The Bulwark Podcast - Durham's Fizzle

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

John Durham didn't report anything new, and he took longer to produce less useful material than Mueller did to expose Russian election interference in 2016—Mueller also had Flynn and Manafort indicted. Plus, only Benedict Arnold has fallen as far as Rudy. Ben Wittes is back for The Trump Trials. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. This is the fourth installment of our new companion podcast, The Trump Trials, with the state and the federal prosecutors closing in, we think, on Donald Trump. We thought we should take time out every week to bring listeners up to speed on all the legal hot water the former president and some of his key Trump world players might be in. And we are partnering with Lawfare, whose experts can cover the waterfront and all the current and potential prosecutions. And, of course, we'll also be covering relevant civil lawsuits. Usually we do this on Thursdays, but with this week's breaking news, we thought we'd move it up. So on this fourth edition of the show, we are once again joined by the one and only Ben Wittes, the editor-in-chief

at Lawfare, who joins us, of course, wearing a dog shirt. So happy Wednesday. Happy Wednesday, Charlie. It's all disorienting doing this on Wednesday instead of Thursday. Yes, and this is going to be an act of tremendous self-restraint that I don't start off talking about the Rudy Giuliani story, but I figured we had to eat our spinach first a little bit. Yeah, we got to eat our spinach and talk about John Durham. Exactly. Something super boring before we can get to the oral sex and self-sick and sex, sex, pardons for sale. Sorry, that's hard to say.

We'll say it again. Oral sex and pardons for sale. Oral sex and pardons for sale. Sorry, that's hard to say. We'll say it again. Oral sex and pardons for sale. Oral sex and pardons for sale. Say it five times quickly. Exactly. Let me just read you the way the New York Times cast this this morning. John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years has pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, accused the FBI of having, quote, discounted or willfully ignored material information, unquote, that countered the narrative of collusion between Donald J. Trump and Russia in a final report made public on Monday. Mr. Durham's 306-page report revealed little substantial new information about the inquiry, known as Crossfire Hurricane, and it

failed to produce the kinds of blockbuster revelations accusing the Bureau of Politically Motivated Misconduct that former President Donald Trump and his allies suggested Mr. Durham would uncover. Instead, the report, released without substantive comment or any redactions by Attorney General Merrick Garland largely recounted previously exposed flaws in the inquiry while concluding that the FBI suffered from confirmation bias and a, quote, lack of analytical rigor, unquote, as it pursued leads about Mr. Trump's ties to Russia. Okay, I feel like this is like a back to the future, Ben, because I feel like we've been talking about crossfire, hurricane, the Mueller report, Russia collusion for years now. So could

we go back to the beginning and give me your breakdown on all of this, what Durham was supposed to find, and what we get at the end of this whole process? So I think, first of all, that is the right question, that it's very easy to take this document in a vacuum. But what's actually important is the marginal value of this document over what was already known. So 2016, the FBI does a big investigation of Donald Trump's coterie of people. It begins as a counterintelligence investigation. It, at the time of the firing of Jim Comey, becomes a special counsel investigation led by Bob Mueller. Bob Mueller indicts, prosecutes 30 some odd people. Many of those people, of

course, are Russians who never got arrested, but basically none of the Mueller people who went to trial got acquitted. They were all convicted. They included a bunch of- Actual indictments, actual convictions. Including of, you know, the national security advisor, the chair of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort and Mike Flynn, including campaign staff, advisors like George Papadopoulos, you know, including a pretty wide array of people. Oh, and then, of course, Mueller issues a final report, which includes devastating accounts of Russian contacts with and probes of the Trump campaign, but concludes that there is insufficient evidence to charge a collusion conspiracy. None of that work is affected by this document at all. This is a very important point here, that this document does not look at Mueller report or feel that the Mueller investigation was in any way improper, correct? Right. This document looks at, first of all, the decision to launch the Russia investigation in the first place, and a series of decisions and tactics

that were used to conclude that a particular pathway was a dead end. So the FBI, you know, did a bunch of things, took a bunch of investigative steps to conclude that a whole bunch of material related to Chris Steele was an investigative dead end or couldn't be substantiated. And this is examining whether, in concluding that it was insufficient, they could have done that basically faster, whether they were too interested in this material and should have not looked at it at all or should have looked at it even more skeptically than they did. The body of this report, to a great extent, is duplicative of the work of the inspector general. That was my next question. Horowitz.

Horowitz, who concluded in a much earlier and frankly, more thorough report that a whole lot of things were done wrong with respect to the handling of the Carter page, Pfizer request, and the Steele dossier and that mess of stuff. Much of this document retreads that ground. Mm-hmm. that he looks at and that Horowitz didn't look at. So let's take first the stuff that's duplicative. Yeah, the FBI fucked up on the Carter Page FISA. We knew that. Again, it's bad. It has prompted significant reforms, changes of procedure within the FBI. It has caused a lot of friction with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It's a genuine set of issues. It's not new, and I don't think Durham adds a lot. I agree with Charlie Savage, the author of that New York Times story, that Durham doesn't offer a lot new in that regard. So however bad you thought it was yesterday, that's about as bad

as you think it is today. The second issue is one on which Horowitz and Durham disagree, which is Horowitz agrees with the FBI that it was appropriate to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation in the first place. And Durham spends a lot of time arguing that it's not. Now, for those who have a memory of what prompted the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, that may sound a little strange. And the reason is that it is a little strange. And to put it simply- I thought it was just me. Okay. Horowitz is right. Durham is crazy on this. So you'll recall that what prompted the Crossfire Hurricane investigation was that the ambassador from Australia to the United Kingdom,

who had been, this is a very distinguished Australian diplomat, he had been the foreign minister of Australia, he's a really serious guy. We're not talking about a random player here. We're not talking about a random player here. Gives information to the United States that he had had this bizarre interaction with George Papadopoulos, who was then an advisor to the Trump campaign, in which Papadopoulos had gotten drunk and told him that the Russians had all kinds of disparaging material, dirt on Hillary Clinton, and that it was thousands

of emails and they were going to dump it. Now, this prompted the FBI to open a full investigation, and Durham thinks it shouldn't have, that there was no basis on this to open a full investigation. They maybe should have opened a preliminary investigation. And his comparison point is that when they had disparaging information about Hillary Clinton, they did not open a full investigation. They gave her a defensive briefing. So I think that sounds nuts to me, frankly, that if a senior diplomat from a foreign country had come to them about Hillary Clinton and said, hey, Huma Abedin got drunk the other night with me and was claiming that the Russians were going to dump thousands of email, like they would have opened on Hillary Clinton too. And the examples that Durham uses to promote this theory seem to me to be grossly unpersuasive. The third area, and this is where I think he really goes into a kind of off the deep end conspiracy theory.

They spent, I think, the bulk of their time as an investigation investigating whether the Hillary Clinton campaign was trying to feed the FBI bullshit and thereby prompt a big investigation of Trump. And there are a whole bunch of components of this, including the Steele dossier, including the Alpha Bank story. And Durham brought two indictments on this subject, one against Michael Sussman, a Democratic lawyer, the other against, and I sat through a lot of that trial. Oh, really? Yeah, I sat through it personally and wrote when the jury went out. I wrote on Twitter, they won't be out long. This is going to acquit very quickly.

And it acquitted in like four or five hours. The other one was Igor Danchenko. And I did not get involved in that case at all because Danchenko used to work at Brookings, and there was a fair bit of Brookings stuff involved in that case that actually shows up in this report, and I thought it wasn't appropriate for me to write on it, so I didn't. That matter also was a very, very fast acquittal. I mean, these were spectacular failures on Durham's part. When you look back at his work product, you know, these failed prosecutions were, they were real clusterfucks.

Yes, they were disasters. And one thing, you know, listeners should understand, federal prosecutors as a general matter don't lose cases. You may lose individual counts. You may not get convictions on everything. But when you go to trial as a federal prosecutor, if a jury comes back in a few hours and just acquits, something's gone wrong. That shouldn't happen very often, or much less in all of the cases that you take to trial. So Durham is undeterred by the losses in these cases. He's kind of convinced that there was an effort by the Clinton campaign to, and associated groups, to get the FBI on the Trump people in a fashion that was kind of a fraud. And you see that in the whole kind of second half of this report. And so I think my bottom line about it is, and I have read the executive summary carefully and not read the body of the report yet. So this is all a little bit

tentative. But my basic take on it is that what's true in here is not new. And what's new is, you know, is probably not true, or at least not persuasive. And so I guess at the end of the day, what I would say about it is Durham took longer to produce less useful, less interesting material in which there's one conviction of a single felony than Mueller took to expose the entire internet research agency and GRU stuff, the Manafort indictment, the Flynn indictment, you know, this was an extremely productive investigation, Mueller's, and this is being used as a way of making us forget it or making us forget that what a contribution it made and how much we learned about Russian interference in the election because of it. And I'm sure it will be discussed at great length on Fox News, on Newsmax,

and in The Federalist and nowhere else. I think you can count on that. What's interesting also is evaluating this is to compare and contrast the expectations with the results. And of course, this was incredibly hyped within Trump world. You had all of these expectations that the deep state was going to be blown up. There would be many, many indictments, many convictions. Of course, as you point out, we're talking about one and the other indictments, spectacular failures. If I remember correctly, I mean, obviously Donald Trump thought that this was going to be the investigation of the century. Bill Barr, the former attorney general, became deeply, deeply involved in this, would have nightly drinking sessions with John Durham,

flew around the world with him. Can you talk to me a little bit about, we know John Durham's failures, but also talk to me a little bit about his conduct, because there were a number of moments that I recall where he was behaving in a way that raised a lot of eyebrows, commenting on an ongoing investigation to the media, commenting in ways that were misleading, flying around and hanging out with the attorney general. I mean, aren't attorney generals supposed to have a little bit of distance with a special counsel? So give me your sense of the way that John Durham went about being special counsel for so long with so little to show for it. Yeah. So first of all, and it actually affects the document in important ways. So you're correct. Bill Barr began, remember,

this investigation by casting doubt on the idea that it really began with the Australian information, right? And he gave these weird press statements and congressional testimony in which he said he was asking Durham to kind of look into how it really started, as though, you know, Jim Comey's account of the beginning of the investigation and Bob Mueller's was, you know, somehow suspect, and maybe it started earlier with the Italians, and maybe the British were involved somehow, and there was some CIA involvement, and they spent a weird amount of time second-guessing the circumstances of the opening of the investigation. Did it really start with this information from the Australians? And the irony is that Durham's answer to this question is,

yes, it really started with this information from the Australians, and he criticizes the FBI for that. So he, you know, having spent this time on this conspiracy theory, now the criticism in the report is when they got this information, they had no other information on this subject. They had no other information on collusion, which was, of course, what they'd been saying from the beginning, that this was where the investigation started, right? There was no secret FBI funneling of information with the CIA. There was no laundering of that. They got this information. It took them completely by surprise, and they opened an investigation. And so there's something very dishonest about the way Durham has presented that as a problem.

That's what they've said from the beginning and what he spent a lot of time doubting. In addition, you are quite right, there are a lot of other weird aspects of his conduct. So one of them is this conspiracy theorizing, drinking scotch and smoking cigars with Bill Barr. I'm all for drinking scotch. I'm less for drinking scotch with Bill Barr. It seems like it would ruin a good glass of scotch. It does, it really does. One of the reasons people were concerned about their huddling that way was, was Barr kind of directing or whispering in Durham's ear these conspiracy theories about how the investigation got started? to have absorbed a lot of very deep suspicion of the way the FBI conducted itself, some of which

has some merit in the sense that the handling of the steel material was clearly flawed and the handling of the Carter Page FISA was particularly flawed. Of course, we knew that already. Durham behaved in a way that upset his own staff. His most prominent staffer resigned, and he pursued cases that he should not have pursued as evidenced by the fact that the juries rejected them quickly. I mean, this goes back to September of 2020, when Nora Danahy was reported, she was leaving at least partly out of concern that Barr was pressing the office for an interim report before it was finished. So they were concerned, like, wait, we're getting way out over our skis here. So there has been controversy and division within this investigation.

That's right. And at the end of the day, the acid test of an investigation is what does it put on the table that we didn't already know? And here, I think Charlie Savage is right that the information in this report, and again, I haven't gone through it with a fine-tooth comb, there is nothing that jumps out at me and says, wow, this is wildly different from what I already knew or a wild advance over what I already knew. And as to the fundamental claim, which was that there was something profoundly defective about the FBI's investigation, I think that's wrong. I think this was a complex, sweeping investigation done under extremely difficult circumstances, that is, the glare

of a presidential campaign, then a transition to the most monstrous figure we've ever had in the presidency, and then supervised by that figure in his capacity as president, it made mistakes, some of them big ones. And at the end of the day, it produced indictments that have stood up. It produced a mountain of new information. And it produced, I would say, the first serious examination of what came to be the basis for Trump's first impeachment, which is to say, not that he was impeached over this material, but he was impeached over the matters that immediately followed this material, heavily conditioned by what Mueller had found. Well, and let's pull back the lenses. David Frum tweeted out about this back in February. He said, look, these are the things we know. Russia helped Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump

welcomed Russian help. Trump's intimates sought even more help. Trump's campaign managers shared information. They all repeatedly lied about it. And in office, Trump supported Russian policy goals. And as we know, Donald Trump remains Vladimir Putin's poodle to this day. So in some ways, all of this is so, you know, glaringly happened in real time in plain view. And now we're in the weeds of what did Carter Page say to who and the various things when we know that Donald Trump stood up there and said, Russia, if you're listening to me, give me Hillary's emails. We know what what Paul Manafort did with Russians. We know the role that

they played. We know that that after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, that Donald Trump went on television and said, you know, I'm guessing that Vladimir Putin doesn't like America very much. So this would be a good time for him to give me some dirt on Joe Biden. I mean, all of this is known. And yet, of course, we have people who are deeply invested in the it's all a Russian hoax narrative. And that will never change. That will never change. I was proud to be on the Federalist's list yesterday of people who had purveyed the Russia collusion hoax and should therefore never be trusted again. I believe I'm number 55 on that list. And I want to say, I still believe

in Russian collusion. And what I mean by that is not necessarily that there was a crime, but that Trump openly called for Russian help and made promises to, quote, get along with Putin in exchange for it. He got the help and he made nice to Putin and embarrassed the United States at Helsinki in response. And so the collusion was open and flagrant, and there may have been covert collusion as well, but I stand by the collusion claim. I think it is obviously and nakedly true. And I think there's two other points to be made here, that if in fact there was nothing going on, why were there so many lies told about it? Why did everybody lie about it at every state? That's number one. Number two, as the Mueller report documented in great detail, why was there such an aggressive effort to obstruct justice? And the obstruction of justice, which you pointed out at the time, was in fact successful. So, I mean, those two points don't

seem to militate in the direction of innocence, nothing here to see. Correct. And there's one other element which people often skate over, but I insist on emphasizing every time, which is that there is a close relationship between these events and the events of the first impeachment, which is that the reason that Donald Trump hated Volodymyr Zelensky and engaged in the extortion effort against him in the fall of 19, was that Trump believed that the Ukrainians had been responsible for the stuff that happened in 2016, and they had been responsible for sort of tarring him with the collusion stuff. And so from his point of view, his suspicions of and demands of Zelensky for dirt are directly related to the events of 2016. And now are directly related to what we're living through now. So this was we're not just talking about this as an historical moment that took place

years ago. This has real implications in real time, right now and in the future. Okay. Hey folks, this is Charlie Sykes, host of the Bulwark podcast. We created the Bulwark to provide a platform for pro-democracy voices on the center right

and the center left, for people who are tired of tribalism and who value truth and vigorous, yet civil debate about politics and a lot more. And every day we remind you folks, you are not the crazy ones. So why not head over to thebullwork.com and take a look around. Every day we produce newsletters and podcasts that will help you make sense of our politics and keep your sanity intact. To get a daily dose of sanity in your inbox, why not try a Bulwark Plus membership free

for the next 30 days? To claim this offer, go to thebulwark.com slash charlie. That's thebulwark.com forward slash charlie. We're going to get through this together. I promise. So having eaten our spinach, Ben. Can we talk about Rudy?

Let's talk about Rudy, Rudy Giuliani. Do we have to be responsible? No, not at all. All right. So this is one of those stories that is, you know, incredibly salacious, incredibly shocking, and yet not surprising at all. Now, I have to admit that I engaged in completely baseless speculation earlier today with my colleague Mona Charon. Obviously, something has gone wrong with Mayor Rudy. Something has taken

a weird turn. And I did wonder whether or not there is such a medical phenomenon as Viagra poisoning, that if the excessive use can actually cause certain neurological effects, because there's something that I mean, like, holy crap. It turns out that scene in Borat, remember the movie where he's lying on the bed and playing with his pants? As I told her on our other podcast, Borat turns out to be a documentary here. Yeah. So we have all known for quite a while now that there is something not right with Rudy. Deeply wrong with Rudy. And exactly what it is, is some combination of a psychological and a medical question. There might be a moral question in there somewhere too, but go ahead. Yeah, okay. I mean, but how much of it is that he's an egomaniac past his prime who used to stand

on piles of rubble and raise his hand and had adoring throngs, and how much of it is that he's in need of money, and how much of it is that he's really horny, really horny, how much of it is a substance abuse issue. I don't know. I think all of the above. None of these are mutually exclusive. Right. And then there's another part of it that is like a lot of people. He's clearly in the thrall of Donald Trump, and he's made terrible judgments that you like to think at other times in his life he would have known better than to make. And we all know plenty of people, you more than I, in the conservative world who that is true. And that's a sort of baseline condition of tens of millions of people in our politics right now. He stands out, though. I mean, this story, these are just allegations from this young woman who had been working with him for quite

some time. It will be interesting to hear people, you know, talk about why someone allows themselves to be abused that long, what the psychology of all of this is. But I mean, you are talking about a really, these allegations depict a genuinely depraved individual, you know, who demands that she give him oral sex while he is on the phone with powerful people, because this is what Bill Clinton did, that he would, you know, ask her to disrobe and work. I mean, it's not just horny. And I'm, you know, for people who think I'm making light of this, clearly it is deeply, deeply abusive. I mean, and the bullying here, it comes very, very close to the line, if it doesn't cross the line, of rape. It is certainly sexual abuse, certainly in all of those categories.

And then, of course, we get to this, the one big thing hanging out there that she says that he was selling presidential pardons for $2 million. Now, the other allegations will be handled probably in a civil trial, civil case. We don't know all the facts, everything. But where does that allegation go? Because to have the president's attorney apparently marketing presidential pardons, that would seem to get somebody else's attention as well. But you can't do that unless the president himself is somehow involved, directly or indirectly, right?

Right. Or at least you'd want to know if he was, right? So you could presumably have a defense that was, well, Rudy did what Rudy did, and I had nothing to do with it. And he's obviously not, so who cares, right? Yeah. So leave aside the how much did Trump know about this, assuming the allegation is accurate. Look, if you're law enforcement and you for it or whether you're just dealing with a single person's testimony about things that Giuliani said. And of course, if it's true, there are going to be people who can corroborate it because to market a $2 million pardon sale, you have to have somebody to market it too, right? And there are

going to be people on the other end of those phone calls or on the other side of those conversations who are going to be able to say, yes, this offer was or was not, or no, this offer was not made to me. So this is something that is checkable. It is something that I think we should treat cautiously at this stage because, you know, people say all kinds of things in civil litigation and there's reason to be cautious. And we don't know what her level of credibility is. We don't know. I don't know anything about her except that she obviously was willing to be an aid to Rudy Giuliani for a very, very long time. Now, she's clearly the victim here, but we don't know what her level of credibility is at this point about allegations like that. That's right. Or about anything else for that

matter, including the allegations about what he allegedly did to her. There may be tapes. There may be some tapes though. Lordy, I hope there are tapes. Lordy, lordy on the tapes. It would be perfect for Rudy Giuliani to allow tapes. It would. You know what I'm saying? That would be. Probably on his phone. The really interesting first question about this is, who does it go to as a law enforcement matter? Right. This kind of doubles back to the discussion we had about Durham. So, is this lawsuit that is filed, is this a predicate to open, say, an FBI investigation? in which there could be sanctions for it not being accurate. So if she just made it up and made a representation in court like that, she could face sanction, and she's presumably willing

to swear to it because her testimony is going to be significant to her case. So I think you would probably predicate an investigation based on that. But the question is, who does that go to? Is that a Jack Smith matter? Because it's kind of somewhat related to the January 6th investigation, although it's not clear how it is related. Or is it a Justice Department thing that then they'll kick to him? Or is it a justice thing that stays in justice? And I think the answer is probably starts in justice and gets referred to Jack Smith,

but I'm not sure. So I know this is emphasizing the obvious, and it's probably something I've said many times before, but I just can't get past thinking about the fact that if Rudy Giuliani had passed away in, say, 2003, you would have a school named after him in just about every community in America. You'd have airports, you'd have federal buildings named after him. And look where he is right now. I'm trying to think in terms of historical parallel of somebody who was as beloved and iconic as Rudy Giuliani, who has fallen this far. Benedict Arnold is the only person I can think of. Yeah. Hero of the first part of the war. And he was not mainlining Viagra.

I mean, he's not. At least we remember Benedict Arnold for doing terrible things, not for, okay, I'm going to stop myself there. Going back to the fiasco of the town hall meeting, let me just read you what Ken Delaney over at NBC wrote about something that Donald Trump said that might give some ammunition to Jack Smith. He wrote, former President Donald Trump's comments Wednesday night, last Wednesday night, about his handling of classified documents appeared to contradict statements by his lawyers and provide potentially important evidence for federal prosecutors investigating whether to charge him with a crime, legal experts say. Trump's lawyers told Congress last month that the classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago compound got there by accident. But one question about the issue at a CNN town hall, Trump said he

had every right to take them from the White House. I didn't make a secret of it. You know, the boxes were stationed outside the White House. People were taking pictures of it. So I guess the question is, did Trump say anything last week during that town hall meeting that can and will be used against him in a court of law by Mr. Jack Smith? So that question has three parts, right? Did he say something? The answer is yes. That can, yes. And that will, we don't know, be used against him. And the reason we don't know is, first of all, I think Jack Smith is going to be, or at least should be, very careful about what Trump's statements he takes seriously, because Trump will say anything that he feels like at any given moment. And you don't want to use a statement as a gotcha. You want to use an admission if you think

it's really admitting something that's true. And so the question is, what does Jack Smith think happened here? One possibility is that he thinks Trump stole the documents intentionally and then tried to resist giving them back. If that's what he believes and has other evidence for, then the fact that Trump said it on national Smith believes that they were really careless. They took the documents in carelessness, and then Trump resisted giving them back. In which case, the fact that Trump admits, yeah, I took them, doesn't matter very much at all, because that's not actually what Jack Smith thinks happened. So I think it depends very much what the theory of the case is. I have always believed that Trump stole the documents. And if you stole the documents, the fact that you admitted, yeah, I took them, I didn't make a secret about it, probably makes a big difference. I don't want to get too deep into speculation here, but there was some chatter over the last couple of weeks that the Chexmas were

asking questions about possible ties to the Saudi Arab Arabians leading to speculation, maybe baseless speculation, that maybe one of the lines of inquiry that he was pursuing was, is this something information that Trump might have been sharing with the Saudis with whom he has many, many business dealings? Do you have any thoughts on this at all? I don't. I noticed that this showed up in the stories that they were asking people about his business deals with the Saudis. It's not clear to me what the context for that is. In any investigation like this, your first priority is not the criminal case. Your first priority is accounting for what happened to the classified material. We're getting it back, figuring out what the degree of spillage was, and figuring out where it spilled to. And so you would want to validate the belief that there was not spillage to the Saudis, particularly if you know that the

Saudis are doing all kinds of business with Jared Kushner, right? And so I could see that being an investigative avenue. I could also see it being just a, okay, we're closing that door, making sure there's no Saudi problem on here. And I think we're just going to have to wait until Jack Smith has something to say about this to figure out kind of what his theory about what happened to this material was, how much of this was hoarding and trophy collecting, and how much of this was something more nefarious than that. Good take. Okay, so one last thing. Mr. Wittes, I want to talk to you about your latest military campaign

against the Russian embassy with the Ukrainian. You have launched an absolutely fascinating new initiative. Can we briefly talk about that? Yeah, so there are two apartment buildings adjacent to the Russian embassy compound. And one of them I have had my eye on for a while because the apartments have really nice views of the front of the embassy. And they're just right close up. And I thought if I could rent one of those apartments, I could create a permanent home for my two spotlights. And I could operate them remotely from home and put up a different message each night.

Tell us about the spotlights, though. I mean, so people know what you've been doing. I periodically go out in front of the Russian embassy and shine spotlights on the embassies with Ukrainian flags and with that sort of thing. Everybody has to have a hobby. Everyone needs a hobby. And we released a really cool video today, which has a poem that we projected onto the embassy with a call for defections. So we wanted to create a permanent home for that. But I thought, hey, if I'm going to rent an apartment,

I am going to house a Ukrainian refugee in it too. And so the goal, and we're working on this, it's complicated because there's a lease and the lease doesn't necessarily permit either spotlights or refugees. They have rules. But we're working on it. We're going to try to rent one of the apartments and we're calling it special military operation housing, housing for two spotlights and somebody who needs shelter in the United States from the war in Ukraine. So that is the goal. We'll see if we can pull it off.

Yeah. So if people want to help, how do they do it? So right now, this is the first special military operation I have ever solicited funds for because normally I pay for them myself. But this one is pretty expensive because it involves a year's lease. So the best way to support it, I will eventually set up a GoFundMe, but for now you can just subscribe to DogShirtDaily on my sub stack. All proceeds from the current subscription drive are funding this project. Go to Dogshirt Daily. We have a radical subscription

discount to support the project. And just subscribe, buy a gift subscription for somebody, and everything that you donate or through this subscription will support this project. And by the way, if I am unable to pull off this project for any reason, the proceeds will be donated to a refugee charity. There are no circumstances in which this will not be spent on at least housing for a refugee. There may be circumstances in which I cannot pull off special military operation housing, in which case I will donate the proceeds. And if people are interested in more information on this, check my Morning Shots newsletter this morning, because I will have a little bit of information on this in the

link that Ben is talking about. Ben Wittes, thank you so much for joining me on our fourth episode of The Trump Trials. Great talking with you. Great talking with you. You're a great American. And thank you all for listening to today's Bulwark podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We will be back tomorrow and we'll do this all over again. Bulwark podcast is produced by Katie Cooper and engineered and edited by Jason Brown.