The Bulwark Podcast - Bill Kristol and Elaina Plott Calabro: A Sordid Lot

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Kash Patel, who could potentially run the FBI, is a compulsive liar who can't keep his facts straight about his work experience or even where he was born. Aside from being a player in the attempted coup, even Trump loyalists are alarmed by his devotion to the president-elect. Meanwhile, by pardoning Hunter, Biden is not only putting his family ahead of the public interest, he's also giving a giant gift to Trump. Plus, more details on Pete Hegseth's disqualifying behavior, and Trump's avenue for getting around the Senate confirmation process. Elaina Plott Calabro and Bill Kristol join Tim Miller. show notes: Elaina's profile of Kash Patel Patel's target list Jack Goldsmith on Trump getting around the Senate confirmation process Tim and Sam on Biden's pardon of Hunter Tim and Sam on Pete Hegseth's mom 

Hello and welcome to the Bullwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Holy shit, the holidays are over and we've got a lot of news. Pete Hegseth, uprated by his own mother. More whistleblower reports from his coworkers. A foreign conflict is intensifying in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria. The president pardoned his own son. We're going to get to all that eventually with our next guest, Bill Kristol, your usual

Bill Kristol Monday. He'll be in segment two. But first, we've got to cover the chilling choice for FBI director from the president elect Donald Trump. And to do so, I've got fave of the pod, Alina Plot-Colabro, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of The Man Who Will Do Anything for Trump, oppression profile of that very nominee, Cash Patel. What's up, Alaina? Welcome back to the pod.

Hey, Tim. Thank you for having me. I want to do all cash with you. And I should mention that this isn't the type of thing that you nominate somebody for because Chris Ray, the sitting FBI director, his term doesn't end until 2027. But we'll get into all that with Bill. With you, I want to focus mostly on Cash's background. But first, I just, I can't help myself because the last time you were on, we're talking about your Kamala Harris profile. And you know, there's just been all of this kind of autopsy stuff like that obsesses over, you know, tactical things like should

she have gone on Rogan, et cetera. You cetera. Some of that stuff gets a little tiresome. And I'm curious though, from your vantage point, having spent time with her and covered her, about whether you had any impressions now with the distance of the post-election on the way that Biden might have not set her up for success or the personal kind of background that you wrote about and how she was kind of navigating, making

herself more vulnerable and more public. I don't know, kind of, I was open-ended. I just wanted to pick your brain on the Kamala of it before we got to Keshe. I mean, it's crazy. I feel like when we talked or even when I published my profile of her in October, I didn't expect this, but it was almost received as sort of heterodox to make the point that Biden was possibly setting her up for failure.

I got a lot of heat about that, not just from Biden's people, but I think a lot of Kamala supporters too, which sort of surprised me. But I guess I thought that seemed to be more obvious through my reporting than perhaps it was to other people. But look, I always felt strongly that his commitment to being a bridge to the next generation was clearly never a priority of his from the outset of the administration, that that was

just not a promise that the American people should take seriously by virtue of the sort of assignments that he was giving Kamala Harris. I think the fact that he gave her the so-called root causes issue of border policy, I mean, really at the very beginning, I think said all you needed to say about how seriously he took her future in the party

and how seriously he took the idea that his legacy might depend on her fulfilling it if that makes sense. So my opinions haven't changed with respect to that at all. But I also think we talked about this too. I just think there was never a point in a campaign where she was really able to kind of make sense for voters the difference between Kamala Harris in 2019 and Kamala Harris now. I understand people who say,

well, she didn't run a woke campaign or anything like that. And that's true. She did not put her identity first really to the extent that even Hillary Clinton did when she ran in 2016. But I think the Trump campaign was really effectively able to exploit sort of position she'd taken in 2019. And she just didn't have the answer to that that I think and to provide the clarity that I think maybe a lot of Americans were

looking for. Yeah, it's tough. Well, I could do more on this, but coconut time is sadly in our past. And unfortunately, cash might be in our future, I guess we will see. I guess my first question for you on this is, the people like us, like me that have followed this closely, you see this on your social media of choice, people that follow this closely are very freaked out about cash.

Like regular people might not understand why. And so I'm curious what, at the biggest picture, why you think that is, that people in the know are so concerned about this nomination? Well, I would say first the dissonance has to do with the fact that he was really not, in terms of his public profile, a high profile figure during his time throughout the administration. I mean, that was one of the dynamics I found fascinating in covering him, that you ask the average American who's Cash Patel and they would probably have absolutely no idea. Meanwhile, he's, I don't know, at his peak was chief of staff to the acting secretary of defense, you know,

getting the president dangerously close to- Acting chief of staff to the acting secretary. Correct, correct. I don't know. You know, getting dangerously close to convincing Trump to investigate the Italy gate conspiracy theory after he maintained that he had not in fact lost the 2020 election.

For people that don't recall, the Italy gate was that there was some Italian satellites or something that was interfering with the election. Yeah, and it was like two people in a Romanian prison, perhaps, who were kind of coordinating all this or knew a bunch about it that Cash Patel was really insistent that we get people on the ground to interview them. And Chief of Staff Martin Meadows was like, that sounds like a great idea. And it only took somebody else in DOD to be like, hey, no, I'm not doing

this for that to be shut down. But I think that dissonance is important because while you have a public who couldn't pick this guy out of a lineup, he is becoming perilously close not only to carrying out things like this, but also becoming deputy director of the CIA, deputy director of the FBI. I mean, for those who are new to Kash Patel, there were so many times throughout the administration when he came close to holding a position like the one he's been nominated for now. And I think the idea was always that because he was kind of thwarted from those roles in the end by someone like Attorney General Bill Barr or Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Mark Milley or CIA Director Gina Haspel that in a second Trump term there would not be people like that around to thwart him

from getting positions like that. Yeah I want to read a couple of those quotes that you're referencing. This is Charles Kupperman who's Trump's deputy national security advisor for the last year or two of the administration on Cash Patel, his nomination for FBI. He's absolutely unqualified for this job. He's untrustworthy. It's an absolute disgrace to American citizens to even consider an individual of this nature. That was Trump's deputy national security advisor.

Bill Barr, this was early in his book about Patel getting the deputy FBI director job. He had virtually no experience that would qualify him to serve at the highest level of the world's preeminent law enforcement agency. The idea that he would have this job is a quote, a shocking detachment from reality. And Barr said he would get it over his dead body. Gina Hasbell, Trump's CIA director,

threatened to resign over cash becoming her deputy. So like those are all Trump's own people, you know, talking about both his personal traits, but also his resume and you like you wrote a lot about his resume. So people who don't know like talk about just how, like what his background is and how unqualified he would be for this position. like what his background is and how unqualified he would be for this position. So from the sheer vantage of his background, even before anything professional, he's the most difficult person I've ever profiled just in the sense that, you know, if I were to profile you, Tim, and I went to look at a statement you'd made once about where you were born, I'd probably take it on good faith that you were not lying about

that. You know, every once in a while, I will fudge my age, you know, when at the gay bar, every once in a while, you know, but besides that, I think you could verify everything. So, Cashtail, this was not the case with him. I soon found that even the most kind of basic, take it on good faith information like that, like I would really have to dig in and check because I would find that in these recent clips, you know, he talks ad nauseum about how the reason

he and Trump get along so well is that they're both from Queens, just a couple of guys from Queens. Cash Patel is in fact from Garden City, which, for those who know, is a pretty, totally suburb on Long Island. Lying about being from Queens. That's an interesting start. So that sort of is a primer for us as we go forward. But Cash Patel, he goes to Pace Law School in New York. He has these visions of being

a criminal defense attorney at a high-powered firm, but he gets no offers from the firms he applies to. So on a whim, he kind of decides to do an interview with the Miami-Dade Public Defender's Office and gets the job, which is really one of the most prestigious public defender's offices in the country. So for the next decade or so, he's going from there and then the Federal Defender's Office in Miami. And I spoke to a lot of colleagues of

his there during those times and said that, you know, they really never expected to see him become the person that he is today, that he was, you know, a basically competent attorney. He did not appear, especially political. There are other things that we can go into later that maybe, you know, seem prescient when thinking about today. But the important part is, is that eventually he ends up at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and spends a couple of years there before ultimately landing with Devin Nunez on the House Intel Committee. And that's sort of where the story of Cash Patel, as we understand it today, and sort

of the right-wing consciousness begins. Yeah. And so, he's in the public defender's office. And again, that's a legit job, right? And then, you know, the Nunes job is, I guess he's like his attorney slash fixer on the committee looking into Russiagate and then goes into the Trump administration. So just like straight on the bio, like when you're looking at the bar quotes and the covering quotes, like this is not a person that either really has experience like leading an operation or an organization of any kind,

or really any like related FBI experience. I guess the only thing you could say is part of his remit and the administration was counter-terrorism stuff, but he does a lot of lying and exaggerating about his remit within the administration. You know, he talks a lot about when he pushes back against those who question his experience, he will talk about being in the counterterrorism section of DOJ when he was a prosecutor there. But again, that's another place where it took me a long time to try to establish the facts

of what it was he actually did there. I mean, in his book, he talks about how he led the prosecuting team. He led the trial team for main justice in Benghazi. Not true at all. I spoke to people who did actually run that trial team and were involved in it. And one person just said, good God. When I read back to her what Cash had written in his book. So again, even the things he could, I think, credibly pull from in bolstering this sense

of, you know, I've been in this world, I'm quite familiar with it, fluent with it, you know, the there is not really there. And I should also say that with people like Kupperman, I also spoke to people who oversaw him in the National Security Council alongside Kupferman. I think that the way Cash Patel enjoys framing things, he's either the ultimate victim or the unjustly persecuted in every story he tells about himself, when the fact is that even though he kind of likes to make out that everyone in the administration, other than maybe Trump, was out to get him from the outset.

He says it's because they were always jealous of his relationship with Donald Trump. When I spoke to people who served with him on the National Security Council, they said that actually everybody was pretty open to getting to know him, because they just didn't know much about him. I mean, there was no reason really to have

a strong dislike or affection for him at that time. But what they found was, you know, instead of sitting down with them to try to go through, okay, this is what we assigned to you last week. Can we go through, you know, your performance basically? He was really fixated more than anything else on getting FaceTime with Trump and like always strategizing sort of how to be in the same room with him. And it got to a point where he had this script that his colleagues could essentially repeat

verbatim, which was, you know, Mr. Trump, I saved your presidency through my work on the Russia investigation. I'm here and I won't let them get you again. That's concerning. And that is to something else I've heard you that you wrote about in the profile I've heard you talk about is He's not Stephen Miller, right? Like he does not have it like a deep ideological Bearing that is related to MAGA really right like and that that his MAGAness is

mostly just in this total willingness to be completely subservient to Trump and blind loyalty to Trump and You know, it's in that anecdote that you told and it's also evident and kind of what, or maybe not evident, but it is the thing that concerns people the most about what he plans for, a potential directorship with the FBI. So, and is there anything else just on his kind of blind loyalty, other examples of that,

that you came across in your reporting? I mean, so many, there were allegations from a lot of, including before Congress, and testimony from senior staff of the National Security Council that Kash Patel, despite not having Ukraine anywhere in his portfolio, was essentially running a sort of backed channel with Donald Trump through which he would send him information on Ukraine. And we don't know what that information was. with Donald Trump through which he would send him information on Ukraine. And we don't know what that information was.

I think Fiona Hill testified that that was the concerning part. She didn't know that, you know, this would ultimately tie into Donald Trump's first impeachment hearing, of course. But, you know, what was Kash Patel discussing with respect to Ukraine with Donald Trump, that Fiona Hill, who oversaw Ukraine in that division, just didn't know about whatsoever, which I think gets to a larger point. I think the fear that I learned about from people around Kash Patel in the administration, again, people who, by any other metric, would be considered very MAGA. These are not just the deep state cronies who happen to, you know, hide and be held over from the Obama administration or something.

These were people who came to a point where they said they didn't know what Cash Patel was capable of, in part because, like you said, Tim, there was no really ideological framework guiding his approach to anything other than what is it that Donald Trump wants me to do today. So when I was trying to make sense of, okay, well, what were the specific reasons that for someone like Gina Haspel, the idea of him being her deputy was just so utterly terrifying. The same thing with, you know, Bill Barr and the like. And it really was just, we would have no idea what to expect day to day. It's not so much what he

would do, but you know, what wouldn't he do if given the opportunity. Yeah. So it's that fierce loyalty. And there's kind of, this is sort of the lying by omission, like the going around people acting nefariously element of it that you hear from sources. But there's also just the straight lying. I mean, you mentioned this about his background with regards to being from Queens. You know, there's another in your story, there's a long time Trump advisor who said he'd been in Patel's presence more than once when he claimed you as the person who gave the order for US forces to kill al-Baghdadi in 2019, an operation for which Patel by his own admission

wasn't even in the Situation Room. Just these preposterous lies that he tells to people internally. And the other great example of this that you've given your story, which had real world potential consequences, was in Africa. So maybe share the story about what happened in that situation in Niger or any other absurd Cash Patel lies that you'd like to vamp about. an American taken hostage in Niger at the border with Nigeria and Department of Defense was doing a coordination with multiple agencies to try to figure out our extraction strategy for this American. This was shortly before the election in 2020. They'd essentially gotten everything ready, but the final outstanding task was they needed to get airspace clearance from Nigeria to kind of actually, you know, be able to fly through and not get shot down. That's why we

asked for permission to do things like that. And a senior official at DOD ends up calling Cash Patel, who at the time is leading the counterterrorism section of the National Security Council. And he says, hey, you know, what do you know about Secretary of State Pompeo's status on getting this airspace clearance? And Cash Patel says, oh, he got it. I just talked with his team, he got it, we're good to go. And the person is like, you know, are you sure about that? Because that's our, we can go then. He's like, nope, you've got the green light, let's do it. And so Secretary of Defense Mark Esper,

this gets back to him, he gets everything off the ground and our SEALs are in helicopters within miles of the international border when Mark Esper learns that in fact, we don't have that airspace clearance, we don't have it. And so there is kind of this immediate scramble to communicate that to the SEALs who then stall

for the next hour. They're essentially just flying in circles as our officials try to figure out here in DC, you know, what on earth happened. It got to the point where Esper was calling Chief of Staff Mark Meadows because they just they couldn't get anyone from Nigeria to pick up the phone basically saying this is going to be the have to be the president's call. Either we just go in and risk getting shot down or we call this operation off and potentially risk like never actually getting this hostage. But just as they're kind of coming to that moment of truth,

Pompeo's deputy calls in and is like, we've got the clearance, we can go. And so we ultimately do rescue that hostage. It is, by those metrics, a very successful operation. And as they are kind of crowding around the situation room, I had two sources tell me that Tony Tata, the person in the Pentagon to whom Cash had given the story about Pompeo having gotten the airspace rights, is, you know, what the hell happened? Like, what are you doing? What the expletive were you thinking?

And Cash Patel is, I'm told by these two sources who witnessed it, was just incredibly blase and said, if nobody dies, who the F cares? And I think in my reporting on him, and I reported for months, I was even texting you about it, I remember during the process, that was probably the most chilling anecdote I came across, in large part, I think, because, I mean, myself included, but also the people I was talking to about this incident, to this day have never been able to make sense of his motives. So I should note that Mark Esper, by the way, in his own book, in his own book, I mean, he comes to the conclusion that Cash Patel just made the story up. I mean, he can't think of any other way that this would have come about.

Pompeo, he speaks with Pompeo who says, I never spoke with Cash Patel about this. I spent many of nights trying to think there has to be some logical explanation behind this. And the reason that I put it at the end of that piece as I did is because I do think that, you know, it symbolizes, you know, what Americans could possibly be in for. I mean, again, this was not just a game of sins and, you know, Cash Patel wanting to stick it to the man or whatever. I mean, these were actual the lives of our soldiers on the line. Just a very scary moment overall. I mean, it seems like the explanation is compulsive lying based on some of the other work that you did in the story. I because it's hard to hard to come up with a other conclusion that makes sense. I should note too, Tim quickly that as I as I noted in the piece, that he does deny that

this exchange took place and in a statement said that he would never willingly put American lives at risk. So, there is that. So, there you go. I'm sure that we can just take that to the bank when it comes to statements for our potential next FBI director. I want to play another clip from him while we're listening to Cash for Tell in his own words. He's been a frequent guest on Steve Bannon's War Room. There's the MAGA hat when he's on there sometimes. I don't think it is in this clip.

I want to listen to him talking about, at this time, I guess Bannon was floating in for the head of CIA, but I want to listen to what he said his plan would have been had he been the head of CIA. Do you believe that you can deliver the goods on this in a pretty short order, the first couple of months, so we can get rolling on prosecutions? Yes, we will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media. Yes, we're going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We're going to come after you, whether it's criminal or civilly, we'll figure that out. But yeah, we're putting you all on notice. And Steve, this is why they hate us. This is why we're tyrannical. This is why we're dictators.

So we've got somebody with blind loyalty to Trump, who is seemingly maybe a compulsive liar, kind of bragging about why people call him a wannabe dictator while discussing his potential authoritarian plans. And he wrote a whole book about this that you read, Government Gangsters. And so I'm curious, like your sense for how serious they are about all of this. And in Government Gangsters, he talks about,

I don't know if he talks about actually prosecuting the media, but he does talk about prosecuting the prosecutors and the people that went after Trump pretty explicitly. Well, his hatred of the media is certainly clear throughout the entirety of his book I would say that Hatred of the media and resentment towards reporters has been a theme of his career from even his days as a federal defender I think it's pretty instrumental in shaping the person that he is now But if you look at the back of the book in appendix, I don't know if it's a or b

There is an actual list of what at the back of the book in appendix, I don't know if it's A or B, there is an actual list of what he considers members of the deep state. So if you're curious, if you're anyone listening is on that list, and if you might be facing retaliation from Cash Patel's FBI director, you can look there just to double check. I'm pretty confident we have a couple listeners that are on the list. Yeah. But no, I think he's completely serious and I think it goes back to there's nothing animating this person other than devotion to Trump and I think grievance, personal grievance.

This is not just about wanting to avenge Trump. I think it is important to clarify. It's about avenging himself. He is someone who feels that he was terribly wronged by the system from his days as a federal defender as he got more exposure to the upper echelons of federal government. He feels he was treated incredibly unfairly by the media, by his colleagues. I think the essential danger of Cash Patel is it's not actually just about loyalty to Donald Trump. For him, the directorship of the FBI

would just be a personal platform to exact revenge on his enemies. What I, as a reporter, I'm going to want to pay attention to is to what degree Americans decide that that is actually helping them in their daily lives. I mean, this is always the thing I've wondered about Cash Patel. And if I'd gotten to interview him, I would have asked him, how do you sell Americans on the idea that by targeting, you know,

these various DOJ attorneys and whatnot that you don't like is actually manifesting in a way that makes their life better day to day? I mean, how is that getting the price of eggs down? And so, you know, I don't know how Americans will react to his stewardship of that office, if indeed he does take it, in large part because I don't totally know what he's going to do or the means by which he's going to carry it out. Yeah, I guess that is another question I have from your conversations. I'd obviously, Haspel

and others didn't want him in these roles because they didn't know what he was going to do. But there's always this sort of question when you're thinking about Trump people versus malice and incompetence and the balance. You look at somebody like Russ Vogt, and I think he's somebody that there's a lot of concern is deeply competent and has deeply thought through what he might do at OMB. I want to talk about him more later this week. The cash situation is more like, who the hell knows, right? Like has he demonstrated in anything since the public defender's office in his life, has he demonstrated any ability to actually execute on plans? I mean, even the Nunes thing, like at this time with working for Nunes, there

weren't a lot of, a lot of pelts or a lot of things to point to of actual success. Right? there weren't a lot of pelts or a lot of things to point to of actual success, right? I would say that in his memo, he did credibly identify gaps in the FBI's process of obtaining the warrant on Carter Page. So I think there were moments in that Russia memo that I think were actually sometimes unfairly overshadowed by the media in terms of their gravity. But his response to that was to sort of say, the media is coming after me because they hate me

and they hate Donald Trump. And my response is I have to get back at them, no matter what. So I do think there are moments where he's shown that, he can be maybe a capable person, but at this point, I think he's so blinded by very personal grievances that to the extent that he maintains some confidence,

I highly suspect it will not be used for any laudatory reason during his tenure. Laudatory is a nice way to put it. Hey everybody. There's a lot of discussion out there these days about the mainstream media and how to handle Trump. I think one thing that we can't lose sight of is that it is important to support investigative journalism that is reporting on what is actually

happening in the Trump White House and in the Trump transition. And for me, one of the outlets that I turn to when it comes to this is our next sponsor, The Washington Post. This podcast is sponsored by The Washington Post. When you go to washingtonpost.com slash the bulwark, listeners can get an exclusive deal to subscribe to The Washington Post for just 50 cents per week for your first year. If you listen to us, you know the great work The Washington Post does on a bunch of topics. We have Catherine Rampell on.

She's always fighting the good fight over on CNN as well. She keeps those posts on the economy. I've turned to post reporters for investigations into the first Trump administration and for their expertise and insight, particularly in what we were talking about on this podcast, ways that they are looking at corrupting the Justice Department and the FBI and our intelligence agencies. Plus, if you're in a rush and need to catch up quickly on the day's most important

and interesting stories, The Post's The 7 Newsletter is a quick commute read sent each weekday morning, and it's also available as a podcast. The Post offers a cool feature for audio lovers like you. You can actually listen to articles in addition to reading them, so you can tackle your to-do list and catch up on the news at the same time. Now more than ever, it's important to stay up to date on the world, so go to washingtonpost.com slash the bulwark to subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year. That's 80% off their typical offer, so this is truly a steal. Once again, that's washingtonpost.com backslash the bulwark to subscribe for just 50 cents per week for your first year.

We have not mentioned either the fact that he had a children's book or nor the fact that he was one of the producers, I guess, of the January 6th choir. Him and Ed Henry somehow were involved in that. Yeah, so the choir thing I get a little confused on whether he was an actual producer or played some other. He has some role in that, but at this point, it's been so many months that it's a bit fuzzy to me. But the children's book, yes, it's called The Pl plot against the king, Donald Trump being the king and Cash Patel being the wizard who Duke Devon calls on to basically help him save the king from the shifty knight who is Adam Shipp and Hillary Queen-ton. So subtle there. That's a nice pun.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of a children's book version of the Russian investigation. And my understanding is that it has actually sold pretty well. The children's book has? Yes. Well, that's exciting. It has.

That's really something to think about. All right. Well, I'm just wondering, always in these profiles, Jeff Goldberg cuts something that you wish was in there or you finish it and all of a sudden calls start coming in, one of the frustrations of profile writing. So is there anything from the cutting room floor, anything since, any other developments on cash that you think are worth marinating on? I mean, actually, this goes back already to something we discussed at the beginning. We really just didn't have room to get into kind of the Italy gate conspiracy theory because

I thought that was such a fascinating example of just by that point in the administration and this was the very end, Cash Patel really had started to understand how to use the levers of power to his desired ends. I mean, the fact that the White House chief of staff is seriously considering the value of using American taxpayer dollars to send investigators overseas to talk to two people about one of, I would say, probably the most inane conspiracy theory related to the so-called election fraud that Trump claimed took place in 2020. It's a competitive category. It's a competitive category.

The bamboo, the Hugo Chavez. But I think for the reason that it takes a lot of explaining to really, I think, capture the insanity of it. We just didn't have the space for it in the end. But yeah, I'll always have Italy gate is what I say. I guess the thing that is just about his shameless, to me, the Italy gate story and all this, like his behavior just around January 6th, he was doing the, the two-step where he is literally inside the government as a key player in this plot, right? Like trying to give Donald Trump fake information, proving that the election was stolen,

nominating himself for various roles where he can help protect Trump and help keep him in power. While at the same time, going out in the, out in mega media world and being like, people call this an insurrection, it's fake, it was a Fed's erection, it was really Nancy Pelosi's fault. Right, so he's like engaging in it on the one hand, and then on the other hand, just doing like bald-faced lying publicly. I think that that is a telling nugget about the type of person that we're gonna have.

Well, I should say one element of loyalty that you had asked about this earlier, and this was an example that didn't come to me until just now, I noted in the piece, and I wish I could have spent more time on it, but when Donald Trump was storing classified documents at Mar-a-Lago and suddenly the investigation was opened into that, Cash Patel is the one who inserts himself into that situation and says, Trump verbally declassified them. He told me that he

was declassifying them as he was leaving the White House. Talked to several people who said that that never happened. That absolutely never happened. And I talked to one source, you know, a Trump World source of mine going on eight years now, said he had actually stopped talking to Cash Patel because he was convinced that anytime a call came through, it was clearly wiretapped by the FBI with what he was saying about the verbal declassification that this was something he just felt he needed to cut off his relationship with this person over that he was just too radioactive. It's probably a mistake for that person in retrospect, given where Cash is going.

Elena, so helpful. Thank you so much for reading us out on this and for all of your reporting. I'm sure you've got some other delicious profiles you're working on right now of other upstanding individuals like Cash Patel, and we'll have you back here to discuss them as well. Thank you so much, Tim. It was so fun to see you as ever. All right. We'll see you up next. Bill Crystal.

Winter came to New Orleans this week. It was, I don't know, I think like 58 degrees yesterday. It was chilly and my schedule's packed and I'm eating a lot. And that means one thing, it's tis the season for the perfect jean. Stretchy enough for that second or third helping of stuffing and cranberry sauce, soft enough to go full couch potato, watch NFL,

and stylish enough to wear to a holiday gathering, which I just did last night to my friend's goodbye party. The Perfect Jeans are well, perfect for all your winter activities. Between holiday shopping and endless parties, the last thing you need to stress about is finding jeans that fit. The Perfect Jeans makes it easy with six fits, waists from 26 to 50 and lengths from 26 to 38. Whether you're a short king or towering, Nikola Jokic like Adonis rocking a relaxed fit or holding onto your skinny jeans like

me, the Perfect Gene has over 5,000 combinations to keep you looking and feeling great all season long. For a limited time, our listeners get 15% off their first order plus free shipping at theperfectgene.nyc or google the perfect gene and use code theboltwork for 15% off. This personal endorsement is going to be short, but I don't know if I can give you anything that's more clear on how versatile these jeans are and how important they've been for me. They're the only pair of pants that I packed for a trip to West Virginia. Not exactly what I'm trying to style, you know, being around the in-laws and,

you know, going to Mama's house over in Beckley. It's, you know, that's not your stylish spot, but they're comfy. They still look good. They looked appropriate for a Thanksgiving picture with the family. And then wore them again, aforementioned, to a cool party like a hipster wine bar here in New Orleans. Same jeans, wore in both places. What better endorsement could you have than that? The perfect jean doesn't stop there though. They've revolutionized t-shirts as well. The Perfect T has just enough stretch to hide your beer belly. No, not a problem for me.

While accentuating your arms, also not a problem for me. For that flawless look, it's soft as butter without shrinking in the wash like all your other tees. It's just perfect. It's finally time to get out of those uncomfortable jeans by going to theperfectjean.nyc. Our listeners get 15% off your first order plus free shipping, free returns, and free exchanges It's just perfect. It's finally time to get out of those uncomfortable jeans by going to theperfectgene.nyc. Our listeners get 15% off your first order

plus free shipping, free returns, and free exchanges when you use code BULWARK15 at checkout. That's 15% off for new customers at theperfectgene.nyc with promo code BULWARK15. After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Get rid of those khakis and get the perfect gene.

All right. We are back with Bill Kristol, who was listening in on that pretty chilling conversation with Elena Plott. I want to talk with you, Bill, about some of the implications of what we just heard and of this decision. One thing, she mentioned this list of people that is in government gangsters. I just pulled it up and I'm going to put it up here. We'll post a link where you guys can look at the names. You don't have to buy

government gangsters. Look at the target names here on the list, but among them are mostly the people that were investigating Trump. You're John Brennan's, Comey is on the list. Sarah Isger Flores over at the dispatch on the list. Stephanie Grisham, Gina Haspel, Robert Herr. Poor Robert Herr, getting it from both sides. Charles Kupperman is on the list. Maybe explains the quote from him that I read earlier. Andy McCabe, etc., etc.

Pretty alarming to think that there's a hit list from somebody that is potentially the nominee for FBI director. So Bill, I guess top level, wondering what your reactions are to cash and what you just heard. I mean, it's an appalling nomination. The notion that this is all haphazard and Trump's a goofball and he picks these people out of a hat, some of which is all true obviously, but they've been if you think just step back the unimportant agencies they went to the more

respectable people right? Doug Burgum, what is Burgum gonna be? Who cares? Interior or something. Interior, he got a bonus too. Interior Andy's like in charge of energy or something. He got a special envoy job as well. And it is and some of the people who want to pretend everything will be kind of okay in the Trump second term are like, yeah, he's not so bad. And the deputy national security advisor is a guy I know, you probably know Alex Wong from Romney days and then he worked on the Hill and he's not terrible. And then you look at the agencies where they can really go after civil liberties, where

they can really destroy the rule of law, where they can really centralize and personalize power, where if they add these kinds of appointees to the power they'll get from putting in place Schedule F, which replaces civil service with political appointees, and if you add in the pardon power, and if you add in doctrines of executive power that they believe in, it's very bad. I mean, it's as scary as we thought it would be a few months ago, I think. Yeah. I mean, the Cash Patel was always the example that was like, this is the ridiculous example, right? Like during the campaign, it was like, what are some ridiculous names for people that I would just name off the cuff when I was doing

interviews to try to talk about what a Trump administration could look like? His was the name that would come up. I mean, he just, to what we read from Kupferman and Barr and all of them, like, it is absurd. Like, imagine being a lifelong, you know, FBI agent. You know, you've worked your way up, you're in your 50s, you're 60s, you're a regional head. And like, you've got to report to this clown. You have to report to this person that was selling a cryptocurrency and going on MAGA podcasts two minutes ago. This person, he's never been an agent.

He's never been an administrator of any kind. I mean, what really brings it home and I think strengthens even the point that you're making about Patel being slightly in a class by himself. These other people are terrible in many ways. Gabbard's really awful. Just what you would do to intelligence, Hague, that's totally unqualified to say the least. But Patel was involved in January 6th. I think it's, is he the, am I right to say

he's the only really key appointee? I think that we'd have to throw Pam Bondi in there because she was in Pennsylvania. Now we're down to making fine distinctions, yes. And I hold that against Bondi and I'm very annoyed that everyone's saying, well, Pam Bondi, that's a respectable pick, she just spent two months going around Pennsylvania and elsewhere being an election denier.

She was still an election denier, sort of on the outside. You might say, literally not in the government. Patel was in the middle of the plot to have a coup. He was literally at the defense department. He was what terrified all the former secretaries of defense to send that and made them send that letter on January 2nd, I think it was, or 3rd, saying we cannot have the military used in this way. He's what had General Milley, you know, with his hair on fire quite appropriately when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

He and his, some of his colleagues, but he above all actually, because his boss, the secretary of defense, was this Chris Milley guy who was not, I think, a serious person. And it was Patel who was pulling all the strings who had, as Elaine has said, sort of the connections by that elsewhere in the administration, in intelligence and at the White House to help try to pull these strings. It didn't work, obviously. But I think in that respect, Patel is even worse than the others because it is the, it's the November 3rd to January 6th coup effort now becoming

the second term administration, if I can put it that way. Correct. Yeah. And the people, I just think about that Africa story, right? And what's happening, right? And the key players there. And you have Pompeo and you have Esper and you have Patel, right? And it's like Esper's waiting for the go from Pompeo.

Patel is the one that is in the middle of it that fucks it all up with his just lies. He's just totally irresponsible lying, the type of thing that would get anybody dismissed if they were not a loyalist of the president. Um, like I just, at that level of seriousness and national security implications to just tell a bald faced lie that was you're obviously gonna get caught for, you know, like to me, it's like thinking about me lying when I was in like third grade or something. I lied to my parents about what my report card was going to say, like to buy myself three days before the report card came. You know, it's like,

you know that you don't, you're going to get caught. But he's such a compulsive liar that he lies about Nigeria giving their space. You just kind of think about that situation. And I'm no fan of Pompeo, and Esper has acted pretty admirably. But like, now you get into administration 2.0 and the person that survived is not either of the secretaries that were acting responsibly. And one of them was a pretty big Trump loyalist, frankly. It is the guy that almost like that put our soldiers at risk to advance absurd lies that is the one that is around solely because he's willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants and that is a very telling anecdote. That's really a good point and he's being put in the I don't know maybe the most sensitive of all the sensitive

positions very close to the most sensitive head of the FBI and no other political appointees there but the FBI director gets a lot of power over the... Well, we don't know if they'll incidentally remain the case that there are no other political appointees there, but they want to put him in as head of the law enforcement agency of the federal government, if you want to think of it that way, the one that has the most ability to make life miserable for the people that Patel wants to make life miserable for, right? So it's really terrible. I would also say, and I make this point in Morning Shots, that I don't think he'll be confirmed, though I don't know.

I've lost all confidence in these kinds of statements. But even if he's not, they have worked out, and Jack Goldsmith explains this in some detail on Twitter and Blue Sky, whichever one you're on. Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, you just look it up. I will put a link to it in the show notes for people. He's over at our friends with law fair. It's really good. I mean, if he's not confirmed, there'll be a vacancy.

And the Trump lawyers are not idiots, some of them. And they've looked closely at the Vacancies Act, which is loose, I would say. It gives the president a lot of discretion. You could put in someone who's at GS-15 level in that agency or any Senate confirmed person from anywhere else in the government. And so suddenly Trump puts in a cash-per-tell type loyalist, not even clear he couldn't

put in cash-per-tell himself, exactly, if they just give him a job in the FBI for 90 days and then bump him up. And suddenly you have an acting director who's in effect a mini cash-per-tell or a slightly less flamboyant cash-per-tell. And that I think is going to be a pattern throughout the government at the director and secretary level, you know, director of the FBI or secretary of defense, as it was incidentally after November. Think again about November 3rd to January 6th.

Who are the people who were there, right? I mean, Patel is there working for an acting secretary of defense and there's an acting attorney general after Barley and so forth. So they're going to do this throughout the government and they'll do it at the subordinate levels too, because they'll be acting assistant secret's and so forth. So they're going to do this throughout the government and they'll do it at the subordinate levels too because they'll be acting assistant secretaries and so forth. The degree to which the unfortunately Trump himself isn't really up to or interested in thinking looking at these details with the degree to which the sort of authoritarian infrastructure of Trumpism, Heritage Foundation and the lawyers and the people reporting to

Russ Vought and Stephen Miller, the degree to which they have worked out, think they've worked out a way to make the government do what Trump wants and what they want and do things that really should not be permitted. I think in a way Patel, whether he makes it or not, brings that home to us. And there's just been all this focus on the potential recess appointments, you know, before the Gates withdrawal, you know, there's an issue that just does require some level of cooperation with the Hill, etc., in which the vacancies loophole, if you will, does not, right?

And Goldsmith goes through it in great detail. And as Shedd built, like the short of it is, in some ways a lengthy Patel nomination, like it might be distracting in other ways, right? To have to go through the confirmation hearings, maybe they don't wanna do it, but provides the opportunity to, you know, put in acting officials into some of these jobs, including at the FBI for very long periods of time.

And you are limited in who you can put in there, but that is where this ties directly into the Project 2025 efforts of the Heritage Foundation, that if you've identified somebody who's a next generation cash patel, a quasi-loyalist within any of these agencies, they could conceivably be promoted to this job as well as somebody that had been promoted to another Senate confirmed position, which I think brings in the importance of they're putting some clowns into these lesser Senate confirmed positions that there aren't going to be fights over because there's not any appetite among Senate Republicans for fights about who is on the board of various other

commissions. And those people could then get moved in. The best example of this in the first term was Matt Whitaker getting put in as acting AG after Sessions left. Right, which they could do legally because he was there at the Justice World Order. He was many layers down, but several layers down. But he's not the deputy. Right, not at all.

I guess he was not set it confirmed, I believe, just a senior appointee. Look, think of this, Patel's held up, Trump keeps the nomination out there, but says, meanwhile, I want Patel to work in the White House as my special advisor. Then they put someone in or find someone in the FBI. There's got to be one very Trump acquiescent type somewhere in the FBI. Maybe they've found him already, or they put someone into the FBI on January 21st. I think then you have to be there 90 days.

Okay. And then Patel just pulls the strings from the White House through some Matt Whitaker equivalent, right? I mean, the degree to which they can do things and look, Congress can then do other things in response, obviously, can threaten to change the Vacancies Act, can threaten to cut off funding for positions. The old days, Congress had ways to prevent administrations or deter administrations from doing this kind of thing, because it was a normal world where people didn't want to offend appropriators and powerful committee chairs. With a Republican Senate and a Republican House,

how much deterrence will they even try to have? Not much. So I think people should be very alarmed. I want to talk also about the Christopher Ray element of this. The FBI directors are appointed for 10 year terms. It's supposed to be a non-political appointment. There are a lot of reforms, post-Watergate, post-Hoover, FBI to try to ensure the independence of the bureau.

Trump broke that the first time by firing Comey. There's a huge uproar over that, but he puts Wray in there who was, I think it calmed the uproar somewhat, right? Because it was a respectable choice, was not a cash Patel. He was a perfectly reasonable person to put in that job. Any president really could have put him in that job, right? There was nothing, not Aga in any meaningful way. He had the experience for the job. He had the resume, unlike Patel,

he had the respect of people within the Bureau. So for now, for him to fire Ray, the person that he had put there two years before the term expires, it is just a massive undermining of the independence of the FBI in a way that the first one was not. It was kind of like a trial run for. David Frum in The Atlantic writes about this and says, what Trump is trying will, if successful, be a constitutional scandal far greater than Watergate. And, you know, the nature of Patel kind of just overshadows that. It's just a dismissal of Ray itself on the

merits is a scandal. So I wonder, A, what you think about that and B, whether you think that Christopher Ray should force Trump to fire him or quit before the term starts. So I very much agree with David's argument in the constitutional crisis, which is a little more the firing of Ray than the nomination of Patel, though. In fact, both are the flip sides, you might say, of one bigger crisis. Incidentally, in 2017, I'm a little fuzzy on this, but I believe when Trump fired Comey, given the 10-year term, it would be challenged or at least would look really inappropriate if he just fired him with no cause. So remember they jint up some fake report, I think, Rose, from the Justice Department that he had messed up the Clinton,

from the Deputy Attorney General's office or something, that he had messed up the Clinton investigation. And that was kind of their grounds for which Trump did it. This time they're not even pretending, right? That's a good point. They did trump up like some pun intended, some fake rationale. Yeah, this time it's just I'm coming in, I'm firing Chris Wray because he didn't, I don't even know what he didn't do that they wanted. They did trump up like some pun intended, some fake rationale. Right. Yeah. This time it's just I'm coming in, I'm firing Chris Wray because he didn't, I don't even know what he didn't do that they wanted. Well, we do know what he, I guess we know what he didn't do. I don't know what didn't he do.

He had to stop investigations. I mean, like the Mar-a-Lago raid. I guess that's right. I guess that's the key. I was thinking. Of course, he also, they also went ahead, the Biden Justice Department with the investigation of Hunter Biden. So I guess the Trump people can't complain too much about that though.

I'm sure they can. They can and they will. Yes, they will. Anyway, yes. So Ray goes, as you said, that is really part of the crisis and part of the, again, just very revealing as to what Trump's intentions are. They could have worked around Ray in some ways, right? It's not like Ray proved himself to be a bitter internal bureaucratic fighter or he was way out there against Trump. He was kind of a low profile head of the FBI.

Anyway, they could have worked around Ray and that's not enough for what Trump wants to accomplish. Well, there'll be much more on this. There'll give us plenty to talk about, but it is extremely concerning. It's moved to the top of my list just for people to have a sense of these things I thought that gabbered was the most alarming choice And I think it's for me. It's clearly patel now at this point and in a context where he wanted gates at justice He's now got bondy who is as you say those was a real election denier and obviously he's going to go along with anything

So I I agree with you that this should be the top of the list. It was Bondi and Patel is as bad worse really than Gates by himself. Oh for sure. So for me. I would move on to Hunter. Just a general point for people we've been doing kind of breaking news reaction stuff on YouTube. So I did some of this already last night with Sam Stein and so folks make sure to subscribe to our YouTube feed if you're looking for that. if you can't wait till your late afternoon fix. For anybody that wants that YouTube feed, you know I'm just appalled by this. I will give my rationale for that at greater length here in a minute. But Bill, I'm curious just for your open thoughts on the president's decision to pardon his

son. No, a big mistake, I think, on the merits, a big mistake in timing, honestly. I mean, I'm against it anyway, but this is but just a trivial point people haven't seen this point made he could have done christmas eve he could have done it on january 19th that's often when these things happen maybe it will you know he doesn't literally the day after the patella announcement when it's perfectly obvious that people really believe in the rule of law are going to be trying as we are to take on the Patel thing. And now he's totally muddied, not totally, he's somewhat muddied the water. So I'm against it anyway, but annoyed at the way he did it, annoyed at the statement rationalizing it, which is pretty disingenuous, ignores the fact, the fact is, he said he wouldn't do it, right, pretty recently, even in 2024. And it was, I think he said it during

the trial, it was clear that he might, Hunter Biden might get convicted. So it's bad in that way. People say, well, Roger Clinton and Kushner's father, Charles Kushner, they had been, whatever you think of those pardons, which are not great, incidentally, they were pardoned kind of to clear the record, I guess, 10 or 15 years after they had served time in prison. This is the first time a president has pardoned a family member who's like in the midst of a criminal investigation.

And in fact, the huge majority of pardons are afterwards to kind of make it help someone who maybe was unfairly, has a black mark on his record and is a felon and so forth. So this is bad, I think, and it's wrong on the merits that it's bad politically and it doesn't speak well, honestly, for President Biden himself, I don't think. Yeah, I think the defense of pardon, we have Kim Whaley in the in the board today that makes that defense and there's an element of it that I agree with. So I want to start with that, which is

that in this particular case, like if this person was Hunter Miller, they're not being charged with this. I think that's pretty clear at this point. There aren't really other examples of people being prosecuted and having to serve jail time for this particular crime of lying on a gun form about doing drugs. I think I saw somebody online say that the estimate is that something like 20,000 people in the country that have lied on a gun form that are actively using drugs. You just look at the percentages of the country that does drugs. I agree with that. And if I was on the jury, I would have acquitted Hunter Biden.

Like I don't think that Hunter Biden should go to jail for this crime. I got some negative feedback from people a while back when I said, I fired off a tweet that I was like, I don't think that either Steve Bannon or Hunter Biden should have gone to jail for their crimes. I think that both of them potentially have committed other crimes that were jailable. In Hunter's case, some of them were videotaped. In Steve's case, at least one of them, he's still under and potentially going to trial for, which is the scam that he ran.

So I agree with that defense of the pardon, if you're defending it on the merits. The problem is that the president spent months, years talking about how nobody is above the law and how he wasn't going to do this and vowing not to do this. Like he said that he was not going to do it. So if you wanted to defend it on the merits, you had to defend it on the merits the whole time. Right? He lied about it. And now we do this at this time when Donald Trump is about to engage in corrupt acts around

pardons, including he just put Charlie Kushner, Jared's dad, who he pardoned in the first term, now is our ambassador to France. So there's just going to be astonishing corruption in the Trump administration, like beyond anybody's imagination. And this is just a gift, and it's not to say that he wouldn't have done it otherwise, but it is a gift to them, to then be able to say, well, Joe Biden, pardon this kid. It's just an easy one-sentence retort that now everybody has. And like, how can you in good faith go to somebody in your life who is Trump curious and complain about Cash Patel or Charlie Kushner,

and then have a credible response to them when it comes to Hunter. Jonathan Shade wrote it like this, principles become much harder to defend when their most famous defenders have compromised them flagrantly. With the pardon decision, like his stubborn insistence on running for a second term, he couldn't win. Biden chose to prioritize his own feelings over the defense of the country. It's hard to argue with that, I think. So I don't know, Bill, do you have any thoughts on either the merits of the actual pardon

or kind of this broader principle? No, I agree with that. I mean, maybe I don't know enough about the offenses to know how serious they were. The overall behavior is not very seemly. That doesn't mean you should go to jail. We don't know that he would have gone to jail. I mean, there would have been, if I'm not mistaken, a, there are appeals and B, we don't know what the judge would have sentenced.

But I guess I was thinking back to, you know, that New York trial with brag that Trump got convicted on for 34 counts. A lot of us weren't sure that was a kind of the right case to bring, but he brought it, it was upheld on appeal that he could bring it. They went to a jury. They seemed to have a conscientious judge. And I remember when the Trump people all went crazy, when he was found guilty, we all said, I think in good faith, look, who knows? We're not experts. Who knows if this case was slightly on one side of the line or the other, but it was a jury trial

with a judge. They found that they looked at the evidence. They were there. We weren't looking at it closely. We have to respect the jury system and the judicial system, otherwise, where are we, right? And this again was brought by a special counsel, so it's a little complicated, but anyway, it was brought in a regular federal court, it wasn't some kind of star chamber with presumably regular citizens on the jury, I didn't follow it very closely, honestly, and Biden had the best lawyers, I think, on, you know, available, you know, to defend him. He would have, he was going to appeal. I very much don't approve it in all those,

in all those grants. The sophisticated retort to what I've just said is, well, once Trump takes over the Justice Department, they'll just go after him even more. And, you know, there'll be no chance. But again, he doesn't change the judge or- There will still be juries and a judge in the Trump administration. Right? Like this difference is still like, Oh, that Trump is immediately moving to gulags. I know I can continue to monitor this. Yes. He's going to target people.

Yes. I'm worried about cash, but tell, but Hunter Biden would still have to go in front of a jury's at least for now. I don't know how things are going to look in 2029, but like, what are you talking about? I, this is, this goes to to the defense that gets me so frustrated. I want to talk about two of the defenses of Hunter that I've seen and Biden's actions. One is just that this, stop you never Trumpers with your norms. It's over.

Donald Trump is one. He's a rapist. He broke all the norms. Nobody cares. Why should we act within norms? There's something to that emotionally. Like I get the nihilist view of all this. I guess my response is kind of, well, if we're going to start breaking norms, can we break

some norms that help people other than Joe Biden and his family? That'd be my first reply. But just also, it's like, well, then what are we doing here? What is the point? Our whole existence as Antonever Trumpers is we're leaving the Republican Party. We're leaving Trump because we found this behavior appalling. Now you're saying to us, well, now we've got it. Well, we can just go ahead and act like that now because there are no rules anymore and you should no longer be appalled and you should just go along to

get along. That's not that compelling of a case for me. I don't know. Let's say you to the people that are like, the norms are over because Trump has won again and none of this matters anymore. Well, and the Trump Justice Department will be just totally out of control, which I believe it could well be out of control. But you say they still are presumably on criminal cases. I don't know if they can fix civil cases. Maybe they can get Elon Musk to pay for civil cases. They can do a lot of damage. I talk to anyone they want to go after. No question. They're going to do a lot of damage and I would like to be able to object to it. And they're going to do a lot of damage.

On the other hand, we do need, I think, to make our case, to have some faith in parts of the system remaining, otherwise what are we defending? And I'm struck how many people I know, and I saw this on a couple of text chains, but also online last night, early this morning, are now saying, and incidentally, Biden should pardon many, many people. The list that's in Cash Patel's book and Jack Smith and stuff, who explicitly, Trump and others have said they're going to go after.

I'm not for that. I think it's a mistake. I think it's a kind of preemptive capitulation and we should raise money so no one gets bankrupted by these draws. People are good defense lawyers, but I think I prefer for everyone to fight, but maybe that's a little too easy for me to say. That was Biden's attitude. The Trump Justice Department is going to be a nightmare and the whole judicial system could be a nightmare. I've got to pardon as many people as I can who are in the sites of Patel and, and Bannon and everyone else.

Well then do that all at once. But don't pardon, you know, Hunter Biden on Thanksgiving weekend. And not Andy McCabe. I don't even know that he's considering, I don't think he's going to pardon all those other people. I think it would be pretty weird and pretty odd. You know, they haven't done anything wrong. So was he pardoning before preemptively against Trump doing

stuff that he's threatened to do? I guess you could do that, but then do it all at once. Right. And I think honestly, if Hunter Biden were one of 82 names on a list that's been put together of people that senior Trump nominees and Trump himself have particularly personally targeted, you could make a colorable case that this is the right thing to do as you leave office. But that's a January 19th pardon of 80 people, one of whom is Biden.

That's not an individual pardon of his own son because he thinks it was not a very strong case. Yeah, I might be on the list of people that would defend the thing that you just made. Because that's at least protecting and guarding against Trump instead of this just myopic focus on his family. And this is where I just have to come to the last thing. And I just want to tell people, give people a trigger warning on this. We're going to Pete Higgs next. So if you want to fast forward through this, you can. But the Biden family defense enrages me for two reasons.

Number one, because the Biden family has obligations to us. It's public service. You want to be the president of the United States. Okay. He was the president of the United States. Okay. And so part of public services is sacrifice. And I'm sorry, like having to be told over and over again, for

a year or two, that we need to care about the feelings of Joe Biden's family and his personal feelings when he was deciding whether or not to run. We got to care about, about Hunter Biden and his legal troubles. And then we've got to put that as the prime concern over the public interest. Over protecting ourselves from Trump over protecting the democracy. I reject that. Like I completely reject it. And while I'm sympathetic to Joe Biden as a person, and he's gone through unimaginable tragedies, unimaginable.

And I understand that and I empathize with it. But again, he made the choice to run for president again. And when you did that and when you win, you take an oath to the country, not to protecting Hunter Biden. And the last thing I'll say about the family is, Hunter Biden has made horrific judgments over and over again. And I'm not talking about his addiction. During the so-called five and a half

year period where he's been sober, he took his baby mama to court to not pay child support for his kid. So you're talking about how Joe Biden needs to put his family first. Is that grandkid of his not part of the family? Because when we had to put the Biden family first, that didn't ever seem to be part of the conversation. And then after that, during this whole period, when after Joe Biden's debate, when it was extremely obvious that he needed to step aside to protect the country, Hunter is hanging out in the Oval Office and nudging Biden to stay in the race. This is sober Hunter. Okay. So I'm not saying he needs to go to jail for those things. I'm just saying like, this is a person that's shown horrific judgment.

And at a time of great peril for the country, Joe Biden put him and his bad choices above everybody else. And I'm sorry, that's just not acceptable. It just isn't. And if he was so concerned about Hunter and that was the top thing, then he didn't, he needed not to have run for president again. And that's just my final thought about Biden and Hunter. And that's just one little footnote. I very much agree with that. And I think that's a subtle

point, but an important one. The wish to run again for president is really at the heart of a lot of this mistake as well, right? Because what he had had all those reassurances and how he wasn't going to pardon Hunter if he wasn't thinking that that would harm him politically in 2024, if he didn't tell people he was... And in fact, I mean, honestly, if he had said at the end of 2020, I'm not running again for a second term, he probably could have pardoned Hunter at the beginning of 2023, before the jury trial,

before the whole thing, or just dismissed that special counsel, said, look, I'm sorry, this thing is out of control. I'm not running again. I'm not watching how to go through this. It's over. And then there's a primary and Biden's a lame dog and no one really, you know, some people could have distanced from it and said that

was a bad decision. And everybody probably would have frankly, everybody would have distanced from it, I think in that context, and that would have been fine. Yeah. So other people whose personal lives are a complete disaster, who want to have positions of public trust on like disaster, who want to have positions of public trust on like Hunter, who is just a guy. The nominee for the Department of Defense, Pete Hagseth. We discussed with great laughter, me and Sam Stein over on YouTube, the email from his

mother where he said that he is an abuser of women. She essentially calls him a bad person in this email. She's backed off of that now, but she sent that email a few months after the incident in California where the woman accused him of sexual assault and where he just said it was a consensual affair that was happening in between his second and third wives while his love child was a newborn. Then we have a new New Yorker story from Jane Mayer talking about his time running a couple of veterans groups, including one that you had a little bit of involvement with, so I'm

going to ask you about this. Here's Mayer. A trail of documents corroborated by the accounts of his former colleagues indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups he ran. In one of the cases, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club. Shout out, Louisiana. He had brought his staff to that strip club and Hegseth, who was married at the time and other members of the management team, were sexually pursuing the organization's female staffers. So that's

the guy that they want to run the Defense Department and you're aware his other qualifications are being a weekend talk show host. So Bill, I'm wondering what your thoughts were about the story and any insight you can have particularly with regards to that organization Vets for Freedom that you had some involvement with. I mean, Jane Mayer and her colleagues at the New Yorker got a lot more information than I knew or maybe I once do a little bit and forgotten've forgotten honestly, but this whistleblower report from several employees, I guess, at one of those two organizations, I can't remember which, about his misbehavior in various ways, I guess she's seen this report and quotes it.

And so that's from people at the time who presumably signed up with that FETS organization because they were sympathetic to Hexeth and to the cause and they're complaining this is not again left-wing critics or you know Democrats or or whatever so pretty damning I think. I knew Pete a little in the Vets for Freedom days as I recall it was very early 2007-2008 I'm not sure these dates all match up maybe I can't remember when these groups officially got started and when he was just doing stuff. He was a big, he showed up in Washington, very well-spoken, ambitious veteran who wanted

to, who supported the war and supported the surge. And I helped him a little bit, I think, get in, meet some people and maybe get on TV or something. And he was a pretty articulate spokesman for the surge. And good to have a young veteran obviously do that. Remember, he got to the Bush White House, I think, in 2007 or 2008, was invited to, I don't know, stand up there when Bush made some speech about the war or about honoring veterans or something.

So, but I do remember that, enough to remember that there were questions raised about his management of that operation, and it was sort of quietly shut down No, I don't think they were criminal legal complaints or no one was covering up anything that they knew to be illegal Certainly no complaints from individuals, but enough Unseemly behavior that people just thought the donors thought, you know Well, it just closed this down and I think they slid it off into another group or something I decided part I sort of was not involved in it. I kind of hadn't carefully read the article yet.

So you're ahead of me probably if you have. But anyway, just to say, it's one thing if you were being, I don't know, nominated for some third level job somewhere, maybe you let bygones be bygones. He can be a, or maybe, and certainly, let's leave this nominated. Could he get normal FBI clearance for a political appointment anywhere? No, out of the question. This I know a little about because I processed these, I was Chief of Staff at Education and then for Vice President Coel and a lot of people came through who had little black marks

on their background from, if they came out in the FBI clearance, sometimes they were disqualifying. Often I actually was a little liberal on this and said, this isn't a disqualifying black mark. A lot of it in those days, of course, was smoking dope in college and stuff. But anyway, people had misbehaved and stuff. So I'm not even a super hard liner on this, but this is disqualifying. This is not ages ago.

This is what, 10, 15 years ago, or in the case of obviously the assault in California, the apparent assault 2017. And this is kind of repeated behavior with his own colleagues complaining about him. I wonder what references he gave. Well, but of course, it's not going to be, I guess, an FBI check. And he's being nominated for Secretary of Defense. He's not being nominated for a GS-14 position in the, I don't know, you know- Commerce. defense. He's not being nominated for GS 14 position in the, I don't know, you know, commerce, the commerce is doing public affairs for, you know, for some assistant secretary

to promote, you know, how they're doing better job of helping veterans get jobs. I don't want to minimize, you know, make fun of that work. It's important. But you know what I mean? I mean, that's we all know a million people who've had jobs like that. And some of them had slightly sketchy backgrounds probably, not as sketchy as Pete's I don't think. Secretary of Defense, Secretary of Defense. I mean, it should just be so disqualifying that every Republican senator should be laughing for a minute, but not laughing and then calling up Suzy Wiles or Trump directly or whoever they want and say, you got to withdraw. We cannot vote for this guy.

How can anybody vote for this person in good conscience? I mean, look, I'm not a strip club man. I don't begrudge anybody coming down to New Orleans and dancing on stage, getting a little drunk. That's great. That's everybody's prerogative. But the repeated behavior when it comes to female underlings, how can this person be in charge of the military? How can you approve somebody? If you're Joni Ernst, and this has been your issue, like which is the sexual assault problem crisis in the military, how can you confirm somebody that has repeatedly taken advantage of his station to abuse in certain cases or to, you know, target younger female underlings? He's had several affairs with them. There have been complaints

about him. Now whistleblower reports about the way that he behaved. He did it at every organization that he was at, at both of these nonprofit, you know, grass tops, you know, Astrochurf groups, also at Fox. His behavior in the workplace is unacceptable for somebody to run an organization like this. And then you just add on top of it just his behavior outside the workplace and the fact that he has no qualifications for the job. It's a completely preposterous appointment. Anybody who confirms him should be filled with deep shame.

I wanted to ask you, pick your brain on one thing related to this, which is that there is a kind of parallel. It's almost insulting to John Tower to call it a parallel. There was a long period, I think like a half century, where there were no cabinet secretaries that were rejected by Congress. And that streak was broken by the nomination of John Tower for Secretary of Defense in large part Because of reports of his behavior of drinking and carousing and inappropriate behavior with women that happened during your your time So I'm wondering if you have any memories of that and can kind of shed any light on that comparison and and how much worse

This is then then the rejection of tower. People were shocked that Tower was rejected. He was personally unpopular with a lot of his colleagues. He was the senator, he was chairman, ranking member, I guess, maybe had been chairman of armed services. Sam Nunn, the chairman, was against him. They had a bad personal relationship. Tower held almost every Republican, I think all but one in the Senate,

but the Democrats controlled the Senate, and they did in none reality the Democrats to defeat him. He had drinking and womanizing problems. I don't think there was honestly that much evidence that would have made him incapable of being a good secretary of defense, but maybe being a senator is a little different. In those days, the standard was so high

that you sort of accepted he would be a senator, quite an important senator, but senators can go out there and get drunk after three days of work each week, and secretaries of defense can't, and maybe they shouldn't be chasing women as much as a tower would. And so that was considered disqualifying.

As I say, it was a party line vote, so I wouldn't make too much of it. This is like so many layers, levels, different. It's really amazing. Just two quick points. The complaints, remember, are from people who were sympathetic to Hegseth, whether it was at Fox or these groups. They

wanted to work with him. They believed in the same cause and generally had the same general politics. So we're not talking about someone being plopped into an organization full of lefties and hostile bureaucrats who undercut him and are ginning up fake complaints. None of that. None of that. He's never worked in an organization that actually has anyone but people who agree with him, right? These different grass tops organizations and then Fox. But I also want to make a point that I just thought of as you were talking, which is a

cousin of the point that David Frum made that you said earlier about the firing of Ray is in a way as worrisome as the nomination of Patel. Trump's going to fire, I think, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Hex-Seth is explicitly called for that the day he takes over. He's gonna institute this program where they bring back retired military guys whom they choose to look at the three and four stars

and get rid of the ones who they think aren't doing a good job, I suppose, at making a recommendation to the Secretary of Defense. So it's both putting in someone wildly unqualified, wildly unsuited to the Secretary of Defense. So it's both putting in someone wildly unqualified, wildly unsuited to be Secretary of Defense, who'll just be a puppet for whatever any people in the White House want to do, but also beginning the process of politicizing the military,

of getting rid of other centers of power in the Pentagon. And so it is, that side of it shouldn't be lost side of either, right? I mean, there's a one-two punch here, which is, mean really can be devastating. I think to the military who's gonna work there Civilian employee, I mean, maybe I don't know military people have a lot of loyalty So maybe they'll stay I think a lot of colonels might get out of 20 years But civilian employees at defense just like the FBI incidentally just like the Justice Department, but of course they want that That's a feature not a bug Getting rid of hundreds of thousands of competent

civil servants or non-political military officers, that's what you want if you're an authoritarian and you take the chaos in the short term to end up with the political loyalists in the medium and long term. Imagine if you're someone that's followed the rules, it's done serious work, that's done many missions overseas, a high ranking government official.

You've got to report to this piece of shit. This like total disaster, fucking blow dried TV host who fucking plays grab ass with women that work for them and allegedly abuse women and like has no qualifications, you got to go report to this guy on cash Patel. It's like it's a it's an insult and and the people that are defending it should be ashamed of themselves. All right. I'm going to have a stroke. Keep going through all these topics today. So I just want to end with this. We're going to focus on foreign policy tomorrow. We've got Mark Hartling coming on the pod, which I'm really excited about. So but just

very briefly, if I could just pick your brain, an open-ended answer, but a lot happening over the holiday. We have protesters in Georgia clashing with police after the government suspends talks on joining the EU, a Russophile government. We've got the rebels in Syria taking towns and pushing back aggressively against the Assad regime and the most aggressive counter attack in quite some time in Syria. The Ukraine battles intensifying in Ukraine as I guess they struggle for position. Looking ahead to the potential negotiations during a Trump administration, do you have

any unifying thoughts on all that or is anything in particular about any of those areas you have thoughts about? I mean, some of those developments are hopeful. Certainly the behavior of civilians in Tbilisi and Georgia, I mean, obviously, Ukraine goes out saying Syria a little complicated, there's rebel groups, we don't love all of them. But still, I think very impressed. I mean, the degree to which people do not want to be lived to live under dictatorships

and do not want to live under Russian pawns and governments that are just taking orders from Russia or terrorist groups that are taking orders from Iran is heartening. The people want freedom. They want basically to live in the world that we are privileged, have been privileged to live in as much as they can. I know we can't democratize everything overnight and all this, but that's what's striking to me.

And that does seem to kind of be across the board. These are very different places, Georgia and Syria and Ukraine and so forth. So Venezuela, there's a lot of resistance to authoritarianism. It'd be nice if we had a government that helped those who were resisting in appropriate ways, and you can't help everyone and all that, but still that helped those who were resisting instead of helping the authoritarians. This is again why the degree of disaster of a Trump administration in terms of foreign policy, in terms of strengthening authoritarians at a moment when some of them really seem to be at risk is so tragic, is to be too deterministic, is so worrisome.

More on that tomorrow. Lieutenant General Hurtling, thank you to Bill Crystal. Thank you to everybody that survived this. I think I might need to go have a cigarette after this podcast. Am I going to make four years, Bill? Can I do it? Can I do four years in a month? You're young.

You're young. I have confidence. I have a little deep breathing, yoga. You do all that kind of hippie-dippie kind of stuff, right? I do do yoga. I got to go. I might have to go to yoga today. I just, I can't with, I can't with the world. Thank you to everybody for sticking around. To Bill Crystal, to Alayna Platt-Colabra, one of my faves. We'll see you back here tomorrow. Peace. I'm not proud of all the choices I've made for a lot of my life.

I've made for a lot of my life Following the shadow when I damn well know That behind me is the light That I've lied to my mother I've made people feel like hell But I refuse to believe I have to keep being cruel make people feel like hell but I refuse to believe I have to keep being cruel cause I'm a coward myself

and time is in patience no patience takes time. Excuses only do good if you're waiting around to die. The Bullork podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with Audio Engineering and Editing by Jason Brown.