The Dispatch Podcast - Why Mitch Can't Have Nice Things

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Will the aftermath of Herschel Walker's defeat in Georgia create a rare window for Republican introspection? And can the infotainment right be part of the solution? Sarah, David, Jonah and Steve also discuss what we know (and don’t know) about the Hunter Biden scandal, wonder what ever happened to the Electoral Count Reform Act, and catch up on what’s going on in the rest of the world. Show Notes: -The Twitter thread that caught Steve's eye Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgher. This week we are talking to Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and David French. I think we're going to make it easy this week. Domestic politics? Foreign politics. And there's plenty to talk about on those two fronts. Let's dive right in.

Let's start on the domestic side. Obviously, the Georgia runoff Senate election happened this week. Democrat, Raphael Warnock, an incumbent, won that race by about three points. Not actually that close, but on the other hand, that's pretty close. Steve, what are we supposed to make of that? It was yet another example in the 2022 election cycle of candidates mattering. In this case, I think candidates mattering a lot. Herschel Walker wasn't much of a candidate.

He didn't spend a lot of time talking to voters. He was propped up by mostly Senate Republicans from Washington, who did everything from hold his hand during appearances to raise tens of millions of dollars to try to get him across the finish line. And it didn't work. He was a bad candidate. Most of them in private would tell you that they were embarrassed at the possibility of him being a colleague. He didn't take advantage of the, I would say, the broad dissatisfaction in the country and in Georgia in particular with the Biden presidency and the direction of the country.

And he was an overall failure. The interesting final note for me is a really interesting piece this morning from Nate Cohn in the New York Times about the alleged problems that Republicans hadn't turning out their voters. that was not a problem nationally, it wasn't a problem in Georgia. Republican voters turned out in some cases they really turned out there was a Republican voter surge.

It's just that in many of these places in many of these cases they didn't want to vote for crummy candidates and Georgia is evidence of that. I mean, David, there's two versions of this, each of which has some kernel of truth to it, which is Georgia's also trending blue.

And so, you know, things don't happen all at once. Georgia elected a Democratic senator, reelected that Democratic senator this year. Maybe this is just a sign of changes within the state. Well, to an extent, you know, this would not happen in Tennessee, for example. Georgia has trended overall blue to an extent to where at least you have a chance as a statewide Democrat. But to put this in perspective, this was the only... I mean, you say that Alabama, don't forget, elected a Democrat. Right. Extreme circumstances.

Candidates mattered in that case. Extreme circumstances. But what's fascinating to me, just to harp on Alabama for a second, that wasn't a close race. Alabama candidates mattered a lot if you're going to elect a Democratic senator in Alabama to begin with. And then it wasn't close. Here, you can argue. candidates matter, but then, boy, three points. That's not a blowout. Right, but I was going to put this in some context. Yeah, George is getting bluer, but let's not go crazy here. These are the, so Herschel Walker was the only statewide Republican to lose. And here are the other margins.

Governor, where Kemp was arguably going against a more formidable opponent even than Raphael Warnock, perhaps, R plus 8. Lieutenant Governor, which was one of the shakier, and it's R plus five, Secretary of State, R plus nine. Everything was between R plus five and R plus nine on the statewide. Every single race was in that range except for Herschel Walker D plus three. So there is, it is absolutely the case that Georgia is bluer than it used to be. It is also absolutely case that Herschel Walker paid about an eight, between an eight and a 12 point tax on support by as a virtue of his terrible candidacy.

So, yeah, a little bit bluer, but that doesn't fully explain what happened here. And don't forget, Biden won the state, of course, in 2020 as well. I mean, by hair margin. Jonah, hearing maybe a little over-reading from the other side that Raphael Warnock is a contender for president. Jonah has made a face.

I've made a face. I mean, what what asylums and crack dens are you hanging out with hanging out in that you're hearing this chatter?

Yeah, I don't, look, it's funny, I was on CNN the other day and I said I thought he was a weak candidate, but that Hershal Walker was weaker or something

with that effect. And I think it was Karen Flynn, Democratic, former Democratic, official said, I don't think he's a weak candidate. It's just a bad environment. I'm talking about Warnock. And I think it's an interesting distinction because he's, my point was, I don't think

we really disagreed. My point is he was a bad candidate for Georgia. And if you have a milk toast boring Republican running against Warnock, that Republican would have won because the state, I don't think, is nearly as blue as people want it to be, or that it may be. years. You do have a lot of northern transplants and whatnot. But I do not in the slightest think that Warnock is

like a front runner if like Biden were to say he's not running. I don't know why anyone would think he would rise to the top. It's also, I mean, I was kind of surprised you didn't bring it up because this kind of thing you did bring up. The amount of money that

was spent in Georgia by everybody, you know, but like I think in the last three cycles, it's something like a billion or $3 billion, some crazy amount of total spending if he had the presidential and the midterms and the runoffs and whatnot. And in this race alone, I think $300 million, you know, or like Warnock has raised $300 million on his own in the last few years. It is just an insane amount of money. And I think the relevance here is, because I'm just going to, I don't, I'm still trying to parse the idea that Warnock is a presidential contender now. But the, I think one of the more interesting stories coming out of this

is that everybody, I mean, yeah, a lot of Republican Senate, Fox News guests came in campaign for Herschel Walker, but he was basically left high and dry by everybody except Mitch McConnell's pack. And which is one of the reasons why I think this argument that Georgia proves McConnell should go is one of, you know, it's like part five

of one of the dumbest bits of analysis of this entire cycle. So I got nothing else for you on this. Well, something I think that is looming over all of these conversations, wherever you hear them, this wasn't actually about the 51st seat in the Senate. You know, this was the future of the Republican Party. This was the future of the Democratic Party, maybe.

this was all supposed to have these looming larger implications. Okay, so we've got the results now. Another Trump candidate goes down. David, you wrote, I really liked your newsletter this week about this, that it's cumulative, right? Each loss informs all the losses before it. And I want you to talk about that a little. But at the same time, if Republicans want to win elections,

it's not as easy as simply saying, great, chuck Trump, chuck these candidates, go back to the DeWines and Sununu's and Ducey's and Kemp's and brush your hands off and they're suddenly going to sweep all these elections because the Republican Party, I mean, think about, we've talked about this in the 2024 context, that if DeSantis beats Trump in the primary, which is an if, but not some like impossible task at this point, I wrote about the polling and like there's good signs in there for DeSantis. Not perfect, but good. Okay, so he's the general election Republican nominee. That has not solved a lot of his problems because now what does Trump do? What do his voters do?

How many of them are there? And if they stay home, can any Republican nominee actually win in a general election? The point being, the Republican Party now has a big problem. They've got two wings of their party, and neither can win without the other. And so, and I got this question from someone who, a listener, and I thought it was a smart question. We're hearing a lot of blame and ridicule on MAGA primary voters for picking these folks who can't win in general elections. But if all you're doing is ridiculing them and condemning them for losing the Senate, is that

really going to bring them back into the fold of the Republican electorate, to which I said, that's not my job. But my job is not to help Republicans win elections. But it's an interesting point about how the Republican Party is going to sew this back together, David. Yeah. Well, here's an interesting question for me, because if you look at this, if the thesis was one set of Republicans will take their ball and go home if the Trump faction is sort of defeated. But then if you coddle the Trump faction, then another set of, of Republicans will take their ball and go home.

How does that explain, say, the success of Brian Kemp? Because Brian Kemp was directly challenged in the primary, loathed by Donald Trump, won his primary. And as near as we can tell, the MAGA right didn't believe him, that they may have voted against him in the primary, but there's no sign at all that they left him when the general election rolled around, and he had one of the state-wide Republicans, he had one of the most convincing victories. Brad Raffensberger had a very convincing victory after beating a serious Trumpist challenger. See, what I find interesting about that, by the way, is less Brian Kemp and

more Brad Raffensberger, because I can in theory explain the Brian Kemp win that they come home because it's Stacey Abrams on the other side. Right. Harder to say that with the Raffensberger race. Yeah. So, you know, there's this, there's a lot of polling that asks, are you a MAGA, are you more MAGA than you are Republican? And I'm skeptical about that. At the one hand, I do completely agree. And I'm not backtracking at all on this discussion we had last week where I said, yikes, if DeSantis wins, he should never expect that moment with Trump on the stage with him holding his hand in the air and that sign of unity. Just never expect it. We should expect Trump and to try to rally people to call it an illegitimate result. And that will peel off some people. I'm just getting more skeptical every week, every month, how many that will be, about how many that will be. And one thing that makes me,

I'm just a little bit more skeptical of these polls where somebody says, I'm a MAGA Republican or I'm more Trump than I am Republican, not so much because I think that they're super loyal, Republicans is that I think a lot of these guys are in the bottom line really, really anti-left. Yeah, so I think that's the key. And that's what it would explain, Raffensberger, is that we know, this is finally, negative polarization has a positive effect, right?

Right. If you actually believe that the Democrats are a sinister, sedonic cabal of child blood drinking deep staters, then you got to vote for Raffinsberger, right? And that's the whole logic of MAGA is to say Democrats are so illegitimate and so evil, you've got to vote for our crazy guys no matter what. And I think a lot of those MAGA people believe it, so they're going to vote for Normies, even if they have to.

Steve, what about the results in Georgia to David's thesis that each loss kind of informs the ones before it? How has this informed your view of the future of political conservatism? Yeah, are you not going to endorse Trump in 2024? I don't, I don't dispute your broad thesis that, you know, for Republicans to be successful in 2024, at the presidential level, they'll need to, in some way or another, bring together both of these sides, right? But I do think David is right that in these particular cases. But David's point is well taken. And those people may show up regardless. Yeah, and he may have even

understated it. Remember, Brian Kemp faced Purdue in the primary, recruited by Trump, championed by Trump, pushed by MAGA, and Purdue lost in the primary to Brian Kemp by 52 points.

He was destroyed. So it was close. I was to argue closer than it maybe should have been, but he was destroyed. What's so funny is you say that, just to clarify, like one could hear that to mean he got 52, points, like Brian, you know, no, no, the delta between the two candidates was 52 points. Yeah. So I think, you know, for people who have been skeptical for Trump for a long time,

on the one hand, this isn't a new problem. You know, it's not like people are just waking up and saying, oh, boy, there's going to be this divide between, you know, people skeptical of Trump and the, and the super MAGA crowd. That's been in evidence since 2015. And frankly, a lot of people had predicted this moment, said, yeah, when there's a split, you're driving people out of the Republican Party who had been longtime loyal Republicans, straight-ticket Republicans, because they looked at what was happening with Trump and under Trump and with this sort of Trump-adjacent or Trump-supported Republicans and said, I don't want anything to do with that.

That's a clown show. This is toxic. it's not going to work for the rest of the electorate. And by the way, I don't like these people. So they left. And that was, by the way, deliberate on the part of many MAGA Republicans. They said proudly, we want to drive out these Republicans who don't fit. So, you know, this is not a new problem.

And while I think you're right descriptively, I don't, I don't, it seems to me that there's not an easy solution, but what we have seen in 2022 suggests that the solution is not go more MAGA, go harder to the base. And the commentary that Jonah was mentioning, I don't know if he was talking about this specifically or more broadly, but there was, I saw a clip of Laura Ingraham and Molly Hemingway and Kellyanne Conway talking about Georgia as the results came in. Laura Ingram had the responsibility of telling Fox viewers, Herschel Walker, was losing it. And there was this two-minute sort of joint tirade about the failure of the establishment.

And this means Mitch McConnell has to go. And, you know, Molly Hemingway said, this is the Republican Party ignoring its base. I mean, it's hard to, you stop for a second and you wonder, does she know that she's totally wrong, that what she's arguing is completely detached from reality? or does she understand it, but she's so devoted to fan service that this is what she's decided to do. But it should be pointed out, Mitch McConnell raised and spent tens of millions of dollars,

I think near $50 million, supporting Herschel Walker, who Donald Trump recruited to run in Georgia. Donald Trump, far as we can tell, spent about $4 million. And even in the post-election pre-runoff part of this where fundraising was, was thought to have been really important, particularly important, Trump sent out fundraising appeals saying that he would keep 90% of the money contributed donated to the appeal. And Hershey Walker would get 10%. The problem here was not that Mitch McConnell and Republicans didn't pull their weight.

It's that Donald Trump is a grifter who sought to capitalize on this for his own purpose. After there was a story written about that, they changed it to 50-50. And Trump wasn't the only one, North Carolina Republican Party, J.D. Vance, all were sending out quote-unquote fundraising appeals on behalf of Walker so much so that the Walker campaign manager put out his own memo telling people to stop basically stealing money from them. Jonah, there will be a lot of attention paid to the 24 Republican presidential primary in terms of what it says about the future of Republicanism and Trumpism and all of that.

But there are going to be a ton of Senate races in red states in 2024. And I mean red presidential states with Democratic senators, Montana, West Virginia, Ohio. Indiana will have an open seat now. Texas and Florida will have Republican incumbents running again.

But in some ways, that will be more interesting to me about this primary issue than the presidential race. The presidential race will have far bigger sort of implications writ large. I get that. But I'm wondering, you can say that every campaign operative in the country knows that early voting is a good thing and that telling your voters only to vote on election day is the dumbest, just strategy that you could possibly want, it would be the perfect self-sabotage.

And yet, there is the Republican Party with a double-digit gap. I mean, a huge, you know, sort of depends on exactly what you're looking at, but I'm looking at, you know, a 15, 20-point gap in early voting at this point, in something Republicans used to lead in, used to have the edge in,

and nowhere near that edge, by the way. So everyone knows that. The only person who seems to have been able to do anything about it is Ron DeSantis in Florida, where Republicans actually did maintain a lead in early voting and a healthy one. And my point being that you can have all these people in D.C. talking to Steve Hayes quietly

about how they understand what all of these election losses mean. But it don't mean a thing if you don't got that swing in the primary elections. And if you're not willing to say these candidates cannot win general elections and say it with one voice, instead of sort of the Kevin McCarthy

let's sing kumbaya together and we'll figure it out when we get to the general election so did Republicans learn anything in the last four years four years I think that's too broad a timeline in the last four months

yeah I think there are signs it's baby steps right you know you set reasonable goals in sort of in a therapeutic sense so that they can have a sense of victory. And when you hear, you know, it's like when you hear people tweet things without mentioning Donald Trump,

it's a step in the right direction. You know, I'm glad to know that Ted Cruz thinks that the Constitution is enduring and will last for millennia. And, And I suspect, like, if Ron DeSantis were the nominee in 2024, he could actually just say, hey, you know what, we fixed this early voting thing for Republicans. Yeah.

You can now vote early Republican, right? Because that's how he's able to say it in Florida, right? And again, Florida runs its elections very, very well. So there's some substance to that. But, like, I think if you got. Fox News and everybody else to say, you know, we realize what a problem early voting was, but now we fixed it and you should do it too. You could fix some of that kind of problem.

But I agree. Look, the Senate primary map is a fascinating question because as incredibly incandescently stupid as I think the campaign against Mitch McConnell is. And I'm not, it's not that I'm a huge Mitch McConnell fan. It's that I think the things we know about Mitch McConnell are that he likes being a senator, which I admire, he's an institutionalist. He wants Republicans to be in the majority. And he thinks that the way you get to the majority is running generally normal human beings, you know, bipedal carbon-based life forms in the general election. And that's who he wanted to a race in 2022.

And he wasn't allowed to have nice things. And so anyway, I kind of feel like at some point, that argument has to be making inroads in various places. But the problem is that there are people who understand that that's the smart argument and don't care. And the sort of entertainment wing, they would much rather, they would rather carry Lake win. But they would rather Carrie Lake be the nominee and have lost than have run Doug Deucy and won. Right.

Right. They want their martyr victim Sarah Palin spin-off characters to populate television and talk radio for and raise money for them for a very long time. And so they would rather lose as Maga Martyrs than be party players and let McConnell pick candidates win. And the trick there is then you just got to have you just got to have grownups take over the GOP again, which obviously is not going to happen in our lifetime. Steve, how does this affect McCarthy's bid for speakership? You know, it's interesting.

I was just thinking about that as Jonah was talking. I mean, you've seen some of the sort of entertainment right that Jonah mentions swing pretty decisively behind Kevin McCarthy in a way that is a little surprising they're I think showing they're being more practical about their about their approach to politics may be forced to do so by the the tight margins but you have at the moment, a pitched battle with lots of sort of third grade level name calling between Mark Levin, conservative angered, angered, he's calling. Yeah, I mean, it's really all he does is call names, but he's taking on Andy Biggs,

who is the former chair of the House Freedom Caucus, who has, who challenged Kevin McCarthy for Republican leader, not getting many votes in the process, and has now announced a challenge to Kevin McCarthy for Speaker and vowed that he will not vote for McCarthy under any circumstances. And Levin is really going after Biggs for this, calling him an imbecile, you know,

talking of sabotage, what have you. And the idea that somebody like Mark Levin, who has for 20, 20 plus years portrayed himself as kind of the ideological enforcer of modern American conservatism, even if I don't think that's exactly, he succeeded in that role. The idea that he would be going to the mat for someone like Kevin McCarthy, who is basically a non-ideological player, you know, would one time. sort of leading establishment Republican is a very interesting development in this moment,

I think, suggests that Republicans see that they don't have a lot of room to maneuver. Or it suggests that they understand that Kevin McCarthy doesn't have a lot of room to maneuver. And by backing him now and backing him early and backing him publicly, they can basically get him to do what they want him to do. I think, David, the same thing plays out with any substantive thing that House Republicans want to do as well

if you want to actually get legislation passed you're going to need to get it through a Democratic Senate and, of course, a Democratic White House or you can do fan service and run investigations, which in fairness is sort of part substance well, it depends how substantive you want those investigations to be, I suppose.

But in terms of legislative stuff, in the lame duck then, before Republicans actually take control, there's been talk of an immigration compromise coming through. There's been talk about guns. We're still, nobody seems to be talking about the Electoral Count Act, which I'm very confused about. I really thought this was,

we were told that this was done, and the votes were there. And now it's mid-December, where is everyone day? Yeah. Yeah. Now, the Electoral Count Act, that is a priority. That's an especially- Only to us. Only to us, but- No, I'm like 35 other people. Yeah. It should be more than just us and the listeners to this podcast who are all united. Look, make that a priority. If we can get in an immigration compromise as well, that's solid, yeah, make that a priority also.

But as I've written two, I've written two things that are essentially the same thing. Pass electoral count act reform or we're idiots. We're just idiots if we don't do this. But David, I don't know why you'd phrase it like that because that's the question. Yes. Are we not idiots? Yeah. You know, to be the really big question about the Republican-led house is less about

investigations. They're going to investigate a lot of different things. Some things I want investigated, like the Afghanistan, the precipitous Afghanistan withdrawal, what we knew, when we knew it about when that government was going to collapse. I want to see the rocks upturned on that, much less, much less interested in the Hunter Biden stuff, very interested in Afghanistan. But one of the questions I have is how much is this internal debate going to paralyze McCarthy when it comes to things like aid to Ukraine?

And that is a subject where you could really easily see the GOP running off the rails with the constant drumbeat of sort of the infotainment wing in its ears leading it astray because we know the infotainment wing can lead it astray. We just watched that happen. We've been watching it happen for months and years. So is it going to happen on something truly world historically consequential, such as aid for Ukraine when Vladimir Putin, was just saying essentially trying to get his people ready for a long war and laying the seeds

for potentially another wave of mobilization. So this, you know, our steadfastness in support of Ukraine is the, if I had to think of how many world historic, how many world historic moves can this next Congress make? It's a very short list, but high on that list would be, it would be world historic to cut off aid to Ukraine and how much is McCarthy going to be held hostage by his hyper-populist America first wing. That's what I'm really curious about. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace

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get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's E-T-H-O-S dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. Before we go to foreign policy, maybe it is worth a minute to talk about Jonah, Hunter Biden, House investigation. Is it into Hunter Biden? Is it into Joe Biden? Is it into Twitter? Do we care? So, look, I think there are legitimate, absolutely legitimate questions to ask. Going back to sort of journalism 101 about the president's finances. Part of the problem is that Donald Trump's finances were so corrupt. It's like a giant honking industrial magnet next to our compass.

And you have like most mainstream media analysts and pundits and stuff, they cannot resist the gravitational pull of doing what aboutism as if whatever Trump did makes it okay for Biden's finances to be whatever they are and there's nothing to see here and it does seem like there are some shady things with the Biden, I'm not going to call the Biden crime family

which a lot of my friends like to do but the Biden family is you know it's got some sketchy stuff maybe it's just like a Billy Carter kind of situation you know, or a Roger Clinton situation. I don't know that it seems to me utterly legitimate for a party, for Congress to do oversight and look into that kind of stuff, ask questions about it and whatnot.

Similarly, I think there is merit to criticisms about the whole Hunter Paloosa stuff and the way Twitter handled and all the rest. The problem is that the people who are most invested in the, this story in either a positive or negative way are so exhausting that it's very difficult for me to find enough oxygen in the coverage and the conversation to figure out where I come down because there are people who are absolutely convinced that Hunter Biden and the laptop are responsible for the de-fenestration of Prague, the chemicals and Kentucky Fried Chicken that make you crave it fortnightly, the Kennedy assassination, which we know didn't actually happen,

and everything under the sun. And then there are people who say, you're a crackpot if you have any questions or concerns about any of this stuff. And I have no confidence, particularly given Kevin McCarthy's narrow margins if he becomes speaker at all, and potentially the Liz Trust of American politics, to be able, like, He's promised Marju Taylor Green prominent committee assignments. Like, the idea that he's going to be able to keep those things from becoming clown shows, those hearings, is just incredibly unlikely.

And similarly, the people who are going to say, oh, how cruel the Republicans are for picking on the president's drug addict's son are going to gaslight everybody to say that there's no legitimate questions to have about any of this stuff. And I guess it's one of the reasons why the dispatch exists is to kind of figure out what the, you know, the golden mean between these two poles are. But like, it's not something I'm, everybody just turns me off. It's the same thing with the Twitter file stuff. The people who think it's the biggest story in the universe and the people who think

it's an absolute nothing burger, there's got to be some space in between those two end zones to sort of say, well, this is troubling, but this is overblown and all the rest. And it's difficult. David, you and I have talked about this offline a little bit in that, you know, when this story comes out in October of 2020, and actually maybe this is better for Steve, because you'll know more of our reporting side.

It comes out from Rudy Giuliani, sort of partisan actors, obviously, within the Trump campaign. And there were just a lot of questions. around like what this was, where they got it, sort of the provenance of the whole thing, because it looked so much like the DNC hack of 2016, which then we later found out, of course, the Department of Justice indicted 12 Russian GRU intelligence officers

for that hack. And you've said this before, but we tried to get information about that. We did. Yeah, no, we reached out to, to Rudy Giuliani's lawyers, we tried to get a copy of the hard drive in real time as this was happening so that we could do our best

to vet it and take a look at it ourselves. Yeah, I mean, part of the problem with the original story is the Providence story was crazy. And I think remains crazy. Like there are unresolved issues with the Providence story that don't make sense. There were clear contradictions in the different versions of the story

that we heard from, major players, to such a degree that it doesn't matter if this is about Hunter Biden's laptop or if this is about, you know, the origins of ag subsidies. When you have these kinds of contradictions, you have to ask more questions. It would have been irresponsible not to ask more questions and to act with the skepticism that those contradictions, I think, required. Having said that, you know, as we learned more, there certainly were questions. I mean, there were questions Jonah wrote about this, you know, a week before the 2020 election where he said, he wrote an entire column saying, let's treat this as if it's real. You know, there are signs that it could

be Russian disinformation. It's quite possible that some of it's real. Let's treat as if it's real and here's the conversation we should have. I think if you look back at the context, we know what Russia did in 2016. It certainly was the case that the big tech platforms, most of the mainstream media, certainly current and retired intelligence officials, were looking at the Hunter Biden laptop story while they were anticipating meddling from Russia. So if you're anticipating this and you're thinking,

it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. And, you know, we published stories about how it was coming. Certainly the New York Times, the tech platforms published stories, there were working groups about how to handle Russian, meddling in the 2020 election, if you're prepared for this and you think it's coming, you know it's coming,

you have intelligence assessment that tell you it's coming based on what we saw in 2016, and then you see something that looks like what you're anticipating, I think it led people en masse to conclude, ah, there it is.

We've been looking and looking and looking and here it is finally. That's, that's, to a certain extent, understandable. As I say, I think there were reasons to doubt, at least parts of the story of the Providence. But it also is the kind of thing that should require everybody,

most especially I would say intelligence professionals, to check those assumptions, to test those assumptions. We can't operate on assumptions. And, you know, if I look back on the way that we covered it, I think we showed real restraint. We pursued the story, not in a way that resulted in a lot of public-facing reporting on it, but of course that's the case with any kind of reporting. A ton of reporting happens that we never publish. We pursued the story. We tried to get as much information as we

could. I would say I wish that we had done more to follow up on it after the original sort of blow up about after the election, take another look, try to get it verified, try again to get copies of the hard drive. I went, yeah, I went back and reread a lot of our early stuff on this just because, you know, I knew that a lot of folks were going to be doing that. I wanted to see if my recollection matched our work, because I wrote about it right after it came out. And I was and basically took the position of, I don't know if this is real, but it might be.

If it is, what does this say, took a position critical of Twitter's decision to clamp down on the distribution of the story. and I looked at our morning dispatch coverage. It was very sober-minded. This is what it says. This is where it allegedly came from. Here's why there's reasons to be skeptical. But it dealt with what it said.

And all of our coverage dealt with what it said. And what I've kind of taken away from this is one of the reasons why the major part of the conversation now is about Twitter and not the contents of the laptop is that the contents of the laptop were and remain 99% of Hunter Biden's story and not in 1% of Joe Biden's story based on what we've seen of it so far

and this thing's been out in the public domain for a while but there's a huge amount of resentment surrounding the fact that not just Twitter but essentially all of media took this outside of sort of I would say outside of right-wing infotainment, but that's not even entirely true. Huge sections of media, including conservative media,

were highly skeptical of this because the story was so wild. Remember, there was reporting that Fox passed on the story. There was reporting that the Wall Street Journal had said, we're not so sure about this. There was reporting that the lead author of the New York Post story had their name withheld from the story because they were so worried about it. And why would they be worried?

It's not that the Wall Street Journal or Fox or this New York Post reporter necessarily had an ax to grind for Biden is because the story was wild. And it was crazy. A hard drive comes in from Rudy Giuliani, says it came from a blind computer repair person where Hunter had just left the laptop and ghosted. It was a wild story. And when you have a wild story like that, you and you're a responsible journalist, organization, the thing you do not do is go Leroy Jenkins and just throw it all out into the

public, which is what they did. And they got very lucky that this was turned out to be, seems to be a legit hard drive. That was a very lucky thing. But if you're doing best reporting practices and Rudy Giuliani walks into your office with a hard drive and says, this is an exact match of Hunter Bidens that I got from a blind computer repair person. then you're going to work on that a long time to verify before you publish when you're being responsible. And I think one of the issues that people glide over is that the New York Post,

the way it responded to this information was to Leroy Jenkins it, and then it got lucky. It got very, very lucky. And that's what's grinding so many people is not just Twitter, but the widespread skepticism at this thing. so it seems to me that the questions that we're left with on this story are or the possibilities maybe is a better way to phrase it that hunter Biden is a sketchy figure who traded on his father's name to make money through international business dealings another possibility is that all of those things are true and that Joe Biden was involved as well there's that email referring to the kickback to the big guy and

a lot of people are making the assumption or believe that that could be referring to Joe Biden. The problem for me with that is that it very well could be referring to Joe Biden, but there's no real evidence that Joe Biden knew about that, agreed to it. The money never happened. Everyone agrees to that part.

And so you can still think that Hunter Biden is the sketchy guy doing, you know, trading on his dad's name for these international business deals and that Joe Biden wanted nothing to do with it. it. And, you know, we see it in the micro sense with the emails about the key to the office in Georgetown where he says, Joe Biden's going to need a key. Well, they never office there. There was never a plan to office there. He never got the key. And so when Hunter Biden spoke on behalf of what his dad was going to do or what his dad wanted, there's at least some evidence

that his dad wasn't involved in that at all. It's kind of sad. okay so there's that whole mess I should just add to that I don't want to interrupt but add to that most of the stuff that you just describe the outlines of which were known before the election right so like the whole election was stolen

just this stuff was buried there were lots of stories about sketchy hunter and his finances before the election okay so when I think about those possibilities A I don't feel like I've learned much in the last year since the election about that but also you know

with the release of these Twitter files. If anything, it showed a lack of coordination with the government. You know, there was all that sort of initial, oh my God, the First Amendment conversation. But of course, when they were referring to the Biden team, they were referring to the campaign. So you had a private company, the social media entity, talking to a private organization, a presidential campaign. Now, of course, there was a 50-50 chance of who was going to win that presidential election. And you can certainly argue that therefore they had outsized influence on what Twitter wanted to do and things like that.

But so far what I've seen in those Twitter files actually sort of alleviates a lot of that, oh, they did it because the FBI told them it was Russian disinformation. They believed it was Russian disinformation. No, it looks like, again, at least of what we've seen so far, that there wasn't actually a whole lot of there there yet. open to seeing more, as I said, there's actually still quite a few possibilities

and unresolved answers in some of this. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events

subject to availability and vary by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.ca. slash Yanex. I do want to make sure we leave enough time for the foreign policy. parts. Steve, it's been kind of a strange week in the world. We had protests, obviously, that had been going on in China and Iran, and then movement in those countries that seemed

to move toward the protesters a little bit. Then we have coup attempts in Peru and Germany, not the two countries that I thought were on our list for this week, for instance. And then, of course, ongoing things in Russia, can you take us around the world a little bit, I guess? Sure, I'll pick and choose a little bit. I think that, you know, there's a lot to learn still about what unfolded in Germany and the coup attempt that was broken up there as ties to German far right parties, maybe a QAnon angle. And Peru, we're learning more, I think, very quickly, even faster than in Germany. The most interesting developments, to me, in some respects,

are what we're seeing in China and Iran for totally different reasons. I mean, there are parallels, I think, but obviously a lot of different underlying details that make them worth discussing. In Iran, we saw the regime as the protests there continue. And in some ways grow. we saw the regime at least rhetorically suggest that it might be easing off of some of its requirements with respect to to dress and some of its other hard-line policies.

Now, immediately, people who have followed the Iranian regime carefully for the past several decades said, this is all BS. This is meant for Western consumption. There's no sign that they're doing this. And in fact, we've seen reports as of, Thursday, that they have proceeded with new executions of prisoners who are guilty of nothing more than participating in protest. So there's evidence that the regime, that this is sort of a rhetorical faint. I still find that interesting. Why would the Iranian regime think it advantageous or necessary, perhaps, to engage in such a rhetorical fain? Obviously, these protests, the fact that they've been going on for many months, the fact that they seem to be, um, in some respects

growing, the tone of the protests and the kinds of things that we're hearing from protesters, whether actually in the protests, whether on their signs, whether, uh, you know, rap songs smuggled out from Iran, really challenging the regime and its supporters in the West, uh, feels significant and it doesn't show any real signs of dissipating. I think this has to be the Iranian regime reacting, at least in part to that. In China, I would say we've seen something similar. The zero COVID policy has been a failure when, to the extent that citizens in China can see what's happening elsewhere in the world, can see that people in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are living semi-normal lives,

they look at the regime's no-COVID policy and say, this has failed, this is not working for us. That's, of course, why, as we discussed last week, the regime has gone to great lengths to not allow those images to be seen in China. But the protests, which for years had been isolated individual places, have also spread. There are obvious clear and clever workaround.

for the protesters to use to gin up more. Those protesters have been much more aggressive in recent years than they, or recent weeks than they have been in years. And I think the regime, while perhaps not in danger of any imminent collapse, of course, is paying attention to that. They see this and they're worried about their standing with China's citizens. I think that's a pretty notable development. And I wish that the United States in both of these cases would do more

to support the protesters. These are regimes that I think can properly be called enemy regimes of the United States. We should want them to be weak. We should want them to fail. Of course there are repercussions to that. Of course, there are market interests in China. But given what China has done to the United States and what is doing regularly, same thing with Iran.

We should not want strong regimes in these places. We should be doing what we can to weaken it. David, also, we have reports that we have made a one- one-to-one prisoner swap to get Brittany Griner back to the United States in exchange for a Russian arms dealer. Was this smart? So first, I'm happy for Brittany Griner, happy for a family. You know, one of these situations,

I think it's possible to try to hold two talks in your head at the same time. One, I can be happy that she's back. Two, I can think it's a bad deal. And I think this is a bad deal. the idea that you can grab and hold our citizens on specious grounds and extort and extract from us a truly reprehensible prisoner in exchange for returning our citizens sets a really difficult precedent.

There was another American though that we have left behind so far named Paul Waylon, a former Marine. And so I'm happy for her. I think this is a very bad deal. at the same time, also realize this is different from dealing with a terrorist organization where you have sort of on the possibility of rescue is sort of fluttering around as, well, wait a minute, there's alternatives to prisoner swaps, and one of the alternatives is perhaps finding and rescuing the prisoner has happened in other situations throughout history.

This one, the idea that you're going to swoop into Russia and rescue Brittany Griner or Paul Waylon is just nonsense. So the decision tree is more limited here. But I think it's a bad deal. I'm upset that we didn't also get Whalen out, although I'm not certain that the door is closed on this, that there are perhaps other negotiations going on. But coughing up a reprehensible prisoner who was convicted

of conspiring to kill Americans, conspiring to kill Americans in exchange, I have real qualms about it. So general has brought this out to the foreign policy positions of the Biden administration. You have Steve and David describing inaction and action by the Biden team. Are they prioritizing the right things? Are they not, are they ineffective? So in terms of the things that we've already been discussing,

I'm really curious about the decision-making that went into these negotiations. Look, I agree to everybody. It's great that this woman is home. She deserves to come home. She didn't deserve to be arrested. It was outrageous what Russia did. And obviously, it's not the same thing

as the Bo Bergdahl situation in the Obama administration. But one of the interesting things about the Bergdahl recovery was how deeply it was, reflected how deep in the bubble the Obama administration was about what the public's reaction to it was going to be, right? They thought like giving five serious members of the Taliban in exchange for a guy who basically deserted his unit was going to be hugely popular. There was actually a Obama aide who told Rolling Stone at the time that this is going to win the election for us, which you shouldn't say. And I mean, I know.

you know more about comms than I do, but like that was not a good thing to say. And so this is obviously not the exact same situation, but it is entirely possible to me that the world that the Obama,

not the Obama, the Biden White House lives in, thinks Greiner's arrest was a much bigger deal than the median American does. And that they may overhype it in ways that may not be politically to their benefit.

On the merits, I just think it's a bad deal. More broadly, I think you have to give Biden pretty seriously good grades on how he's handled Ukraine. And without it seeming, without giving much ammo to the, much fair ammo to the boobate isolationist crowd on the right. And there's a point that, you know, like Luke coffee over at Hudson will make all the time. If you actually look at polling, the average Republican is actually very pro-Ukraine in all of this. And the sort of Maga caucus crowd in Congress and the president of the Heritage Foundation, notwithstanding, beating up on the Ukraine stuff isn't a mainstream Republican or conservative position, never mind a mainstream American one.

I have to say on Saudi Arabia, on Iran, Biden gets much lower marks. This country should have a bedrock, nonpartisan policy of we root for people fighting for freedom. And rhetorically, we're not, we have not been there. When I say that to defenders of the Biden administration, he said, well, you don't know what's going on behind the scene. And Reagan said things in public while he was fighting for the good guys.

a good fight behind the scenes. True. I'm open to correction on all that. But when you see Saudi Arabia having this high-level visit with the Chinese this week, when you see how basically Saudi Arabia just doesn't like Joe Biden,

or at least the Crown Prince doesn't like Joe Biden, he's kind of lucked up that relationship. He's the politics of wanting oil from Venezuela, but not from Texas and Montana. Strikes me is very strange. And I just want to correct one thing that Steve said. Absolutely the topics that he said the things that are most interesting are China and in Iran. I absolutely agree with what I think he meant, which is they're the most important things.

But the most interesting thing is the story that broke this week that warriors, Teutonic Knights for the Second Reich. attempted a coup in Germany this week with elements from the Q&on brigades and the theory that they were going to reinstall reinstall the essentially the Kaiser or a distant relative of the Kaiser

that is like almost Marvel superhero movie plotting right there and I think it's fantastic. I mean, probably bad for Germany and all that, but you know, whatever. And I think I must know more about it. Steve, I'm curious how you would compare the Biden administration's actions.

You can pick whichever ones you want from this popery bag this week. Compare it to what you think a Trump administration would have done in the same position and what a other Republican president conservative president would do in this week. Where does it differ?

Where is it the same? It's a good question. I mean, I think one of the problems with the Biden administration policy is that nobody knows what it's going to do from situation to situation. There's no through line. You can't predict this. Now, this is something that was said,

I think in fact said by me, as a criticism of the Trump administration policy. It's good to let people know. It's good to tell people what your principles are so that they can make their positions, make their important decisions with an understanding of what the U.S. reaction will be, particularly if you are the world's leading superpower. I think the Biden administration seems to be doing this on an ad hoc basis that in some ways isn't unlike,

at least by judging by results, what the Trump administration would do, right? I mean, You had the Biden administration, even after these protests had been going on in Iran, even after Barack Obama said publicly that he regretted not being more forceful about the Green Revolution, sort of leaving open the possibility that they would continue to pursue the Iran nuclear deal. That's crazy. I mean, I think it was crazy not to set aside the Iran nuclear deal based on the actions of the regime going back decades before. I think it was a poor decision to do it. But in the face of everything that's happening on the ground is, as you're seeing, this demonstrated weakness by the Iranian regime, the Biden administration said publicly, yeah, we're not sort of done with that yet. They've later issued statements that seem to suggest it's not going to happen, but they're much more descriptive statements. This is probably something that's not going to happen than, you know, statements of moral judgment where they're saying we couldn't possibly do a deal with a regime like this.

it's killing its own people. The same thing is true on this story coming out of Russia on this Brittany Griner exchange. Everything David said, agree with it, of course we're happy for the families should be stipulated. But why Brittany Griner and not Paul Whalen? There are other people in captivity, including someone named Mark Fogel,

who was a teacher at an Anglo-American school in Moscow, who was taken for having small amounts of marijuana, detained for having small amounts of marijuana, prescribed marijuana, as he traveled into Moscow. And the State Department hasn't even concluded that he's been wrongfully detained at this point, much less made much of an effort, at least much of an effort that we know of, to get him released. It just seems arbitrary. And I think the real concern with this prisoner exchange is that it makes America. targets around the world. Other people are paying attention to this. Other rogue regimes are watching what's happened

and they're seeing that if they take an American, they can extract concessions from us for doing this. There's a really interesting Twitter thread and you all know how much I hate to bring up Twitter threads on this podcast so you know I think it's really, really interesting. But it's from a guy named Alex Plitzis who used to work. He's now at the Atlantic Council, used to work at the Pentagon on hostage situations.

And he says he was the Secretary of Defense's representative to the 2015 White House Hostage Policy Review Team. So you'll come up with the policy and looked at oversight on hostage rescue and personnel recovery and has been working on this for a long time. He said that traditionally these kinds of swaps are reserved for members of the military, maybe intelligence officials who've been captured in the course of their duties, What this does, and I'm quoting here, is send a signal to rogue regime's terrorist organizations that the U.S. is willing to negotiate and provide concessions for releasing hostages. This is incredibly dangerous as it only encourages further hostage taking. I think he's got a good point, and I worry about the short-term and long-term consequences of doing it. So, Steve, one factual thing, or at least purported factual thing.

Andre Mitchell was reporting, apparently was on this, was going to break a lot of this. She was saying on the Whalen question that at least what the administration is saying is that the Russians never, their position was he's an espionage case. We're not talking about that. It's one for one or nothing.

And they took Whalen off the table. Now, maybe that's not necessarily a defense of just accepting it. Right. No, I think it makes it worse in many ways because of exactly what Alex Plitz has said. And it was the case that in the earlier discussions of this, at least publicly, the administration, administration officials were backgrounding reporters suggesting that it would be Whalen and Griner for this Victor Boot.

It certainly feels like a step back. It should also be noted that the Wayland family has put out a statement, commending the Biden administration for getting Brittany Griner, even in this moment of disappointment. And with that, instead of a not worth your time, I actually want to read the statement from the Whalen family. There is no greater success than for a wrongful detainee to be freed and for them to go home.

The Biden administration made the right decision to bring Ms. Griner home and to make the deal that was possible rather than waiting for the one that wasn't going to. There's a lot of Americans who are being held, abroad this Christmas that aren't going to be with their families for another year

and I think it's just worth a moment on this podcast to think of them Austin Tice has been in last scene in Syria in 2012 and his family

has been waiting for him and praying for him and trying to secure his release the Wayland family has been missing their son for four years now and there are so many other Americans and all sorts of places.

Rwanda, Venezuela, Iran, the list goes on. So this Christmas, when you're sitting around the table, cheers to them and think of their families as well this year. Thanks for joining us. And make sure to rate this podcast if you want other people to be able to find it as well. And if you want to comment on this episode, become a member of the dispatch and hop in the comment section.

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