I was like, don't worry. Oh, man, I can't wait to get scolded by my kids. Yeah, I know. It's what happens when they get to be about it. Very smart questions and insights. Listen, I'm very glad you're back because we got a lot to talk about today. While you were gone, Ben, you might have noticed there's a huge leak of highly classified national security documents.

It's causing problems across the globe. One of those days you're glad you're not working there. So glad. So glad. The Biden administration, released an after-action report on the Afghanistan withdrawal, which was interesting. So we're going to tell you guys what it says because I know you're not reading 12 pages out there. Yeah. Folks, it's okay. We did it for you. Lots of people are pissed at French president

Emmanuel Macron's trip to China. President Biden is very excited about his trip to Ireland and Northern Ireland. There's some scary tensions in Israel. We got some sports washing by the Saudis and Twitter will not stop doing stupid stuff and we have to talk about it. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. What our listener is going to hear? Yeah, so I talked to Valerie Hopkins, who's an international reporter for the New York Times and has been based or reporting from Russia, Russia and Ukraine, but including Russia, is friends with Evan Gorkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained. So we talk about what it's like to be a reporter in Russia since the war started. We talk a lot about Evan and what kind of guy he was, how it feels to see him in the

state he's in. The questions that, you know, news organizations and journalists now have to face about how to report on Russia, whether to have people there. And then we, We also talk a little bit about Russian opinion. Like she had been focused on that. She'd been out when she was in Russia talking to Russians, you know, giving a more nuanced picture of the variety of opinions about the war in Russia, which we don't hear much about. So great interview and a really important story that we're going to have to follow, which is, you know, her point basically is this arrest, you know, is tragic above all for Evan and his family, but it's also just if we lose access to, you know, what's already a fairly incomplete picture. what's going on Russia, that would be a huge loss to the world. Oh, absolutely. Listen, I have enormous respect for any reporter still doing reporting out of Russia that's at a Western news outlet, but I personally would get the hell out of there. Yeah, I mean, it just, and part of what's so extraordinary is that, like, during the Cold War,

like, there were reporters in the Soviet Union and it's more dangerous now. Last time. It was like in the Cold War. Last time it happened was 1986. Yeah. It was like U.S. news reporter was accused of being a spy. And he was, you know, he was released in a couple weeks. Yeah, like 11 days.

Yeah. Yeah. Terrible. Well, I'm very excited to listen to that and I'm grateful to her for joining the show. So our first topic today, Ben, is this massive leak of classified information. And some news reports are already saying this could be worse than the Snowden disclosures. Seems a little premature and hyperbolic to me. It's like two playbooks.

But I guess time will tell. The bigger question is, Ben, do you think this is the intelligence community's Katrina? We haven't used, we haven't dusted that one off. It felt good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Okay. So let's talk about the origin of the documents, or at least what we know about the origin of the documents that we can dig into what they say.

So the New York Times first reported on the existence of this leak last week after five documents appeared on a Russian telegram channel. That's a social media channel, very popular in Russia. News reports say there's about 100 documents total. The U.S. can't confirm that, though. The majority of the documents appear to be dated from February and March, and were first posted. posted online on Discord, which is a social media platform with chat rooms and stuff. It was popularized by gamers. Specifically, they were posted on a Discord channel focused on Minecraft.

Is that a game that's popular in your house? No, we've kept it. It's not in the house yet. Okay. My kids are aware of it and they're Minecraft curious, but it's not anything against Minecraft. It's just more like waiting for them to start gaming. It's just like a super popular kind of like mini-metaverse. Oh, I played it a little bit.

It's kind of, you know, but I'm not much of a gamer. Okay. Okay. Well, if you'd been on the right Discord, you could have got these dots. Apparently, they also popped up on a site Discord channel for fans of a Filipino YouTuber. From there, they hopped a 4chan, telegram, everywhere else. So the documents themselves appear to be briefing materials prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They primarily focus on the war in Ukraine, but touch on a number of additional topics

and drawn reporting from across the intelligence community, including the CIA. The documents looked like they were printed and photographed and then uploaded that way. It wasn't some leak on a thumb drive or something. Because in the photos, you can see like a box for somebody's hunting rifle, gorilla glue, like some weird things. So, Ben, the best case scenario here seems to be that someone got access to photographs and uploaded a single day's Intel briefing book that had prepared for General Millie and the Joint Chiefs of staff. Yeah. Someone lost a briefing book. Yeah. So, you know, the job of General Millie in his team, they provide the president and military advice.

It would make sense the contents would focus on Ukraine and Russia, but also include other topics because you imagine Millie being like, hey, what's going on in Israel? Can I get a briefing on that, you know, protesting? The problem with the best case scenarios is still very bad. Yeah. Because Milly gets like really good, high sensitive intelligence. The worst case scenario could be that someone had or has ongoing access to these joint staff briefing books. There may be a bunch more information online or the joint staff got hacked by a foreign actor. A Belling Cat, which is an investigative journalism group that specializes in open source intelligence collection,

talk to sources who claim that many more documents were leaked over the past few weeks. in another Discord channel called Thug Shaker Central, which is one I know you also frequent. Yeah. But Belling Cat could not confirm this because the Thug Shaker channel was deleted. So this is why like John Kirby, our friend and former colleague,

who's now the NSE spokesman, has been saying bluntly, like, we don't know. We don't know if this leak has been plugged. We don't know exactly what's out there. Like this is, by the way, why John is kind of rare in spokesman circles. He's just like candid about what we don't know. Yeah.

So what I do know, Ben, is they are taking this very seriously. General Austin referred the matter to the Department of Justice for a criminal investigation. The Pentagon is locked down and limited access to intelligence. They're trying to figure out how the leak happened. Again, sorry for the long wind up there. First question for you, Ben, how much PTSD did reading about this give you over the weekend? Oh, my God. I mean, the Snowden, yeah, I mean, it gave me massive Snowden. I mean, well, we had, first, we had the WikiLeaks disclosures of like every, you know, cable in the U.S. State Department, it seemed like. Then we had the Stodden disclosures in 2013.

It was like a fine shot of no to pop, you know. It's like starts with the WikiLeaks and then notes of lingering. And then 2016, you know, the 2016 election stuff. Oh, God, yeah. Yeah, I mean, but actually before we get into the individual documents, like the reason that is really important to reflect back on is the problem. This is a, this, thus far appears to be a very different kind of issue in the sense that what Snowden had and was leaking were kind of the wiring, the plumbing, if you will, like how we collect intelligence, which has its own pretty big risks, because once that's out in the world, it becomes harder, you know, whether you agree with Snowden or not about mass surveillance, it, you know, foreign governments could obviously reverse engineer, okay, this is how they do that, we'll patch this and try to keep them out. And so that was like a structural leak of, you know, like the diagram of the house, you know. What this appears to be is, you know, like, I don't want to say the crown jewels, but like the really good stuff.

Yeah. That is the end product. PDB adjacent. Yes. That is the end product of the intelligence community. So instead of the diagram of the house, you know, this is like the really expensive stuff inside that you can break in and take. And because this is, you know, this is like to the joint, you mentioned General Millie, like the joint chiefs of staff is, this isn't necessarily General Millie's personal briefing. it could be. But I think what people have to understand is like a lot of people get access to,

you know, like the PDB for instance. Like I got the PVB. So did like I think at the end of the day like probably dozens of people, even though that's the president's brief, right? So the people that work at the joint staff also have access to this. So there's a ton of them too. Yeah. And that's a pretty big, you know, operation that they run over there. But the problem with it is that on any, at any given day, what's in that briefing is the best stuff, right? It's curated by the intelligence community. Here's what we think you need to know now about the most important things happening in the world. And so the problem is this stuff appears to be really good stuff. And that can be reverse engineered to like, how did you acquire this data or what does the

U.S. know about that we can patch? But it also just puts out a lot of the U.S. government's thinking on things in ways that are going to have long-lasting, repercussions with some relationships with other countries we can get into. Yeah, and I'm sure the information that goes to Millie or the information that ends up in the PDB is a lot less reluctant to say how we got the information, right? Like this was signals intelligence collected on a senior Mossad agent. Yeah. For example, whereas a product that was going a little wider to a bigger distribution list,

it might just say reliable intelligence on Mossad thinking suggests blah, blah, blah, right? Just sort of like fuzz it up. Yeah, or some parentheses with a bunch of letters that, you know, like you, But, but, yeah, I think that what they could do, for instance, so is that they could, say, you're Russia, right? They could read the documents and kind of figure out what the U.S. has penetrated on their side, you know, and then they could try to go purge. People are patched that or set up new structures to avoid routing information that way. Now, what we should also say is like there's so much penetration. and there's so much disinformation that this stuff may be less valuable than it might have been five or ten years ago. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I want to get into the Russia stuff in particular because that does seem like the most sensitive piece. But before we do that, there's been lots of interesting forensics happening to try to figure out the source of the leak. So I saw Reuters noted that the documents only went to American consumers. They were marked no foreign, which suggests that it couldn't have been like, you know, someone in the Five Eyes, like a liaison partner, the British service or something. But Alex Ward at Politico noticed the documents. were printed on something called A4 paper, which apparently is like the standard paper used abroad, but not in the United States.

We got lots of like open source intrigue. At least one document was edited in a way to make it look better for the Russian government. The correct version, the real version seems to have been posted at one place, but someone changed it to understate Russian casualties when they posted on telegram. That was interesting, but it was sort of shittily done so people don't think it was a state actor. So we should say this is because this is a really interesting question. I've been, you know, like if you're, you're seeing these documents being reported on, and it's possible that there's some forgeries, too, like that people now know that people think that there's leaked documents, so let's make some new ones and put them out.

Or it could be that there's a document that, yeah, like you said, like the Russian one, that turns the dial in one direction or another. And that's part of what part of the communications challenge for the U.S. government is you don't want to get in the position of confirming documents. But at the same time, you might want to shoot down if you see something that's a fabrication, your instinct is going to be to shoot that down. But if you start denying that certain documents are true, but not others, you're kind of confirming that. So this is the challenge that the White House has. The worst. And I think that the best thing is to do is kind of what John Kirby is doing. Tell people what you don't know. Don't get in the

practice of adjudicating every individual document. But, you know, you have to figure out some ways probably at some point to point out stuff that is total forgery, and that's difficult. Yeah, Trump will say these all came from Hunter's laptop. Two other quick things. The Guardian reported, do we know they didn't. We do not know that they didn't. The Guardian reported that the documents that were leaked in Discord initially seemed to be part of an argument between two users and one of them use them to win an argument about the war in Ukraine, according to these open source analysts. And this leak isn't the first time that sensitive documents have shown up in a gaming-related server. The Wall Street Journal was reporting on this. Last year, a player in the War Thunder

military vehicle combat game posted real classified information about British tanks. And then another time, a user posted classified information about a French tank because they wanted to push the game to be more accurate about the tank's real capabilities. So, I mean, it would be pretty amazing if there is just like a hack because these gamers, you know, want to like enhance their gaming experience. Yeah, they're like the little Clark tank is not going fast enough. I think that what's partly telling is it does seem like these documents are out there for a while without the U.S. government knowing it, right? Maybe months, yeah. And the reason that's interesting is because there's such a world of intelligence, disinformation campaigns and everybody's inventing

fake documents or, you know, AI produced the kind of shit you send me. like deep fake voices and stuff, like that actually it might be hard to be like, oh, wait, shit, actually that's, that is our stuff, you know. It does speak to how that that scenario would have been impossible a decade ago. We're in just a totally new world. Top of the line British and French tank specs on some gaming server because the people want it to be more realistic. So you mentioned the intel on Russian military movements and Ukrainian military movements. That, in my opinion, seems to be the most worrisome. So there was reportedly detail in these documents about intercepted communications within the FSB, the Russian Intelligence Service.

There's details of how the Russian Defense Ministry deliberating on things. There's granular Russian planning about how to counter Western tanks. There's detail about U.S. collection on Russian military targeting, which apparently we passed off to the Ukrainians to protect them. There's also information about anti-Western Russian propaganda operations in Africa, what the Wagner mercenary group is up to all over the world. Some of this intel, again, talks about interceptive communications. There's also lots of collection on the Ukrainian government and military. There are details about their S-300 air defense systems running low on munitions and what date they might run out.

That's not great. There's debates within the Ukrainian government about military operations and tactics in Bakhmut, that town in the Dombas that's been hard fought over the last few months. So, Ben, again, like if this is, you know, the best case scenario where this is, one day's briefing book that somehow got out. I guess the good news is that the intelligence itself is a little older. It's a little less actionable. The bad news, as you said earlier, is the Russians should be able to adapt to prevent, you know, this stuff from getting intercepted in the future. But I'm also kind of confused because clearly the U.S. has been all over their

communications and movements for a while. The Biden administration has aggressively declassified stuff to release it. So it's just hard for me to kind of get my mind around like a damage assessment. The Ukrainian stuff seems very embarrassing, and I guess everyone just sucks it up. But it's just like, look, sometimes these things are not as bad as they seem. And so here I'll devil's advocate at being, because like, you know, and I was asked like a couple times about like, oh, the actual assessment of the Ukrainian military is it's more degraded. And people know that. The Russians know that. They're fighting the Ukrainian military.

Like so sometimes, yeah, do you want that broadcast? No, but we've been talking on this podcast for weeks about it. Zelensky's been basically just pounding the table demanding weapons because they're running out of ammo. People know that, right? That's one aspect of this. I think on the Russian side, I was struck by how broad the coverages, but then to speculate here, and I'm just speculating and looking at this stuff, you have to think that as Russia is being driven down this path of madness of invading Ukraine, that there are people in that system

that are playing ball with the U.S. because they don't like what they're seeing. And I don't know that to be true, but like it's so broad. And I just have to think that there's some people there like, you know, who probably are like, you know, first of all, when you're fighting a war, your comms are much more vulnerable.

Exactly. Like, you know, you've got to communicate up and down a chain of command, so it's easier to intercept stuff. And also you have people that are against the war and more likely to pass information. So I don't know that you can patch all that is my point. Yeah. No, there's a really good point because we've been reading all these stories about, you know,

Russian troops who didn't know they're going to Ukraine in the first place, winding up in like the Donbos and just using their personal cell phones and getting targeted. Like you have to think that kind of like desperation extends up the food chain, at least somewhat. Somewhat. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes like the, you know, yes, it's not good. you don't want this stuff out there.

But where this stuff has a longer tail is usually if like some of this stuff, like embarrassing stuff about Israel or Turkey or Egypt or, you know, other U.S. partners that's why the WikiLeaks stuff was so damaging, the diplomatic cables. It wasn't like sensitive collection, but it was like really embarrassing, you know, and usually correct judgments about the governments that these people were dealing with. In WikiLeaks, we pissed off every country. Yeah, every country. This one, it seems to be slick.

So the others of topics included deliberations in South Korea about whether to give the U.S. munitions to help replenish our stockpiles, given South Korea's concerns that they could wind up in Ukraine. This one is extremely awkward since Biden is hosting the president of South Korea for a state dinner on April 26th. President Yun will also address a joint session of Congress during that visit because we're commemorating the 70th anniversary of the alliance between the U.S. and Korea. So tough timing there. There was intelligence. Kind of got ahead of the deliverable announcement. The intelligence said the Mossad, Israel's version of the CIA, advocated for its staff and Israeli citizens to protest the new judicial reforms.

This one got an angry denial and denunciation from Bibi Nanyahu and his government. Annoyingly, it folds into Bibi's idiot sons conspiracy theories. Deep state. The protests of the deep state. The protests of the state department. It did seem like when I read that one, it could have been a garble. The Intel report was sort of based off like what former public Mossad leaders had said. Yeah, I mean, it could basically be that, like, U.S. analysts are judging that, like, Mossad people don't like what Bibi's doing, and there's a bunch of former people, you know, it could have, the dial could have been turned up a bit.

I put it this way. It didn't suggest, and looking at, didn't seem like the Mossad was, like, running, like, a covert op to have protests, which is how the sensational version of it came out. Yeah, that's exactly right. And then there was a report alleging that Egypt secretly planned to covertly ship 40,000. rockets to Russia. That report was allegedly based off of intercepted communications between President C.C. and his military officials. Yeah, that one seemed pretty alarming. That's a big deal. That's a real problem. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a huge fucking problem. This is the second largest recipient of U.S. military citizens in the world after Israel. Already we shouldn't be providing

it. You know, you and I are both opposed to it on human rights grounds. But if these guys are shipping rockets to Russia to fight a war that we say is the number one foreign policy party of the United Can we finally cut these guys off in Egypt? Yeah. Here's another one you'll like, Ben. There was an AP report I just saw about an intelligence report saying Russia had convinced the UAE to get their intel services to work against the U.S. and the UK. Yeah.

Interesting. Well, and I do think there's something to this Egypt and UAE one, which is, and again, if these are accurate documents, but they say they have the ring of truth, you know. It is, look, we've been looking at this question of the Saudis, the Emirates, and we should have added the Egyptians to that. They usually try to avoid scrutiny like this. But this, you know, when you are framing the war in Ukraine correctly in my judgment, so I agree with the Biden administration on their framing as a battle between democracy and autocracy. Well, these are autocracies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and Emirates. And what these documents seem to suggest is

just what we've been talking about in this podcast for a while. Like it seems like they're more in the autocratic camp, put it this way. than they are in our camp. Yeah. So I guess, like, I don't think anyone would argue that U.S. intelligence collection on Russian military movements

and deliberations is anything, but, like, makes total sense. Yeah. A good use of time and money, right? There is this separate set of collection on, like, friends and frenemies, the South Koreans, the Israelis, the Egyptians, the UAE.

I guess that what I'm starting to wonder is, do you think this is still, like, legitimate collection? Are we getting enough insight from these intelligence, products, that it's worth the inevitable fallout when something like this leaks because it's happening over and over and over again. It seems like we're at a place where we're just incapable of protecting U.S. secrets.

That's a really good point because, you know, I felt like this by the end of the Obama administration, which is, you know, because ultimately what was a pain in the ass too in the white ass is like somehow you're accountable for something that like, what the hell were we supposed to do to prevent leaks of stuff? But each leak is corrected as if it's the last. going to be the last one. And yet this is just, you know, happened on repeat. And to your point, like, no, I'm not sure it is worth it. I mean, like, look, we should be able to make judgments about the South Koreans. Absolutely, we should be able to have, like, analysis of South Korean decision-making intentions. Like, that's the State Department, right? Yeah, you can't ask the

U.S. government to not have, like, be trying to figure out what an ally is going to decide to do, right? because that's part of the job of government. But I would argue that oftentimes, like a good diplomacy and having broad contacts in South Green government and South Green society that are not, like, you know, secret, but are just, like, the business of interacting with a partner can usually tell you what you need to know. You're a really good ambassador. Now, knows a lot of people. Yeah.

Take a lot of meetings. Well, there you go. And diplomats who get out, you know, in a place of South Korea, they can. can get out. Now, the flip side of that is like there are these places like South Korea that are like, I think, viewed a little differently than others because like a war could break out, you know, like that's true. Between North Korea and South Korea. That's very true. And then also you want to know everything, right? We got 27,500 U.S. troops sitting there. Yeah. So I think it's hard to ask the U.S. government to not kind of turn the, and I'm not

revealing anything. But like, it's a really good point. It's just like a little different. But But in general, default, like, yeah, I think you want a relationship of trust with the country like South Korea. And you should be able to learn the most important stuff you need to know by going in through the front door. Yeah. So what seems like going to happen? DOJ will prosecute the shit out of this or at least investigate it. It sounds like the Department of Defense is locking down distribution of intelligence. I'm sure they might make long-term decisions to really, really limit sort of the most sophisticated or sensitive intelligence products.

that go out. But, you know, like, you and I were sitting in the White House, right? I don't think you can patch it, yeah. Like, there, I doubt you ever received a briefing that was like, hey, by the way, we're, we're spying on Angela Merkel's cell phone. Or who knows if Obama ever did, I never did, right? And it's like, I'm sure if you told Obama, hey, do you want to spy on Angela Merkel's personal cell phone or no? He said, no. He said, absolutely not. But this, there's this sort of, there is a deep state that kind of exists. It's not like evil and nefarious. It's just, it's this monolithic thing. Yeah, and we've talked about this, like, but at the end of the day, like, again, even the, precisely because it is like the presidential daily briefing, it's not raw intelligence.

Like this is a hard thing for people in China. This is not like here's a 50-page transcript that we intercepted. It's like a summary of what we think is happening somewhere. Right. That you sometimes don't have any idea where that you could ask, well, where'd we learn this, you know? And so the capacity to kind of limit distribution, I don't think that fixes it. I mean, the smartest thing they did is when they shifted from paper to tablets, right? Because there you can do things like, you know, if that tablet leaves a room, it's wiped, you know, like nothing's on it, you know, whereas if you leave a binder of documents, yeah, yeah, like in Starbucks, you know. The Minecraft guys have it. Or the Minecraft guy figures out what you're reading over there and starts taking pictures of, you know, like, so like, I think the

physical dissemination of paper, that makes a lot of sense. But in terms of like restricting who knows something. I mean, anybody works in General Millie's office or anybody's on the joint chat, you know, any of the joint chiefs or any, you know, like somebody was supposed to take a burn bag out and actually burn it, but decided not to, right? Like, these intelligence products go to human beings. Yeah. Right. They're the end user. Some of them are corrupt. Some of them are irresponsible. Like, it's people, you can accidentally lose a document. It happens. But there are, and this is where the deep state exists. Like, don't at me. I don't know if like Ben Whittist or something, but like, like the, the, I don't, I didn't

learn like, even as a high level consumer intelligence, like, much about, like, our nuclear weapons, you know, like, they don't just, you don't like get the job and they come. I wouldn't ask. Exactly. That's the point is there is a lot of stuff that's very sensitive in the U.S. government that just doesn't travel about. Yeah, it's not one of those restaurants where they push around a car. Yeah, yeah.

Exactly. You know, they read you into things if you have a need to know. you need to know it. And the thing about this file, if it was a file, is that this was the stuff that was most present. And again, how can these people do their jobs if they don't know the state of play in Bachmood? You know, like, how could, and if someone's in charge of arming the Ukrainian military. It's not just like, it's not general military can just do that without reading in other people. Like, a lot of people in the U.S. government need to know that Ukraine is running low on X, Y, and Z, because it's their job to fucking get them X, Y, and Z.

So I don't think there's some answer. This is why you're right about, like, these leaks will keep happening, where you can restrict this to, like, five people reading about the state of play in Bachmood. Like, thousands of people in the U.S. government need to know what the state of play is in Yeah, yeah. Here's my conclusion. If you see anyone on the comm staff at the NSC, if you see John Kirby, if you see the Defense Department, press people, maybe the State Department, buy him a drink.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they didn't make this mess. But they're cleaning it up. So are diplomats. Avril Haynes, like the Director of National Intelligence. I pour one out for every. Pour one out. Yeah.

Jesus Christ. Okay, Ben, well, I guess we're just going to stick with challenges with intelligence here. Let's turn to Afghanistan. Yeah. Because the administration, the Biden team, released a very interesting 12-page report on the causes and lessons learned from the Afghanistan withdrawal. Just a couple of things that jumped out at me. So it had a lot of detail about how much the Trump administration policies

completely screwed them and set them. down a tough path in terms of the eventual outcome. We knew a lot of this, but seeing it together was compelling. So, for example, Trump drew down to 2,500 troops right before he left office, like January, 2021. There was zero plan given by his team to the Biden team for how to get the rest of the people out, despite the fact that they kind of like handed them this bag. The report says when Biden took office, quote, the Taliban were in the strongest military position that they had been in since 2001 controlling or contesting nearly half the country. Again, I think we knew that,

but it's compelling to hear it in the sort of like simple terms. They assessed that if Biden broke the withdrawal timeline, U.S. troops would have been attacked and that the U.S. would have needed to send more troops back to Afghanistan to fight back. Again, we knew that. Trump allowed a backlog of over 18,000 SIV visa applicants, those are the special visas for Afghans

who helped the U.S. out in some way. It did talk about sort of lessons learned from Afghanistan, contingency planning, and communications in evacuations, like what happened in Afghanistan and how they applied those in Ukraine and Ethiopia. The conclusion to the document was basically this. Ultimately, after more than 20 years, more than $2 trillion in standing up an Afghan army of 300,000 soldiers, the speed and ease with which the Taliban took control of Afghanistan suggests that there was no scenario except a permanent and significantly expanded U.S. military presence that would have changed the

trajectory. It's hard to argue with that kind of like big picture take. Yeah, no, look, Clearly, they're trying to get ahead of all these congressional investigations or gathering steam. And correctly, they want to kind of focus people on a couple of big points. One, that Trump made this deal and kind of set this whole thing in motion. And two, that last point that, like, absent, you know, there wasn't like this middle option of, like, if we just kept Bogram, everything would have been fine. muddle through. That basically absent the U. is kind of re-committing

to Afghanistan and probably increasing resources, the trajectory was kind of where it was going to go. So if you're going to withdraw, you might as well withdraw. Now, there was, and that's right.

And it's important for them to be framing everything that's going to be coming out. There's an Afghanistan commission that's looking at the whole history of the war, which is, I think, a very useful exercise.

Definitely. And probably a lot of sensationalist Republican gotcha oversight. There was stuff on like the, evacuation, they just don't want to concede that it could have been done better. This is what bothered me, too.

It bothers me because they've already lost that argument. So I don't know who they think they're going to convince that the evacuation itself went well. They basically made recommendations like, well, next time this happens, we should begin it sooner. But like, that's kind of a weird recommendation because I hope there's not a next time that like 20-year war ends like that. So they still seem to be kind of trying to avoid just saying, hey, we probably should have begun evacuating more people sooner. Like, you know, instead it was kind of forward-looking like next time,

maybe we should evacuate people sooner. And so that's where I think there's still too defensive about what was a shitty situation, but one where, you know, basically everybody's judgment from veterans who are getting people out to civil society was, you should have started this clock earlier. We were telling you to do that. And that leads to a comment I have about the oversight, but I don't know if you... No, I had the same thought you did, which was a, I have no doubt, like, they talk about all this planning that went into the eventual evacuation and all, you know, all this, you know, preparation that ultimately allowed them to get what is like, 124,000 people out of the country. But it doesn't address the fact that it wasn't necessarily the right people that we got out, right? Like, we promised to help all these people.

and a lot of them were left behind. And, you know, for example, also in the report, and where are those 124,000 people? Right. And not we're not just talking Americans. We're talking about, like, people who helped U.S. military. And they talked about how the U.S. went from issuing 100 SIV, those are those special visas a week in March to more than a thousand a week in July.

No doubt Joe Biden deserves enormous credit for ramping that process back up. But like, you do the math and you realize that's nothing. It wasn't like drop in the ocean. You should have, that's an argument to delay the withdrawal timeline, I think. Yes, exactly. The point is that they needed a different structural approach to evacuating people from the moment that he announced that we were leaving. You know, and again, I get all the reasons why. Right.

And in fairness, they're like, look, we didn't want to spook people. But, like, that's the critique. So, look, and they may want to continue to contest that, and that's entirely they're right. I just, I don't know that who they're convincing of that, you know, and so better sometimes to kind of figure out where you're going to acknowledge. Now, this plays into the oversight question is the other thing I saw. that we didn't talk about, but like Tony Blinken was testifying, and there's a dissent cable, right? So the State Department has a process by which people can dissent from decisions. And the Republicans have their eyes on embassy cobble. Did they file a dissent cable to basically

what was to warn that this place is going to collapse? I'm sure they did. Well, they did. And so they want that document. And Tony's saying, well, actually, the integrity that is the, the integrity the dissent channel is that people can error their views. He's totally correct. Tony's absolutely right in saying, we set up this channel so that people could provide advice without fear that someday might end up. You know what? I don't agree with it. Well, get it out. Like we talked about this. The more drama you create around a document, they will get that document. I guarantee you that they will get that document. Six months or now, one year from now, 18 months or now. The more you drag it on, the more drama you create around what's in that document.

Totally agree. So again, this is a hard learned experience. I understand all the reasons why you want to protect your dissent channel or you want to, and I don't mean to focus on pick on Tony. I'm just trying to make like a general point that I think that there's a comm's point. And they're also a little too nervous about this Afghan oversight. Like what was good about the 12 page document is that the debate that they should want to have is about, do you still think we should have troops in Afghanistan

and Trump is the guy who made the deal of the Taliban, not us, right? The more you create the drama around things like document production or are you cooperating or who's testifying. The more the drama is not about the core question of Afghanistan policy and is about like, are you hiding something?

The mystery. So I offer this as advice. I'd offer it privately as well as publicly. Like the more you just say, we have nothing to hide, you know, yes, now there's, it's physically impossible to produce everything Republicans want. And I'm not suggesting that, but like, just beware the trap of the Washington drama of drip, drip, drip. I'll just think like my big picture

view is still that every single president who worked on Afghanistan owns part of this failure. Of course. I could make, I could make it argue for every one of them owning it the most. Bush for invading Iraq and taking his eye off the ball. Obama for listening to the military and doing a counterinsurgency strategy and sending more troops. Trump for cutting this garbage deal. Like Biden for pulling out too quickly. In some ways, Biden was left, like, he was playing in musical chairs and was the last guy standing. No, that's entirely correct. You know, like, and you could say, well, he is the most responsibility. He's been around the longest. He was VP. He was in the Senate. I don't really agree with it. I think we all own it. And I would just say that. Yeah, that's exactly

right. And by the way, I think Americans totally understand that. Like, they totally understand that. That just didn't go well. And yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I, there's no spin in this one. There's no spinning this one. Also, Ben, in the better, the never category, Congress might finally repeal the Iraq war authorization. Yeah. So it passed the Senate with a 68 yes votes, but it's going to require a coalition of basically like Democrats and freedom caucus types to get through the House. Have you seen anyone articulate an argument in opposition to repealing the Iraq war authorization? What possible argument could there be? We wanted to repeal this like back in the Obama years. And the people,

if you pressed on who actually like wanted to keep. keep it. It's like scary reasons like maybe we could use it to attack like Iran or something out of course. You know, like there's weird bank shot arguments or like, God damn it. Because actually like the case we were making back then is like even when we had a counter ISIS presence in Iraq, that was actually under the 2000, the original AUMF, you know, the counter al-Qaeda. Right. My opinion is they should all be repealed and replaced by new ones. You know, like if we have a reason to go to war against a terrorist. organization, get a new one. But I think it, as, as meaningless as this feels to people, the reason

it is important is it's important to set the precedent that these things end, you know, because the real one that you want to repeal is the post-9-11 one that has been used everywhere. And again, often on the Obama administration as well as others, it's important to say like, hey, look, we can actually end one of these things that we started. Definitely. And also shout out Tim Kane for fighting for this, Senator Tim Ken and Virginia. He's been on this war power saying forever, and he deserves a lot of credit. It's kind of thankless. Lonely fight.

Okay, let's take a quick break, and we come back. We're going to talk about President Macron in Beijing. All right, Ben, so French President Miao Macron took a three-day trip to China, and people are super pissed about it. He, Macron and Xi Jinping, they had a private dinner, they got out of Beijing, they went to a province. Macron hung out with some students. Before the trip, Macron said he was going to push Xi to do more to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine. but they're like six-hour hangout. Didn't really feel like that.

Didn't move the ball, did it? No, the communicate didn't really move the ball either. Tea ceremonies. Yeah, they like the tea. Kind of a bromance. They had a bromance vibe. Macron basically, I think he got like a vague assurance that she would call President Zelensky

at like some point TBD. They didn't seem to publicly discuss Taiwan and right after Macron left, the Chinese military started a series of military exercises where I think they basically encircled Taiwan. This was their very petulant response to the president of Taiwan. President Saiz meetings with Kevin McCarthy in Latin America.

So it seems like she's strategy is to peel France off from more hardline European countries who are more critical of China. I can't tell if it's working. Macron was accompanied by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, who got a lot less love. Well, she's much more hardline. She's been, she's much more focused on human rights. And, yeah, she did she get tea?

She did not get tea. or she didn't get the good stuff for it that way. Not the top shelf tea. So I was going to read you one quote and then I want to sort of get your gut on whether these people should be so pissed about this. So Macron said he didn't interview with Politico where he said the following. The paradox would be that overcome with panic we believe we are just America's followers. This is about Taiwan. The question Europeans need to answer is, is it in our interest to accelerate a crisis on Taiwan?

No. The worst thing would be to think that we Europeans must become followers on this topic and take our cue from the U.S. agenda and the Chinese overreaction. So, okay, I get like at face value why people, one, don't have a lot of faith in Macron's diplomacy, right? Because he ran around Putin before the Russian invasion. He thought he'd, like, solved it. Remember the picture of him in the hooded sweatshirt like, you know, racked with pain?

Yes. Yeah. And then one of the long table. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think he told reporters on one of his flights home from Russia that he'd, like, solved it. And then Putin just invaded the next day, right? So skepticism is fair.

On the other hand, we just did a big episode on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, where the French were right and we were wrong. Not long ago, we had Trump threatening fire and fury in North Korea. It's not hard to see why the Europeans or the French might want a little space from U.S. foreign policy at times, in particular, a war with China. Where do you land on the D.C. outrage? I don't, yeah. I'm kind of like in the middle, you know, with an understanding of Macron's position,

which is what I take from this visit is, look, if you're in Europe, you don't know whether Trump's coming back. Like, that's number one. So you want to hedge on the U.S. generally, you know, like, because because you just don't know there could be a crazy person running this country in a couple years. Secondly, like the China issue is nowhere near as, you know, advanced in terms of, like, viewing China as, like, this boogeyman in Europe as is in the U.S. like deep commercial relationships, deep economic relationships, Chancellor Olaf Schultz of Germany,

went over there with like 100 CEOs before Macron did. So it's also a hedge against like what we call decoupling, this idea that the kind of West, not just the U.S., but all of our supply chains in certain areas are going to have to somehow untangle themselves from China, incredibly complex saying, and the Europeans are like, do we really want to like disadvantage our companies and all this stuff because the Americans have decided that they're getting super Hakkish on China. As we passed these very nationalist, climate change, tax provision, and the Chips Act. You know, as we pursue basically this mercantless policy here that screws European companies. So, like, I don't, do I like the image of Emmanuel Macron kind of soft peddling Taiwan and soft peddling human rights and kind of giving Xi Jinping a PR win? No. And I think Macron did kind of walk right into the protocol trap that the Chinese set, which is we make you look like you're literally visiting an emperor.

You know, like, gee, is the emperor, and here's, you know, we're going to allow you to drink tea in this place. And, you know, they appear, like, they lost control of that optic. And he should have taken some more opportunities to pointedly criticize the war in Ukraine or to raise issues around human rights or the Uighers. Like, that's where I fault Macron is on just kind of rolling over generally. But I do think it's a useful warning to Washington to not assume that the Europeans are going to like march and lockstep behind our China policy without us kind of meeting them, you know, in the middle or at least having an effort to kind of come together and figure out a joint policy. Or like have we really brought them into our thinking on Taiwan?

I think it's a, the warning signal is they still have doubts about U.S. credibility because they don't know if Trump's coming back. And even with Biden, I think they feel like they haven't been brought along as part of this China policy. If you're sitting in Paris, like you're looking at U.S.-China relations and you're seeing a debate over why didn't they kill the balloon faster? And we look like a bunch of fucking morons with the balloon. And never mind the fact, by the way, that like the signature part of our China policy

was an August deal that cost the French like $80 billion in subs or something. Yeah, we screw them out of a huge submarine contract. And then we get pissed that he goes to China. I mean, like, so again, like, I'm not like a McCrone apologist because I think he overcranks everything. It can be annoying. He overcranked the bromance of Xi. And at a sense of time right after she'd been in Moscow. So there's all kinds of things to criticize McCrone for.

But the fact of them, him. going and having, that's normal. And I also think, frankly, the United States needs to be talking to China, too. Like, like, there is a place for diplomacy and engagement, even as we're, you know, taking all this confrontational tone on stuff. I bet we have a lot of listeners in France tweeted us, like, what's the coverage been like? How's this playing over in Paris? I was there during the China visit, yeah.

How to look. Could you read it? I could read some of it with my study abroad French. part of what was the story there is that after Macron lights this fuse and blows up like French politics with his ramming through his pension

it was like he's trying to rehabilitate himself by playing statesman he's left this like fucking mess to all of his deputies so there was more like it wasn't questioning the assumption of why is he going to China it was like

what the hell they come back in mind the story hey bro where you going yeah that makes sense okay well But I'd be curious what actual French people think. That was just my South of France Chateau Nifte-Nive to Pop Correspondent take. Send us a copy of the latest Charlie Hebdo and whatever else you're reading. So, okay, well, speaking of statesmen on the global stage band, President Biden,

is on a four-day trip to Ireland and the UK. I start in Belfast in Northern Ireland to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, which ended 30 years of fighting between Protestants and Catholics and those who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK and those who wanted Ireland to be one big sovereign state together. This fighting feels so far away to me at this point in time, but it was wild to read that there was an intelligence report about an IRA bomb threat to coincide with Biden's visits. So, like, tensions are like just under the surface.

As we've discussed before, part of the reason these tensions are under the surface is because Brexit nearly upended the Good Friday Agreement many years later. there was when the UK left the European Union, Northern Ireland came out with it, and no one wanted to see a land border or a big customs check put up between Ireland and Northern Ireland. So Biden goes to the Republic of Ireland later in the week. He's got meetings with the president, the Taoiseach, and he'll address a joint session of the Irish legislature. This visit is very personal for Biden. He's Irish Catholic. I think he's the first Irish Catholic president since Kennedy to visit, maybe first since Kennedy period. He's going to meet with relatives while he's there and visit a cathedral. that Biden's great, great, great grandfather helped construct. He sold them the bricks. And apparently, probably more legit than the Obama relative that we found. Those are some good stories. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was some good shit. Ben, are you taking the over or the under on 20 Seamus Haney quotes during the train from Biden? Yeah, definitely the over. And look, like, I everybody loves Ireland in American politics. For sure. And so I think we should allow. Joe Biden this moment

of just soaking in the adulation, the friendship, the friendliness of being in Ireland. The Belfast, this is really important. Like I remember we went there

and, you know, like you could sense like it's like right underneath the surface there. You know, like there's an agreement on paper but there's still a lot of mistrust. There's a wall between these communities.

Yeah, there's still piece walls, literally. And the peace walls are actually not peace walls there to keep communities separated. So reinforcing the importance of that agreement, I think, is badly needed. It's a useful timing, too, given all the recent tension around it, but with this kind of Windsor agreement that Rishi Sunak has, like there's at least a plausible pathway forward. So I think kind of reinvesting

in that is important as a diplomatic achievement, but as unfinished business. But yeah, I mean, let's face it, this is going to be like a lot of Joe Biden anecdotes and quotes and, you know, my uncle this or my dad this, you know. It's going to be incredible with like every Irish American politician. Oh, can you imagine the manifest? Do you imagine the number of members of Congress that we're trying to get on this? I was talking to someone on the NSE staff who had gotten bumped off of Air Force One and bumped off of the support plane and put on a commercial flight because it was just like such a massive

on trash. Yeah, and that doesn't happen very often. Ireland is like basically a domestic campaign stop. Let's be very honest. Exactly right. Here's another story where we're keeping an eye on. So it is currently the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. During that month, there is a tradition of sorts where Muslim worshippers will stay overnight in the Alaksa mosque.

The Alaks of mosque is this very sacred spiritual site for Muslims as well as a symbol of resistance for Palestinians. The Israeli government does not approve of or often allow people to stay overnight at the mosque. So they often evict worshippers at times by force. That brings us to last week where there were some incredibly disturbing videos of Israeli security forces beating the shit out of Palestinian worshippers and firing stun grenades inside the mosque. Hundreds of people were arrested, dozens were hurt. These videos spread like wildfire to the entire Muslim world. Militin groups, most likely Hamas, but we don't know that, responded with rocket fire

from Gaza and South Lebanon. Israel responded with airstrikes in Gaza. And just to make things more complicated, Ramadan Passover at Easter all overlapped this year. So everyone's trying to visit the Temple Mount Holy Sites at the same time. in the past, one of BB's far-right minister, Ittmara Ben-Gavir, who we've talked about a few times, has called for Jews to ascend the Temple Mount. There is some far-right Jewish activist every year

who tries to sacrifice a fucking goat on the Temple Mount. Apparently, that's very inflammatory. I don't totally understand why. I think it's because only Muslims can worship at the Temple Mount, and this is like OG worshipping, biblical worshiping if you kill a goat. There's any goats listening, let us know. Also, shout out of you guys for surviving.

driving. Long story short. So last week it felt like this could spiral out of control into a massive war in Gaza like we saw, what, two years ago? Or South Lebanon. That's where there hasn't been a war since 2006. That's a good point. So the Israeli government has halted visits to the Temple Mount by Jewish worshippers and tourists for now to prevent more tensions. Ramadan ends April 20th. So I guess like we're kind of holding our breath until then, but I don't know if there's anything else you're watching here. What I'm watching is because what was interesting about the South Lebanon piece of this is it seemed like Hamas and Hezbollah, which are distinct, obviously, organizations. It seems like some degree of teaming up in this case, which is, you know, a big development in a way. I mean, you know, Hizbollah is a much stronger organization. Yeah, keep me off that group, chess. Tons of rockets in southern Lebanon basically controls southern Lebanon. And then you got Hamas and Gaza. that's a two front war for Israel, right?

That's a different thing than just a Gaza war. So one is that watch whether Hezbo and Hamas are going to be more collaborative. But then also just, you know, the introduction of Lebanon was a new angle here. But also just the longer this Israeli government is around, it's a reminder that like this could get out of control. At any time. Like the wrong thing could happen at the Alaksa mosque. Like they're Jewish extremists who've wanted to blow it up. You know, I mean, this is how far it could get.

This is, this thing could catch fire. You know, like, we, every day that the people like Ben Gavir are in that government running national security in, you know, agencies, the capacity for an instant to get out of hand that starts a real war, at least on the scale of the Gaza Wars you've seen, but perhaps bigger, is there. Yeah, it's really nerve. I asked my friend Yair Rosenberg, who writes for the Atlantic, great writer. These are the kinds of things.

I DM him. Okay, dumb question. Why is sacrificing a goat on the Temple Mount such a big deal? He wrote me back about 800 words, so I'll read it and get back to you guys for the next spot. Another thing, Ben, so last year, I did this mini-series with Roger Bennett from Men and Blazers. It's a little podcast called World Corrupt. It's about the World Cup soccer tournament in guitar and this trend of sports washing when corrupt autocrats like our friend Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia or companies like Gazprom, the Russian state oil and gas

conglomerate, invest in or sponsor teams to burnish their image. The series was nominated for a Webby. If you want to vote, go to WBBY.com. Go to WB-B-B-Y dot-O-slash vote. Vote for World Corrupt in the featured guest category. Do you know I won a Webby? What did you win for? For Missing America.

Hell yeah. Congrats. Yeah, for one of the episodes. Is everything changed since? Nothing changed. Come on. Yeah, yeah. Help me out.

Don't make me... No, no. It's a very satisfying feeling. Don't get me wrong. Oh, no, I'm talking the listeners. Help me out. Give me a Webby here. That's what I wanted a Webby.

It was very validating. You don't get a lot of podcast validation beyond the nice reviews at the bottom of the iTunes thing. Mostly for us, it's just like, hey, you pronounce this wrong. Oh, I get a lot of that. I got a very sternly worded email from one. I've continually heard about my pronunciation of Kim Jong-un, who I probably just misproncy it.

Someone wrote me like a multi-paragraph, just on rip-shit email. I was like, I'm sorry. I can tell you guys, listen, it's not on purpose. When I took French, I almost failed out because I just like don't hear things correctly. Anyway, WBBY.com. C.O.

slash vote. Check it out. So Ben, by the end of this, the series was ostensibly about Qatar in those games. By the end of it, I was basically concerned that, like, Saudi Arabia is the real sportswashing elephant in the room and about to become the biggest player here. They already purchased an English Premier League team, the Newcastle Bonesaws. MBS was jealous of the shine Qatar got from hosting. So the Saudis also hired Lionel Messi, who's the goat, the greatest player of all time, to be their tourism ambassador. Now there are reports that Messi has been offered more than $400 million per year to play in the Saudi Soccer League. This comes as the Saudis are going to compete,

doing that in air quotes for those listening. These competition implies fairness and not bribing people, and that's not what I expect will happen here. They're going to compete for the 2030 World Cup. Cristiano Ronaldo, another star player who was a little past his prime, signed up to play in the Saudi League last year, so it's his growing entity. But I don't know, man.

Stars feel pretty aligned for like 20-30 World Cup and fucking Riyadh. Well, because they'll spend, I mean, the Messi's salary is indicative of,

they'll spend any amount of money. I mean, they would have given Tiger like, what, like a billion dollars to,

you know, he just didn't need it. And it'll be interesting. To live golf tour. And the thing is, even without that, I mean, like,

what's interesting is like Messi's currently on Paris Saint-G, Qatar basically owns, you know, that team, right? Yeah. And then the,

the uniform is Qatar Airways. So what's interesting is that the Gulf, like soccer is clearly like a status thing for these guys and and and there's this kind of takeover happening of uh of of of soccer um by by by golf countries and if you have bottomless money like you can do that i mean the messy tourism deal it's like literally like he goes down there and takes a few instagram pictures and they give him like tens of millions of dollars it's

it's not officially for the world cup but like obviously you know you're promoting Saudi tourism and soccer. So, like, the subtext is the 2030 games. And Argentina, where Messi is from, is part of a competing bid. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, I guess, like, to be fair, it used to be the U.S. that had, like, David Beckham at the end of his career, you know, here in L.A. But, like, the difference here, obviously, is, like, the reason that Maham bin Salman is seeking these kinds of ornaments is to kind of change what we think about when we think about him because of what he's done, not just with Khashoggi, but in a lot of ways. And you just have to keep reminding yourself each time, like, that that that's where this money comes from. Yeah. There's an MLS team that I think has offered

messy an ownership stake in the franchise. Yeah, the Miami team, but I don't think they can compete with Saudi money. I mean, who can. I mean, the only thing there is that Miami's like the capital Latin American in a lot of ways. So he's got this platform down back to, you know. Would you rather live in Miami or Riyadh, bud? Come on. Jetta. Actually, I mean, yeah, that's, he doesn't want to. God, he's got more money than anyone. God, he probably pays no taxes and savvy.

When is it enough enough, you know? Well, that's true, yeah. Okay, last thing before we get to Ben's interview. So we have all spent the last few months watching Elon Musk run Twitter into the ground. He spent $44 billion and then recently valued his own company at $20 billion. So tough. There was that one hilarious week, Ben, when Twitter Blue was rolled out and you could impersonate, you know, brands or anybody you want it for eight bucks. That was fun. Since then, it's been mostly just

whining from people on Twitter with blue check marks about losing their blue verification check marks, even as they pretend they don't care about the check marks and say they're going to quit the site and then come back the next day like nothing ever happened. But every once in while, Elon and his little minions do something capricious and stupid and genuinely damaging. Like last week when Twitter decided to label NPR as state-affiliated media, giving it the same label a state-run propaganda channels like RT in Russia. That happened, even though their own definition of state-affiliated media said that organizations with editorial independence like the BBC or NPR are not defined as state media. So Elon is like, he didn't seem to know his own

policy. He didn't seem to know the NPR gets less than 1% of its funding from the U.S. government or that the BBC gets his funding from British citizens who are charged a license. He's clearly never been subjected to a week-long pitch drive. on Morning Edition. We could have solved this for you, one tote bag. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Come on. Yeah.

What are you doing? That's a really good point. So, like, it's just so frustrating to watch these idiots who have, like, not thought for one minute about these hard issues, kind of learn the facts in real time. And then in the process, just, like, destroy what was once a pretty helpful way to get news. It's always interesting that these guys, like, Elon Musk and these general, the general vibe of, like, the crypto tech bro, like, drive by. geopolitical experts, like walk constantly right into like, what about Putin, what aboutism,

you know, like kind of positions, like NPR, we've got the same label as Pravda and is RT, you know, like, they just always trends in that direction, you know. Yeah, why is that? I mean, it's just like a right wing thing. It's just a right, the breadcrumbs are just laid in that direction, so they just like follow them, you know, but it does show, but just from a business standpoint, to like why are you down in those weeds of like how you're labeling mpr it just shows like the kind of enormous colossal pettiness of this whole enterprise yeah because you wanted to like you know show the gang at t p u.sa that you like owned the libs yeah you're you're just you really wanted to dunk on like terry gross like what fuck is going on i love mvr like back the fuck off mpr okay

like and by the way i was in the u.s government they state media shit like i i never they kicked They kick the shit out of us because they were actually smart. They actually knew what the fuck they were talking about. They'd lull you in with their hush tones and then they'd like drop the hammer on you. Or Arii Shapiro and have like that really friendly thing. But then like by the third question, like, fuck, he just walked me right into the end of a labyrinth. Yeah, this super tall, handsome man with a miracle voice just destroyed me. You just go go watch the sweaty balls as an L tape and just calm down anyone.

Just chill out. Just chill out. Okay. We're going to take a quick break. And we come back. You'll hear Ben's interview with Valerie. Hopkins from New York Times about reporting in Russia. So stick around for that. Okay, we are very pleased to welcome to Potsidu, the world, Valerie Hopkins, who is an

international correspondent for the New York Times, who's covered Russia and Ukraine extraordinarily well, bringing stories of how Russians are thinking, how they're experiencing the war, among other things. So Valerie, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me on. So, you know, one question I think that is on a lot of people's mind, and we'll get to the arrest of Evan Gerskovich in a moment here, but just in terms of being a reporter in Russia since the war started, how has your reporting had to change? Like, what risks are you aware of, both to either yourself or your sources that has led you to make adjustments over the course of the

last year? Hmm. That's a great question, but I wouldn't say that my reporting has been adjusted in the past year, I think that, you know, Moscow 2021 wasn't exactly, you know, an easy place to report. It obviously became much more difficult after Russia invaded Ukraine. It became much more complicated. And certainly many people didn't feel safe at that time and left. I was in Ukraine reporting about Ukraine. So I didn't have to make that decision about leaving. But when everybody came back, When people did come back, it was in a much smaller group. You know, I think I can count on one hand the number of American reporters we had in Moscow.

And I would say it was just more of a constant awareness that we are under surveillance, which we already were before, that we are being watched and followed, especially when we travel outside, that we are being sort of harassed. by local media outlets if we travel outside of Moscow as well and in the course of our normal reporting. You know, every outlet made different decisions in terms of how to respond to the very strict censorship laws that were passed several weeks or not even, you know, less than a week after the war started. You know, things like not being allowed to use the word war, not being allowed to be allowed to use the word war, not being allowed to. to disseminate any information that wasn't, you know, part of the official Ministry of Defense's information. You know, when I was deciding whether or not I would go back, the discussion I had with my editors was that I don't want to make any compromises about that. I don't want to

not call a war a war. And I don't want to, you know, I don't want my reporting to be hindered in any way. And I would say probably Evan had the same discussions with his editors. Did you guys talk, it's interesting you mentioned the handful of American reporters there. And did you guys talk to each other about this? I mean, you talk about talking to your editors, but were you, as a Times person, talking to Evan, the journal person, talking to the people who are there for other Western outlets? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, it is funny that, you know, the Times in the journal are, are, competitors. But, you know, first of all, Evan was in Moscow far longer than I was, and he was always

providing me with advice, you know, encouraging me to pursue whatever line of, you know, storyline I was pursuing. And also, most importantly, you know, with Evan and with other journalists, we sort of shared our experiences, you know, strange things that happened to us in the field, perceptions about what was going on. And, and most of these, sort of, you know, were frequently commenting on what was happening around us, right? So, you know, we had a conversation over dinner one night in February, I think, after two people who gave a video interview like Vox Pop to Deutsche Vela were charged with something that's called discrediting the armed forces of the Russian Federation. So that's, you know, saying something about the war that's not

flattering to the war. And those people were tracked down, I guess, using facial recognition. because they didn't give their names, and they were charged. So we would very frequently have discussions about how do we continue to do journalism in such an environment. Then I think a month after that, there was a man on the Moscow metro who was just reading his phone, and he was taken in by the police because his neighbor denounced him for having something sort of pro-Ukrainian on his phone. I don't know exactly what it was. So, you know, it was a very tense environment and only by sharing this information kind of were we able to figure out how we would go about our work. But, you know, for Evan and also for me and for others, what we cared about most and what we focused on most was how to make sure that none of our reporting harmed the people that chose to talk to us, whether those were people in the street or whether those were sources, you know,

there was always this feeling that the real danger is to them rather than, rather than to us, journalists with, you know, accreditation from the foreign ministry. And this will begin to get into Evan's story. But, I mean, you mentioned that the harassment picks up when you leave Moscow. Whereas, you know, Moscow, I think they like to keep this appearance that it's just like, you know, cosmopolitan. I mean, I've also been photographed in broad daylight talking to sources at Moscow restaurants, with a person who fits the profile 100% of belonging to the security services, just sitting behind me with their phone, like, you know, right in my face.

So I guess it's intensified a bit. All right, I'm going to take a tangent here. Let's do that before the war. I'm going to take a quick tangent here to tell you a story, which is that when I was doing the negotiations with the Cubans, when I was in government, I was meeting the Cubans in a hotel in Canada once, and I went to check in. and this very conspicuous couple tattoos just really stood out,

walked up to me, stood about three feet from me, very close, took out an iPhone and just started taking pictures of me. I'm certain it was the Russians. It's a weird tactic that they have. Like, we want you to know we're watching. But I guess what I was getting at is like,

you know, what do you think they don't want the world to know? Like, it seems like if there's sensitivity to going outside of Moscow and with Evan it was, you know, maybe reporting on the Wagner group, but it might also be reporting on just public sentiments out in the provinces. Like, what is your sense of, what is this about? Is this that they don't want the world to know certain things that are only available to reporters you can get out and talk to people?

I mean, believe me, this is a constant source of conversation in the last 13 days. among our friend group, among other correspondents, among other people who, you know, follow Russia. You know, I think in part it's a systemic extension of this kind of need to completely control the message, right? I mean, you know, at a time when the state is doing things like relieving a single dad of custody over his 12-year-old daughter because of things he wrote on social media, or because of something she, a picture she drew in school, you know, or accusing, you know, a 19-year-old college student of supporting terrorism for an Instagram post, you know, Evan was still trying to do incredibly ambitious and incredibly difficult reporting. I think that is pretty annoying to the security services. I, you know, I hesitate to speculate on what they're really thinking, right? You know, there are many people who think that they are looking for people to use in a potential exchange for the many Russian spies that have been getting arrested in the recent weeks and months.

But, you know, again, I don't want to speculate on those, on that. But I think it's just, for me, it's incredibly heartbreaking because, you know, there was already so few American journalists in Russia, you know, like, of course, it's a very difficult assignment, you know, to be a reporter from what Russia calls an unfriendly country, you know, from a country that, you know, foreign ministry says they're de facto fighting a war against. But at the same time, you know, America with its role in the world and Russia, the biggest country in the world, and Russia, the biggest country in the world, like need to find some understanding. And I think that, you know, having people on the ground providing a nuanced picture of the country contributes a lot to that. And it's a, it's very, very upsetting to think about just, you know, it's already become so much harder after one year of the war to figure out what's going on in Russia and to report about the war. And I don't want to even think about what will happen, you know, the longer, the longer this goes on. But I mean, I think Evan is an incredibly resourceful, incredibly talented, fluent in Russian and creative journalist.

And I think that that's not something that the Kremlin appreciates to put it mildly. Yeah. I mean, well, let's talk about Evan. for a moment here. I mean, what, you know, you guys are colleagues in a way, even if you work for competitive papers and you clearly know him well. And what's it like to see him, you know, you've covered, you know, people arrested and you see the footage of them being taken into custody and you see, you know, the kind of Potemkin legal proceedings begin. What's it like to watch that and see someone you know, like Evan, like, what?

When you see those images of him, what do you think is going through his head? Like, he must have obviously known the risks. Like, how do you, what do you see when you see your friend? I still have a hard time articulating it, you know, with some other friends who were also close to Evan. A few days ago, we were talking about the way that we were, you know, zooming in. You know, there's not very much, you know, there's basically one photo of him. Yeah. In his coat, which I've just seen him wearing, you know, days before his arrival.

it's it's incredibly it's incredibly hard to watch and it's incredibly scary um and it's infuriating and i think you know i just the only thing i can think of is that i that i hope he he can get home very soon and and and you know knowing even as i do i pretty much think he um what can i say, I think he's just frustrated that he can't be covering Russia right now and instead he's stuck, you know, aside from the whole ordeal, you know, but I think it's, it's, it is, you know, I've spent, I've gone to a lot of trials in the past year, uh, for people who have been accused of pretty trumped up charges. Um, and this is the first time for me that, that, that I've been been personally affected. And you just see how it, it, it completely destroys like an entire circle of people, everybody who's, who's, you know, Evans family, his friends, all the people that care about him, you know, like hundreds and thousands of people, you know, who studied with him, who, you know, who can't really do very much besides think about how to get him free. And I do wonder about, you know, how that just gets, is being

replicated on a very large scale at this point in Russia with political prisoners, also with people who were not, you know, actively engaging in politics, but simply, you know, thought that they could still share a joke on the internet. Yeah. Well, you know, they, you said understandably you're not going to speculate about motivation. I mean, clearly the Kremlin does things for, for a reason or multiple reasons. And, they charged him with very serious charges, right? This is not like a Britney Griner circumstance. You know, this is equating him with a spy.

Yes, although they changed the laws just before the war started to really broaden the definition of espionage, right? So it's incredibly broad at this point. It's sort of even if you don't pass information, for instance, to another, to any government or any other party. you know, having any knowledge of like essentially the military industrial complex or any knowledge of the military or it's it's so incredibly broad that that so much can fall under it. I just don't want to overstate. I wish I could be a more specific. No, that's a good point. I just don't want to overstate that it's, you know, I mean, they have in their statement, of course, they said that he was doing this in the orders of the U.S. But but the way that they have rewritten the law was, you know, precisely to be able to. to apply it to any number of actually quite petty offenses. Yeah. Sorry, I shouldn't even say petty offenses because it's actually just the normal

type of job. Anything that they determine. My colleagues, you know, would do anywhere in the world. No, it's like it's not unlike, you know, the national security law in Hong Kong, right? Which is like nobody quite knows what it is. Like talking to a foreigner could get you thrown in prison. But the question I had is like they may. obviously try to leverage this for exchanges, spies, like you said. But also, like, they have to know

that Western media outlets are now, everybody's going to be thinking about, like, whether or not it's safe to report there. Do you think it's safe for people to report there? And do you think, again, you know, you don't have to answer it, but like the, that they're part of their motivation maybe that they don't want anyone reporting there? Well, I think this has certainly had a chilling effect, right? Every single journal sitting in Moscow has been talking to each other, talking to their editors, trying to determine the risks, and also trying to find, you know, some reason why they maybe are safe, right? You know, different European, people from different European countries think, oh, well, our country doesn't do exchange, so I'm not a target, or maybe I just won't

look into these certain things. But I think that what we've seen, over the past 14 months and more is that we're dealing with an incredibly unpredictable apparatus. So, you know, I remember before I went back, I felt that Russia was more dangerous than Ukraine. You know, I don't want to offend anyone. But like, you know, and if you are going to cover the front line in Ukraine, you prepare for it. You have a security team. You have, you know, protective gear. You hopefully have someone with you who knows how to do, you know, proper first aid. And you're primed for it.

And in Russia, you know, and then you limit your exposure. And in Russia, it's just very unpredictable, you know. Evan was able to do incredible reporting since he came back in July without any hindrance. And now all of a sudden, you know, he's being taken away from a barbecue restaurant with a sweater over his head. Yeah. And that's what's so scary is you don't know what the thing is, right? That, you know, why is something totally normal one day and then the next day you're in prison?

And, you know, we've seen Russia do this in the past, like demonstration cases to more broadly chill. I wanted to ask you about Russian opinion, which you've covered. because it's such a black box. And, you know, the first, the kind of elimination of Russian independent media kind of silenced a portion of that. Obviously, the political opposition with the Luxeinevon, in prison has been pushed out of the country. We just don't have a good handle on what Russians think of this war. What is your— I think nobody, you know, they certainly don't want us to.

Yeah. Well, no, that's my question is like, what do you think is the, what is the more nuanced version, you know, between like Russians are kind of mindlessly going along with this because they worship the state or they like Putin? That's clearly not my experience of Russians, but I'm aware that the Russians I know are, you know, basically the liberal opposition. So what is your sense of what people don't know about Russian opinion about this war? Well, I think it's really mixed. And, you know, my conversations with ordinary Russians that I would encounter were always, you know, have been some of the most enriching and fascinating part of my reporting. You know, and we would discuss with Evan quite a lot and with other friends that, you know, while there was certainly, you know, I mean, there's several groups of people, right? About 20% of people admit to pollsters that they don't support the war. which is already saying something, you know, a much smaller percentage of those people are out protesting, bringing flowers to a Ukrainian monument in Moscow, trying to engage in certain acts of civil disobedience. You know, 20,000 people were detained, you know, since last February for protesting against the war in various ways.

So, you know, this is not an insignificant. number. And then there are also a group of people who seem to not really know what they think and who have seemed to given the higher, the decision making to a power that, you know, they believe is more informed than them. But there is also another trend in society, which is people, especially in this information vacuum, becoming more and more supportive, you know, the more, you know, as Russia becomes ever more cut off from the West, and as, you know, as information, as access information is kind of more and more tightened, you know, some people, and maybe just because some people are like that, you know, people are feeling the rally around the flag effect, you know, and this applies.

I did some reporting recently in the city of resigned where there's an elite paratroopers training school. And, you know, I went to the cemetery. I talked to the mother, you know, and she's, you know, she was upset that the invasion wasn't prepared very well. She was upset that her son died. But she didn't question the premise of the invasion. She wasn't angry that it was happening. Well, that was my, yeah, that was what I was going to ask you, though. like so okay you've got you know the people who opposed a war but then there's this question of there might be people that completely accept the premise of the war you know completely usually defer to the

state on matters and yet maybe their loved ones are dying or maybe they're worried about another round of mobilization or maybe just things are getting worse i mean what what should we watch for in terms of cracks among opinion that is not uh you know against the war for the reasons we would want them to be against the war, but may just, like, there may be fatigue or, or frustration or, or the loss of a loved one. Like, what, are there things we should watch for, uh, to get? Because usually people watch for things like protests, but that's going to be very hard in the, the, the kind of police state you describe, like, what do you look for? What would you counsel people to look for as, as metrics, uh, you know, that, of whether that's happening or not? Well, for instance, one metric is,

there's been a 50% spike I heard yesterday on the Russian news in interest in VPNs. You know, the state is trying to, to crack down so much on access to information into the internet. And people are actually hungry to get VPN. You know, there's always a concept. We were in our group chat with Evan. They were always like, what's going on with this VPN? Let's go in with that one. You know, it was, it was like a game of whack-a-mole constantly, you know.

And so there are people who are hungry for information. There are people who have been brave enough to put videos of themselves complaining about the conditions that their husbands and sons are being treated in at the front. But, you know, I think it's going to take a long time. You know, it took a long time for resentment, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to really bubble up. And, you know, part of that is what the Nobel Prize winning Belarusian author, Svetlana Alexievich, you know, noted as this need for, you know, if your son is going to die, you need to feel like it mattered. You need to feel like it was important. And that, in some ways, that's, that's drawing people further because they've, you know, they've had to make sacrifices, whether it's that, you know, prices have gone up. And they can afford less, you know, or they, you know, they, They're not getting as good benefits now from the government or the health system is struggling. You know, I think people want to feel like it's worth it. And a lot of people, you know, separately actually blame the West and not Putin for that.

And, you know, they often show it to me as evidence that the West has always hated Russia and sought to destroy it. And they are really people who are happy that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, Putin is defending them against, you know, defending them against it and asserting himself. Yeah. Against the West, yeah. Well, look, last question is just like, we've talked a good bit about Evan. I think you've given us a sense of how dogged he is as a reporter. I mean, is there anything else you would want people to know about him as a person?

Is there watching this story and thinking about him? He's just really funny. He's cool. You know, he's very, you know, he's just, he's a, he's a, he's, an all-American kind of kind thoughtful. I don't know. He has an energy and a warmth and a charisma, you know, that like anybody listening, like, he would befriend you, you know. This is the kind of guy that he is. And I hate to think of him now not being able to be social and have fun. You know, he's the kind of guy when you come to Moscow and say, like, man, I don't know anyone.

I'm not even in, you know, a group chat for correspondence. He makes you a group chat, you know, and then proceeds to talk to you. I'm, you know, I'm sort of still at a loss for what I could say, that he's just, he's a very, he's, he's, he's an incredible friend. And a very brave guy. And the most important thing actually is, you know, that he really loves, he really loves his job. You know, this is like, this job is exactly his dream. And I think that he, you know, he really wanted and wants, you know, he's important for him that people care about this story. And it was important.

Every story he puts a lot of work into them in order to be. in order to make it alive for people, you know, because if this is going to end, you know, and it will end, you know, what happens inside of Russia is going to play a big role in that. And, you know, he took this risk, you know, to keep all of us better informed about it. And I think now we owe it to him to get him out. Yeah. Well, look, that's a great note to end on. People should definitely follow you.

you follow your work and like wherever you end up. We hope you stay safe and and we'll obviously be hoping the same for Evan. So thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much for having me. Thanks again to Valerie for joining the show. Ben, I'm supposed to say at the end of each episode, follow us at Crooked Media on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok and subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full videos of this show and exclusive content like the really awesome video. I don't know if you've seen this yet of you and Wali Adiyammo. talking about sanctions. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, actually check that out because, yeah, Wally breaks shit down, man. And he did some extra sanction explaining, yeah, like people should definitely check that.

If you ever heard the word sanction and not known what the hell it is and wondered, check out the Potsay of the World YouTube page. We should give Wally like a whole, not that he has,

doesn't have better things to do, but you could have a whole podcast on sanctions when he leaves treasury. Yeah, sure. Just come break it down. How old is he? He's embarrassingly young. It looks really young.

Yeah, yeah. Embarrassingly, like, I mean, It's embarrassing how much she's accomplished. Yeah. No, yeah, while he's, he's not, I mean, he's kind of in our neighbor. Okay. All right.

Well, I'm listening. I'm so stupid enough. But listen, check it out, Pod Save the World on YouTube, and leave us a review if you feel so inclined. Yeah, it makes this feel good. Cool. Thanks for listening. Pod Save the World is a cricket media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez.

Our producer is Haley Muse. Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Segglin, Charlotte Landis, and DeCilius Futopoulos, are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, and Milo Kim, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every week and check out the POD Save the World YouTube account. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.