The NPR Politics Podcast - Merrick Garland's Had A Lot On His Plate

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

The Department of Justice this week announced war crimes charges against four Russian soldiers for alleged torture of an American citizen in Ukraine, and the arrest of a former U.S. ambassador on charges of working for Cuban intelligence services. Both of these come after last week's arrest of a man allegedly plotting to kill an American citizen at the behest of a government official in India. We look at each of the cases. This episode: political correspondent Susan Davis, justice correspondent Ryan Lucas, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This episode was edited by Casey Morell. It was produced by Jeongyoon Han. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Patrick. And this is Jimmy. We just finished our 19,340-foot summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Oh, wow. This podcast was recorded at... 12.42 p.m. on Thursday, December 7th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but we'll still be celebrating with our poolside beers

before we head back home to the great state of Colorado. Here's the show. Hmm, have fun. That's impressive. I always wanted to do that. That's very impressive. A friend of mine did it and he said it was very, very hard, but he was very proud of himself. I bet that was a really nice beer they enjoyed after that. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. And it's been a consequential I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And it's been a consequential week at the Justice Department.

An Indian national was charged with plotting to assassinate a Sikh leader and U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, a scheme allegedly directed by an Indian government official. Then a former U.S. ambassador to Bolivia was charged with being an agent for Cuban intelligence. He was arrested in Miami. And just yesterday, charges for war crimes committed against a U.S. citizen in the war in Ukraine. Ryan, this is a lot of separate issues to tick through, but let's start with the assassination plot. What happened there? So the Justice Department says that the target of this alleged plot was a leader, as you said, of the Six Separatist Movement here in the U.S. He is, as you said, and this is important, an American citizen. One man has been charged, an Indian national by the name of Nikhil

Gupta. Court papers say he was kind of leading the organization of this murder-for-hire scheme. But the really interesting thing in this case is that the indictment says the plot as a whole was directed from afar by an Indian government employee. And the language in the indictment suggests that this was possibly an Indian intelligence official. Gupta, for his part, he had ties to the underworld, a background in kind of narcotics trafficking, weapons trafficking. He's put in charge of kind of orchestrating this on the day-to-day logistics of it. He, according to the indictment, asks a contact, someone that he knows, for kind of a recommendation of someone to carry out a hit in the United States. And it turns out that the guy who he was talking to was an informant for the DEA. This is insane.

I'm sorry. This is insane. I'm only halfway through it, Mara. It gets more insane. I'm sorry. This is insane. I'm only halfway through it, Mara. It gets more insane. So what this informant for the DEA does is he says, sure, I've got somebody for you. And he puts him in contact with someone who he says is a hitman. But that hitman, that purported hitman, was in fact an undercover DEA agent. And this undercover DEA agent and Gupta talk about logistics.

They settle on a price, $100,000 to carry out this hit. Gupta tells the hitman, the alleged hitman, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. We want to get this done. But, and this is important for the geopolitical context here, he says, just don't do it when there are high level talks between Indian officials and American officials. Which happened pretty recently. That's right. It happened this summer. And this is all going down in the sort of May to late June timeframe. Ultimately, though, Gupta was arrested at the end of June in the Czech Republic at the U.S. request. He's still there awaiting extradition to the U.S. This is the kind of thing that in another era could be considered an act of war, to assassinate a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil? And didn't something just like this happen in Canada recently? That's right. There was actually a six separatist leader who was actually killed in Canada. He was shot and killed. And the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, came out and

said outright that they have said they were Indian government agents who carried out that assassination. And that case is actually mentioned in the indictment. Mara, part of what's fascinating about this to me is that the Biden administration has gone to great lengths to build its relationship with Indian Prime Minister Modi. There was a state dinner. I remember doing a podcast about the entire U.S.-India relationship earlier this year. And this seems like, you know, allegedly quite an act of aggression by the Indian government. Oh, my God, this is a thumb in the eye for India to do to the United States. It sounds like they don't want good relations with the United States. And India, which is a large and

fast growing economy, is soon going to go right up to the top three with the US and China. It's the biggest democracy in the world by population. And there's no doubt that the Biden administration wanted its relations with India to be a counterweight to China. I don't know what this does to that, but this is a big deal. Well, the administration officials have talked to the Indian government about this and did over the course of the summer. Biden brought it up himself with Modi on the sidelines of the G20. And the Indians have since said, we're going to conduct a high level inquiry. But whether anything comes of that, I think a lot of people are skeptical. And then there's this case involving a former US ambassador to Bolivia.

This all just sounds like the stuff of Hollywood movies, Ryan. Talk us through this case. So this is a case against Victor Manuel Rocha. He was born in Colombia. He's 73 years old. He was born in Colombia, became a U.S. citizen. And in 1981, back in 1981, he joins the State Department, rises up through the ranks, works in U.S. embassies in Central America in the 1980s, busy time in Central America. He was on the National Security Council in the 1990s, ultimately ends up being the U.S. ambassador to Bolivia, as you said, from 1999 to 2002, leaves government, goes into the private sector, does some work kind of consulting for U.S. Southern Command, which deals with South America and Cuba. But it turns out, according to the Justice Department, that dating all the way back to 1981, so for more than 40 years, Rocha was also secretly working as an agent for Cuban intelligence. Yeah. Ryan, how did they catch the guy?

Well, it was an FBI sting operation in the end. What ended up happening is the government learned somehow, was alerted to his alleged ties to the Cuban government. And so they had an undercover agent approach him saying that he was a quote unquote friend from Havana. And they agreed to meet and they met up three times. The indictment says that Rocha tried to use kind of counter surveillance techniques to avoid being followed to these meetings. The FBI, of course, knew who he was and where he was and where he was going. And they recorded both on audio and video all of these meetings. And in these meetings, according to the indictment, there's just these

very incriminating things that he says about the work that he did on behalf of the Cuban government, how he's still dedicated to the Cuban cause. He talked a bit about how he pretended to be this right-wing guy when in fact, of course, he was aiding the communist government in Cuba. And the FBI has this all recorded. Does the indictment say what he got for it? It doesn't. There are still things that we do not know, a lot of questions that we would like to have answers to. One of them being, yes, what did he get in return? And the second being, what specifically did he do? Was there information? What information was he passing along? It sounds like he did this out of because he was a true believer, not for cash, as we've seen What specifically did he do? Was there information? What information was he passing along? It sounds like he did this out of – because he was a true believer, not for cash, as we've seen so many other similar spy stories.

You know, they get a whole lot of cash or they're in financial distress and they start spying for a foreign government. This guy sounds like he's a true believer. That impression does come from the indictment, but I would also say one can be a true believer and accept cash. Also accept money on the side. You know, Mara, Cuba has seems to have moved so far down the list of foreign policy concerns for the U.S., but not too long ago, this would have been a very explosive story. What's so interesting about this story is that, as you said, not many years ago, this would be a huge story. Cuba was the communist country on our doorstep. Now we're more worried about these former communist countries

that are more or less merely dictatorships like Russia and China. But Cuba is no longer the big ideological threat it once was. All right, let's take a quick break, and we'll talk more about those hotspots when we get back. And we're back. And Ryan, the DOJ also this week charged four Russian soldiers with war crimes for actions in Ukraine against an American. This is, as I understand it, the first of its kind of this kind of criminal charge.

Yeah, it's the first time that the U.S. has brought charges under the 1996 War Crimes Act, which allows the department to charge people with war crimes for crimes against an American citizen. And it's a really grim case. I mean, it's similar things to what we've heard stories about Russian atrocities in Ukraine against Ukrainians, but in this case, it's against an American citizen. The four people charged, you had two kind of commanding officers. The other two were people who were lower level figures. What the indictment says is that basically when the Russians rolled in to this village near Kherson in Southern Ukraine, they abducted this American for 10 days and tortured him. Here's a little bit of what the attorney general said

describing the treatment when he was first abducted. During the abduction, we allege that those defendants threw the victim to the ground while he was naked, tied his hands behind his back, pointed a gun at his head, and beat him with their feet, their fists, and the stocks of their guns. He was living in this village with his wife. We don't know who this individual is, who this American is. He's not identified, nor is his wife. We don't know why he was there. We just know that he was living in this village. What the indictment describes as happening to this guy over those 10 days is pretty awful.

And at one point during an interrogation, apparently when the defendants did not like what he was saying to them, they dragged him outside. And this is what the attorney general said happened next. There, they forced him to the ground, put a gun to the back of his head. The victim believed he was about to be killed. They moved the gun just before pulling the trigger, and the bullet went just past his head. So they subjected him to mock execution.

Ryan, is this indictment more symbolic? Because I don't imagine the Russian government is going to be quick to turn over for Russian soldiers indicted by a U.S. court. Right. They are not in U.S. custody. As you noted, the Russians are unlikely to turn them over. It's certainly important for symbolic reasons, yes. What the Justice Department will say and what officials say in cases like this, even when someone is not in U.S. custody, is one, the federal government has a long memory and a long arm.

And sometimes people will go on vacation in some place that has an extradition treaty with the U.S. and they'll slip up and they'll get caught and they can bring them back here and they can face the American justice system. And Garland yesterday actually referenced U.S. efforts after World War II to hold people responsible for Nazi crimes. And he said, look, in many cases, it took decades to identify those people and deport them and have them face justice. And he said with Ukraine, the Justice Department is not going to forget what's going on there. It's not going to forget the atrocities and they are going to pursue war crimes crisis going forward. Mara, in terms of geopolitics, I mean, the Ukraine angle here is very obvious. And the Biden administration is working very hard in Washington to get Congress to pass more money to assist the Ukrainians in their fight against Russia. But it doesn't look good right now in Congress. No, it doesn't look good. I don't think this indictment really will make a difference one way or another. But this is a huge deal.

The Biden administration says that Ukraine has run out of bullets and they're running out of time. And if Congress doesn't approve more money for military aid to Ukraine, that Vladimir Putin will be advantaged and Ukraine might lose this war. The Republican Party used to be part of a bipartisan consensus that the U.S. should help Ukraine. But support among Republicans has really dropped. And what surprises me is Republicans for the most part are the tough, strong defense party. They're for aiding Israel milit party. They're for aiding Israel militarily. They're for aiding Taiwan. But they're not for aiding Ukraine. And I think there are a lot of reasons for that. But one of them that we can't ignore is that Donald Trump, who is the

leader of the Republican Party, has a well-established animus to Ukraine and especially to President Zelensky. And he has a soft spot for Putin. He got impeached because he put pressure on Zelensky to open an investigation into Joe Biden, held up military aid to get that investigation, which never happened. So it doesn't look good. I mean, there are people in Congress who say they'll come back in January, somehow solve the problem of the border. Republicans are saying they're not going to approve any aid to Ukraine unless they get something very big from the Democrats in the White House on U.S. border security. But right now, that funding for Ukraine is not going anywhere. Ryan, it feels like there is a connective tissue here in that, one, the world is a very

dangerous place. But also, as we talk through all these cases, I'm thinking about FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was on Capitol Hill this week testifying. And he had this exchange with Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, about how he views the sort of global landscape right now. So what I would say that is unique about the environment that we're in right now in my career is that while there may have been times over the years where individual threats could have been higher here or there

than where they might be right now, I've never seen a time where all the threats or so many of the threats are all elevated all at exactly the same time. Would you say that there's multiple blinking red lights out there? I see blinking lights everywhere I turn. This is a big look. We are having a presidential election where I can't think of a time we've had so many

global crises all at once. A major land war in Europe, a war in the Middle East, and an aggressive China that every single U.S. war game has shown if they wanted to, they could take Taiwan. And those are just the first three. Yeah. And those are overseas. And you look at the domestic front, which is what Ray is responsible for.

And I will say, I mean, the blinking red lights certainly does catch your ear. It's also his job to see blinking red lights. He looks for the blinking red lights certainly does catch your ear. It's also his job to see blinking red lights. He looks for the blinking red lights everywhere. But, you know, there's, he's talked about a heightened threat environment, as they like to call it, in a counterterrorism sense, with concerns about people inspired by what's going on in the Middle East to take action here. You have concerns about domestic terrorism here. And certainly we have seen growing indications of the willingness of Americans to settle their political disputes with violence. He's talked about the cybersecurity threats, Russia and China counterintelligence threats, people trying talked about, you know, the cybersecurity threats, Russia and China counterintelligence threats, people trying to steal American intellectual property.

Hate crimes are spiking. There is a lot going on right now and a lot to draw the attention of the FBI. All right, let's leave it there for today. And we'll be back in your feeds tomorrow with the Weekly Roundup. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. I'm Ryan Lucas. I cover the Justice Department. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thanks for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.