80-Year-Old Man Loses War

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The customer's testing test is on shopiefire.com. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Plicy of America. I'm John Favre. - I'm John Navit.

- Tommy Detour. - On today's show, the U.S. and Iran have signed a memo to end hostilities allegedly for now. We'll talk about it as well as the implications for Iran's nuclear program, Israel,

and our own midterm politics. We'll also dig into Trump's 80th birthday celebration, which involved the much anticipated White House UFC fight, and lots of opportunities for him and his pals to make more money.

Gavin Newsom just announced that Trump's Goons

of the Justice Department are investigating his wife and a bid to derail his potential presidential campaign. We'll get into what we know about that. Then Tommy talks to Senator Mark Warner

“about the Iran situation and what the Senate can do”

and why he's pushing his colleagues to confirm Trump's new pick for DNI. Before we start, please consider subscribing. If you haven't already, you get ad-free episodes of PODSAVE America and all your other favorite cricket pods.

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So check it out, cricket.com/friends, become a friend of the PODSubscriber today. All right, let's get to the news. The Iran War appears to be over and Donald Trump has lost. U.S. and Iranian officials have signed a memorandum

of understanding, short-handed, as an MOU. That extends the ceasefire another 60 days. Reopens the straight-of-war moves and exchange for ending the U.S. naval blockade of Iran and kicks just about every other issue

to the next phase of negotiations, including Iran's nuclear program and economic sanctions relief. Iran has certainly suffered significant casualties and damage in this war, but Trump's war didn't topple the Iranian regime, destroy its military

or ballistic missile capabilities, and Iran's support for proxies like Hezbollah, or eliminate its nuclear program by the way, those were all of the objectives that Trump and Marco Rubio laid out way back in February and March when this whole thing started.

Other than that, mission accomplished, which seems to be a face saving agreement that lets Trump pretend he won, which he did shortly after arriving in Europe for the G7 on Monday.

- The deal's all right. And the strain is already partially opened as you know there. Doing a little hunting for a couple of mines. These ships are starting to go out.

Now on Friday, it'll be completely open. It's not like the Obama document, which was just a terrible document. I think it's gonna be free sailing. We do want to see when you can straighten out the lemon,

the lemon and the thing. - Where were they? By the way, that was the least presidential backdrop I've ever seen. - I don't know.

- I assume they're somewhere in France if he's with Macron, but they're on a porch.

- Anyway, the Obama document was terrible

“and we do want to straighten out Lebanon, maybe.”

- Lebanon. - Lebanon. So the administration says the full text of the MOU won't be released for another day or two, but based on the details that have been reported,

how does the deal look beyond the headline summary that I gave? - You know, the old Mike Meyers thing, like this suit nuts are not their suit nuts. It's like this is the replacement nuclear deal.

It's not nuclear, we know that, but it's not really even a deal because presumably in a deal both sides would have to concede something and I can't figure out what Iran has conceded.

I know what the U.S. gave up, right? I know what were massive fun that they could get access to sanctions, really, they make it a bunch of cash. They get a ceasefire in Lebanon, which they want to try to constrain.

Iran seems to have agreed to the non-proliferation treaty it already agreed to and to reopen the straight of her moves, which was open 109 days ago. So this is not a deal, this is the U.S. surrendering in order to reopen the negotiations.

It stopped when it bombed Iran. - It was a deal to temporarily deal with the fallout from the stupid war we started and hopes of maybe getting a full nuclear deal to accomplish our goals. I mean, you laid it out.

I mean, the Trump described his goals. He did a video statement right after they started the war. He said, we're going to destroy their missiles and raise their missile industry to the ground. We're going to annihilate their Navy.

We're going to ensure that the region's terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world than attack our forces. And we'll ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon. I guess we like-

- It's the Navy. - The Navy? - Maybe you get one for four of that. - Yeah, we took a Navy, but they saw the straight of her moves close so that doesn't seem good.

Look, this is hard to message because this was the best deal available to Trump in for the world because it ended the war. And we were seeing economies in Asia, collapsing. We could see a global famine because of what was happening, but Trump accomplished none of his goals.

“And I think we should we have to message that.”

And Iran now knows that can shut down the global economy at any time by closing the straight-of-home moves and they could get hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief, like this is a disaster. And the Trump and Netanyahu, like Netanyahu actively tried regime change

by killing the Supreme Leader. Trump was for it when it seemed like it might happen, but the net effect is there's now a younger, more hard-line Supreme Leader and a more entrenched IRGC running the show. And the United States looks like we're unreliable and weak.

- I thought it was very funny that in one of his truths about this, Trump was like, "I hereby declare the straight open." And then you look at some of the fine print, or at least some of the reported details. And before the war, the straight was controlled by no one. It was an original body of water.

And now it will be controlled by Iran and Iran together, apparently. And so you don't really hear Trump talking about that, although he is saying, "It's toll-free." It's toll-free, like the calls that we used to make back in the '80s and '90s. Sounds like it might be toll-free for 60 days.

And then Iran has plans to slap a toll on that shipping. - Yeah, they've said that they can charge fees, so that seems to be, even that seems to be in dispute right now. - Yeah, also, you know, Trump is saying that it will be fully open by Friday when they signed the agreement.

But when they were last talking about what the deal would look like, it was going to take 30 days to potentially remove the minds that are in place. And I don't know if I were an oil tanker, I would definitely want to go after several.

- Yeah, I would not be first.

- A lot of like, no, no after you, after you, Exxon. - We don't know after you. - Every restaurant opening is delayed, you know? Like when you do a remodeling, take a lot of things out. - Yeah, I think it's a good order.

- You want to be the third or fourth oil tanker, for sure. - It may be fifth or sixth. - Can I read you guys one quote from a senior administration official, I'm pretty sure, is named Ryan, so with a Haiti plant. One of the really cool things and interesting things about this entire process

that we actually have a direct relationship with a number of people at the highest levels of the Iranian government. You know, you could have just called them and not killed like their whole family. So the war was literally the friends we made on the way.

“- That's what it's, that's what we learned.”

- It's like, hey man, I know it's hard to make adult friends, J.D.Vans. - The male loneliness crisis, he's unbelievable. - With the Iran War. There's some back and forth on the sanctions relief too. So it's like first it was, we heard some reports

that there'd be 12 billion sanctions relief right away with another 24 billion coming later, depending on what Iran does. And then Iran's asking for like a pot of $300 billion that they might be able to access down the road.

Now it seems like there's no sanctions relief right away, but it's also like, where was the money coming? This is like, it would be unfrozen assets, right? - Yeah, there's much of unfrozen money that is the Iranian's money sitting in banks and Qatar, for example,

then there's all this talk of like a, up to a $300 billion investment fund that will come from Gulf countries.

I think the truth is no one knows.

Iran's real money is in the come from slapping fees on ships

and sanctions relief is my guess. - Selling all its oil again. - Yeah, well, they've already claimed that the docu-sign is done or however they did it over email. What is the release of the text, if the Iranians have seen it

and signed it and we've seen it and signed it, there's no secrets between us. So to me, I can't think of a reason why Iran wouldn't want the text out there. It seems to me that vans and Trump are trying to spin this thing

until we see the text and everybody loses their fucking minds. - Maybe there's something about Jeffrey Epstein in the text. - Oh yeah, I could be as he negotiated this thing. There we go. - Boy, I'll be, what a surprise that happened.

“- I mean, I think it's a conspiracy too, yeah.”

- Trump was always gonna say whatever deal signed

was better than Obama's Iran deal. You were saying Tommy this morning that the comparison is apples and oranges. - Yeah, in the case of the apples, there was a deal that when it's a force and that worked for a couple of years

according to Trump's own top national security aids. In Trump's case, there is no deal. There exists a framework to talk about possibly getting to a deal. And just to remind everybody with a JCPOA said,

the preamble of the JCPOA said, quote, Iran reaffirms and under no circumstances will Iran ever seek to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. So whenever Trump says, look, they said they're not gonna get a nuclear weapon.

That was already enshrined in the JCPOA and also enshrined in another treaty called the NPT. We don't have to blabber that. But to make sure that Iran could not get a nuclear weapon, the JCPOA said Iran had to reduce its enrichment capacity

by two thirds. I meant like taking down or shipping out or shuddering out all their centrifuges.

“They had to cap in Richmond at 3.6% purity,”

3.7% purity. They had to ship out 97% of their stockpile and allow the IAEA to inspect all of their nuclear sites. Then agreed to not build a new enrichment facility for up to 15 years.

Republicans were always mad about the sunset provisions

in that agreement, but it was working and it worked. And it sounds like Trump is maybe at best gonna get a similar deal after launching this disastrous work that he could have gotten if you just tried to renegotiate.

- Yeah, we need a president without sense prohibitions. - That sounds like super easy to problem. - Yeah, it does seem like now that the blockade will be over and the straight is open. It's not like there's a lot of pressure on Iran

to get something out of these negotiations. It's just if they want sanctions relief, and which I'm sure they do, then maybe they make a deal, but they've also been going on quite a long time without sanctions relief.

So it doesn't seem like there's a forcing mechanism here. So Israeli and US officials are both saying that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon is not part of the agreement. Iran and Pakistan are saying an end to all military operations

in Lebanon is part of the agreement. Trump has also been publicly attacking Netanyahu over the last few days for launching strikes in Lebanon and nearly tanked the deal, he told Axios that BB has, quote, "no fucking judgment."

So this chapter of the conflict seems unresolved. What do you guys make of the Trump BB dust up and where this goes from here? - That was in an interview in which Trump said that Israel launching those strikes

delayed the deal from going through, and then after the deal goes through, in which Iran and Trump are claiming Israel is bound, Netanyahu says he doesn't see eye to eye to Trump and they retain all their prerogatives to defend Israel

from attack. And so I don't understand what is supposed to happen over the next 60 days and how you get to the end of 60 days without Trump threatening further military escalation to get to a deal or Israel threatening military escalation

or they're being some kind of a fight in Lebanon because in his first comments about this Netanyahu who said plainly, we reserved the right to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon that will continue to be our position

regardless of an agreement. - Yeah, every time Netanyahu wants to try to blow up talks or prevent a deal, he just bombs somewhere in Bay Route and he tried that move again here and it seems to have pissed Trump off

“and actually I think probably sped up the deal.”

I mean, I do think it's hard to overstate how negative the reaction to this deal is in Israel right now. I follow this one is really political security analyst who was in the IDF for 25 years and he ran the head of the Iran branch

for Israeli military intelligence at one point, so like, you know, pretty hard line guy. He described the deal as a political and security catastrophe for Israel because the nuclear issue is unresolved and the fact that Trump lost the war

will likely defer future presidents from taking military action against Iran what you're just saying there about the lack of stick now for the Iranians. And it also, it seems like Iran will end up stronger

because they will have all these financial incentives

and there will never, there won't really be a credible deterrent

anymore because no president's gonna want to touch this stove and so this is a huge hit for Netanyahu himself. He was Mr. Iran, he was Mr. Security, he was the guy who couldn't manipulate Washington now he's none of those things.

He's got an election coming up and here's what some of his opponents are saying. A Avigore Lieberman said, a catastrophe from Israel's perspective, that was one quote. "Guyer Lippie, the moderate,

this is one of the most shocking failures

So I think I'm also watching whether Netanyahu

tries to blow this up and they're currently occupying the forward operating line for the IDF right now is six miles into Lebanon. They say they're not going to retreat from that, but they're also gonna get shot at by Hezbollah.

So I'm not sure how this is gonna go, but he needs to be careful because he needs Trump's help both politically and in terms of security support going forward. But also, you can imagine from Trump's perspective

that he's thinking, okay, I got this whole thing done if the negotiations over the nuclear program don't really go anywhere, no one at home is really gonna care or notice and I can just move on.

BB though, for everything you just said to me, clearly is not done with Lebanon and Hezbollah and is now feeling all kinds of pressure to continue that. I'm sure Trump thinks, well,

BB can do whatever he wants now, I'm washing my hands of this.

Like I don't have to want to deal with it.

“But Iran knows that the best way to get the US”

back into the conflict and to draw them, to draw us back in, is to close the straight again. So you can imagine that BB goes into Lebanon and there's another menarun, you know, fires to help. Hezbollah and they go back and forth

and Trump wants to stay out of the whole thing. But Iran, of course, knows that it can get us back into the whole thing just by closing the straight again. And so like, Trump's dream, I'm sure is like, let these people fight it out.

I don't care anymore. I want to wash my hands of this. Like, I just don't think it's gonna be that easy. It has to look in launch missiles at any time to draw us back into the conflict and draw criticism

from the world because Israel's escalating the conflict in response to Hezbollah, part of what Iran

has been doing is using Hezbollah to make this conflict

also about Lebanon, which is successfully dead, right? Because now Israel, because now Iran can call off Hezbollah for a short period of time while demanding Israel adhere to a ceasefire in which it's perpetually under threat from Hezbollah and the North.

So it's just a stupidity of this war. We will just be living with it for just very, very long time. - Yeah, I mean, the Iranians have said they've made clear that if the Israelis hit targets in parts of Beirut, they will fire back directly at Tel Aviv.

And that's the linkage they created in the two conflicts.

“And I think it's a very dangerous place for Netanyahu”

to be as people especially in northern Israel feel like they're living under constant threat from Hezbollah bombardment they are. - Yeah, it's totally fair to fill that way. But in terms of a security measure at the such as backfire,

I'll fire it spectacularly for Netanyahu. - Let's say I know the memo is playing in Maga World, which has been divided over Iran, bloodthirsty warmonger, Lindsey Graham raised some eyebrows when he tweeted that while he was pleased

to hear the straight will be reopened, he's quote somewhat concerned with what the Iranians are saying about the MOU believes that Congress must have the final say on any nuclear agreement and quote, it is imperative that the architect of the deal

vice president Vance and his negotiating partners and quote be part of presenting any final deal to Congress. So what's that all about, you think? And have you guys seen any other note worthy reactions from either the anti-war maga faction or the Iran hawks?

- So, some bolt John Bolton criticizing it. The Lindsey Graham being unable to criticize Trump because Donald Trump cannot fail. He can only be failed and so pathetic.

“You want to hang this around J.D. Vance's neck”

because he's easier to criticize. You feel like he'll give a little bit more. You're just just not scared of the guy. It's all sort of the usual pathetic Instagram. - The anti-Iran hawks are losing their minds.

- I interpreted Graham's comments, both is wrapping this thing around J.D. Vance's neck, but also maybe suggesting that this would be subject to a 67 vote threshold in the Senate, which means it would be dead. Or yeah, treaties require two-thirds vote.

The JCPOA was not treated as a treaty. Thus, future presidents were not bound by it, so maybe that's the argument here. But like Mark Levin, the Fox News host, is losing his mind on an hourly basis.

He's getting in fights with like-- - Micro-punism. - The national security team, yeah. The Neocon, thank tanks, are losing their minds. This is one called FDD, the foundation

for the defense of democracy, which is just garbage human beings. You know, propped up, I write wing billionaire money, who do nothing but push for wars that they, nor their kids will ever fight in. I haven't heard A-Pakway in, that that's a baby

sort of suspiciously quiet. So, but the hawkish wing of the Republican Party is furious. They know this is a capitulation. They know Trump lost.

They're just trying to figure out how to undo it. - I hate to break it to Lindsey Graham and maybe J.D. Vance, but I don't think Congress will be viewing any kind of deal anytime soon, 'cause I just can't imagine a deal actually getting done

with this point. - Yeah, good point. - You can see Graham going after Vance is like you said, because you know, this can't criticize Trump. But also, it's kind of like a warning shot to J.D. Vance

about 20, 28, and it did make me think that if this goes as we think it's gonna go and the around war hawks are all pissed off, someone's gonna try to launch some kind of a more pro-war campaign than the Republican primary against a J.D. Vance

that is destined to fail, by the way.

- Yeah, exactly. - But you can see Lindsey Cruz. - Yeah, Lindsey.

“They want to kind of hold J.D. Vance up as like beware,”

beware, we're gonna come after you in a primary with our hawks, which is like, "Ooh, I'd be so scared." - Yeah, you really know that's gonna work, but you can see that.

You can see that maybe Ted Cruz, who's also I saw, thinking about a presidential campaign again. Amazing, amazing stuff. (upbeat music) - This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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I'm a huge fan of Willie's. It's really grace and joy life in the high country. Go to drinkwillies.com and use code crookid. (upbeat music) I wanna touch on all the political implications

of all this for the midterms and beyond. There's a question of how long it will take for high gas prices and other straight-related disruptions to end a question of whether Trump and Republicans will be able to just move on from Iran

and pretend like it never happened,

even if the next phase of negotiations hasn't led to a deal by November. And then there's the question of what Democrats say about any of this over the next few weeks and months.

Tommy, you wanna take the, I know you have some thoughts on the last one, especially.

“Yeah, I think being a Democrat in this situation”

is very hard because we are trying to be responsible. And the Democrat was cutting this deal for Barack Obama was making this agreement. Republicans would say, "You're weak, you're a coward, "you lost rinse repeat on Fox News at Nazium."

And it's a simple and powerful message. You know, strength versus weakness. Our job is harder because, again, ending the war was the best of a bad set of options. But we need to explain why Trump's starting the war

has made us worse off as a nation because I think we just need to kill and finally this neocon argument that you can bomb your way to peace. We heard this in Iraq.

Somehow it wasn't discredited then. Now we're at war with Iran and it's just a nightmare. And so, again, it's repeating that we failed on the core objectives and just arguing that we could have gotten

the deal of Trump will potentially get after this 60 days of negotiation without ever going to war. The original sin was not in 2018 just trying to renegotiate the JCPOA.

And I think Democrats need to be more fulfilled, rooted in support of diplomatic solutions to problems. Stopping afraid of their own shadow on this stuff. And more fulfilled, rooted about why regime changed

towards the Middle East or disaster. I thought we'd all got there, but apparently not. - The good news is, is war is extremely unpopular, like shockingly unpopular. 60 days from now is like mid-August.

And so, two possibilities, well, whole range of possibilities. But two possibilities are there is a deal in which case Trump will do everything he can

to make it seem like he did this amazing move

to start the war, to get us to a position to negotiate the deal. And that'll be about selling. That'll be about us, make telling just the story of how we got here and how stupid and dangerous and bad it was.

And then the other is, got only knows the kind of chaos that could happen in the next 60 days. There's algae in the, he drained the fucking reflecting pool to paint it blue, but the algae's back. He's not, you know, he does not have some magical ability

And like the, I think it, I think we will,

we will be so close to the election by the time we either get to a deal or don't that we will be able to,

“I think, make it a big part of people's dissatisfaction”

with the economy, the high cost of living it, everything that we'll carry on for weeks or now, if not months for now. - So I'll sort of, like, the straightaway moves is not a valve, you turn on and off.

It's on a gas that's not flowing. It's like oil futures prices can go down quickly, but tankers will now have to come out. And then, and future tankers will have to go back in, load up their gas, and then transit it.

Like, I think, there are already reports that these oil and gas companies are kind of moving cautiously, 'cause they don't know, like this isn't a final deal. There's no agreement, there's no nuclear agreement. Trump is threatening to go back to war.

And so I just don't think this is gonna be resolved quickly, because it was like months probably. - I think even under the best case scenario, gas prices come down between now and November, but they don't end up where they were

before this conflict started at all, because it's just gonna take time even the most conservative economic estimates are saying that. I also think, for Democrats, you go out there,

and he's like, Donald Trump just spent the last year in broiling this country in a war that he lost, that cost us upwards of maybe $100 billion, and then however many more billion dollars, people paid in higher fuel costs.

And he hasn't seemed to have learned any lessons, nor have the Republicans in Congress. And if you return to Republican Congress to him, they're just gonna create more war. They're gonna jump into more wars.

He's still talking about Cuba. He still has Greenland on his mind. He's like, the guy is a blood thirsty maniac, and so are the Republicans in Congress, who approved it, and do you want them to spend even more of your money

on more war and like, what did this war get us? It got us nothing, nothing, nothing. It got us nothing and it cost us a lot. - We're 14 people died, thousands of people dying in the region. And just, like, let's say it didn't make the country any safer.

- When we talk about like, you know,

the cost being higher and that it's always very abstract,

like, people's lives are ruined by the fact that suddenly their fuel went up, they suddenly didn't have access to raw materials. Like this had a huge ramifications for the global economy that we felt for a very long time.

And by the way, everyone who's just predict, oh, this is when gas prices will go down. This is when oil prices will go down. The market says what the oil is worth right now. The market says what the gas prices will work.

If people thought and knew that the prices would go down, they'd already be down. People have no idea what the future holds because we're dealing with fucking maniacs and the complexities of reopening the street

and all the rest. Nobody knows what gas prices will be in September or October.

“If they did, that's what the price would be.”

- Yeah, so one funny footnote on the timing of when the Iran agreement was announced, the Iranians didn't wanna do it on Trump's actual birthday. So they waited until it was Monday in Tehran just to be as petty as fuck,

which got a hand into it, my guess. - Yes. - It was that they literally used the time change to keep both Trump and the Iranians happy. So then Trump could say he announced it on his birthday,

but the Iranians can say, no, we didn't. - It was Monday. - It's not your 80th birthday. - It's adults who care about their birthday, everything being about Trump's fucking birthday.

It is also embarrassing. The Iranians feeling like they can get one over on Trump by kind of holding it to not sign it technically on the birthday is stupid, but it's in response to dealing with a guy

that clearly wanted the fun of signing the thing on his fucking birthday. - Which is happening over world run by tyrants, they're all just little petty bitches. It's unbelievable, so dumb.

- Of course, none of this stop Trump from celebrating the deal or himself.

“He threw a low-key party at the White House Sunday night,”

where the self-lawn was transformed into a Vegas style UFC arena that hosted a cage match, attended by 4,000 lucky guests and broadcasted to Paramount plus subscribers,

the $60 million event paid for by the UFC

and other sponsors was truly surreal to watch. Here's some of what it looked like. I'll just set it up and narrate this for those of you who are just listening. There's Trump and Dana White walking out of the oval.

There's a fly over. I love it, this fly over. And here's an actual eagle, let's call them. - Awesome, there's the fight. What I wanted to do?

- Yeah, there's a couple of this. - A little evil conieval action happening. This is one of the fighters walking out from the oval. - No shell, hold on, it's a man. Am I right, America?

- Yes. - Yeah. Even the crowd was like shit. - And that was Josh Hookett, who won the heavyweight fight. He has apparently said that before.

This is like a bit of his. He said it before in a fight. He put it on his Instagram, like last year. And so, you know, it's, I don't know if that makes it better or worse.

- It's a far right magazine. They've been saying it for a long time. - Yeah. - But for him, especially, is what I'm saying. So what do you guys think of the fight?

- So I feel like everybody combined a bunch of things. Like one was the just the brazen corruption of the whole thing and having butlite sponsorships on the White House lawn and the crypto stuff and all the rest.

The fact that Donald Trump made this event about him

I think that's a big part of it.

If this were a Democratic White House, that also had poetry slams and readings by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and other kind of sophisticated events. And then one day Barack Obama was like,

guess well, we're gonna have motorcycles jump in over each other on this not long. - Not long. - That's great. Having an eagle fly around and land on somebody's arm

during the, during America's celebration. That's great. All these sort of busy bodies on social media being like Thornton Wilder once visited the White House.

“Like guys, can you please not be a bunch of pretty stuck up people?”

People like fucking motorcycles. I have no problem with that. That is entertaining and it could be on the White House lawn. Zero problem with that. It is the corruption and then making it about him

and it being a right-wing mega thing. Like that is the problem. - Yeah, President told events on the South lawn. Sometimes it's a concert. Sometimes it's the dude in a bunny suit

rolling Easter eggs. Sometimes it's a cage fight. It's like that is what it is. That but didn't bother me either. The corporate sponsorship stuff that we're gonna get to

in a minute is where it gets really gross. But just politically, I don't know that it was smart for Trump. I think UFC fans will love it. Trump super fans will love it. Regular people that are pissed about inflation

or just be like, what are you doing? How are you spending your time this way? The writer stood up all just 16% of Americans said it was appropriate for Trump to hold the ultimate fighting championship event.

For his 80th birthday, well 46% said it was inappropriate at the rest for like whatever I don't care anymore. So whatever it is, but also like,

“there's a lot better sports to watch this weekend.”

The next one, the NBA championship.

There was a million world cup games.

The Stanley Cup finals were on like, I was doing other things. I don't a Paramount Plus, so I couldn't even watch it. - We have Paramount Plus for some kids programs. And it was, so I watched the whole thing.

And I tried to watch it as someone who was just like, okay, what if I was not really paying attention to politics what this looked like? And like, first of all, the production value outstanding A+, it looked great.

Like the whole event looked really cool. There were like, and like there are some UFC fighters who have commented publicly about how this is like a gross thing to do in cynical for the president to make it all about him and we're gonna talk

about the corruption and all that. The parts that made it more about Trump were the parts that you're like, what is this? And first of all, also the fights weren't that great. I'm not a UFC person, but it was like,

all of them were kind of quick and-- - First round knockouts. - Yeah. - And they were like knockouts, but I don't know, it was just, and then you see like,

it's just like that the number of times it pan to Trump and then it talked about Trump and then like, then there's Mark Zuckerberg and then there's the president of crypto.com and all this kind of shit and it's like,

all of the accoutrements around it. We're like, could get really annoying, but the fight itself and the way it looked with the White House lit in the background looked pretty cool.

- But this is where like, we should talk about the corruption, but this is where you can't separate the fact that he is so corrupt from the event itself because Donald Trump is trying to steal the patriotism and excitement and prestige of America's birthday

and kind of put it on himself, but the end result is really just, he gets his stink on like the White House and the event itself because if you didn't know that this was so partisan and so corrupt

and such a boondoggle and such favoritism and just so much corporate interest, then like maybe it wouldn't be so terrible to have a fly over or have marine standing behind a fighter, whatever, it may not be the kind of thing

I would normally want to watch, but it wouldn't be so despicable, but to use the military to use these symbols for such a corrupt practice,

“I think is why the whole thing becomes so sorted and ugly.”

- Yeah, we'll say the, walking the fighters out through the oval and the dip room and having all like the marines they're saluting. Like, that part was like a little,

well, just because it's a poor protest event. - And because, yeah, for profit event and the whole America 250 thing too, because it's like, whatever president is leading the country when it's America's 250th or 275 or 300 whatever,

you get to do your own thing, right? But they sort of went out of the way to make it feel exclusionary to anyone who wasn't magma and just in the way that they did the event, right? Like they could, and not just by being a UFC fight,

you could have done it UFC fight that still seems welcoming and unifying to most of the country. - This is where it's where back to where Trump was in the first term,

where he was always taking pictures in front of the desk.

They're fucking tourists, 'cause they know they don't belong. And so they walk through this gold plated room. It looks like as a gold fungal infection. And then they've show through these fighters, walking through all the rooms,

like a bit like the kind of, it reminds me of like when like human beings and some apocalyptic future stumble upon a museum and they're walking through looking around and like, who built this?

How is this even here? Like that's sort of the feeling of it to me. (upbeat music) - Pot say America's Project by Tommy John. This summer, don't be that guy.

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of the store are important for example from Lager to the store. Find it directly in the dashboard. Start a new shopping trip to Shopify.com. It would have been entirely possible for Trump to throw

himself a $60 million UFC birthday party

without also turning it into an orgy of corruption. But that would take all the fun out of it. First, the broadcast itself. Dano had originally said that the fight would be free on CBS now owned by Paramount, but it ended up on the $9.99 per month

Paramount Plus instead, Paramount is of course owned now by Trump, Ally David Ellison, who had a front row seat to the fight two days after Trump's DOJ approved his latest acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which includes CNN and there's also a brunch or a dinner

for David Ellison that weekend to Big Party for that. So everyone is celebrating the Big merger. As for Trump himself, ahead of the fight, the president quietly purchased between 15,000 and 50,000 worth of stock in TKO, holding group, which owns UFC,

which is nothing for him, but like, optically, so stupid. You know what I mean to someone do that? Just doesn't care anymore. There were also some tweets that appeared to be between Eric Trump and UFC commentator, Daniel Kormier,

looking for insight information for betting on the fights. The Kormier is saying publicly that his account was hacked. Not to fear the fight still offered plenty of opportunities to make the Trump family richer. Take a listen.

It's $250,000 of our performance bonus and USD, one is presented by World Liberty's Financial. Those catcheting for tonight's broadcast. It's not going to be a different way to win these special edition of the Dowians.

This battle is proudly spotted by true social, the real voice of President Trump. Download truth social today. [LAUGHTER] Jesus.

Well, I was watching that, though, and that's when I was like this. It's too much. God, yeah. If you didn't catch all that, one of the official sponsors of the event was the Trump's Family Crypto Operation World Liberty Financial.

We've talked about this a lot here. For this event, they created a $250,000 bonus pool for the fighters, which is to be paid in their stable coin, USD-1. And then you heard there was also a sponsorship plug there for Trumpcoins.com, which is selling commemorative medallions,

designed by President Trump. It prices up to $12,000. A piece of coin-heavy event. That's a real coin-heavy. Just an 80 attacks, whoever's buying these fucking coins.

Reacting to a bunch of these stories, the White House said that Donald Trump only acts in the best interest of the American publics. And that his assets are in a trust managed by his children. So what's the problem, guys?

Jesus Christ. I mean, politically speaking, Trump should be furious that this thing was on Paramount Plus, right? That limits the distribution, that hurt him, right? This is his propaganda, then, why is it not seen by more people?

So you're like, OK, I get what Paramount Plus got. They got to add subs to get people to buy this. What's the kickback? I'd like to know. The crypto sub is disgraceful.

Remember, like, USD1 is their stablecoin.

“Remember that Trump's got the Emeraldies to use their stablecoin”

in this transaction when they invested $2 billion

into Binance that made it the seventh biggest stablecoin in the world? And then, Reuters did this big investigation of the Trump family crypto assets. They found the Trump families made $2.3 billion in profit. And then, of course, on the other side of that,

you have like a million retail investors who've gotten fleeced and have taken $2.3 billion in losses. So this is just an ongoing show of the way they're using crypto, just to like ring money out of their followers.

makes no sense. Like Eric Trump, so the story is he DMed the guy, I said, hey, is this fight rigged because I want to bet on it. And then, Corbyn is like, no, I got AI hacked. What does that mean?

You posted the tweet. Did it make sense when Eric said he deleted it

“because it was fake, but then why would he have posted it?”

The first time I believed it might be true was when Eric

Trump posted it. Yes, me too. And then, you know, Corbyn, he was asked about it at the fight and was just like, that's crazy. Why would anyone believe that?

And then he like tweeted, are you all stupid? Why would you, but like, you posted it. It's interesting because if you look at the exchanges that they posted or the DM that they posted, it's very, it's not like, it's not as obvious as like,

hello, are there any fights rigged? I would like to bet on them. Like, like, you play something. Hey, how's it going? And he's like, oh, I didn't expect to hear from you, man.

How it's good to see you and your family at the fight? Can't wait, he's like, hey, place any bets and then he just keeps going. He's like, all right, fine, I'll get to it. Any of the fights rigged?

Who knows what's real or what's fake anymore? And he's gonna happen. Good have been hacked, someone could have done it. I don't know, but-- Yeah, well, there's the problem with these people being--

And they don't tell the truth. Corbyn's liar. It's the corrupt liar, too.

“It is completely believable to me that it's fake.”

It is completely believable to me that it is true. You have no credibility, I would not be surprised in either direction. You are completely morally vacant operators who are profiting every day off the office.

You can't take your word for it, maybe we'll never know the truth

'cause everyone around you is a liar, but that's the price of being-- So, it's not nice to ask, I guess. Celebrity attendance at the event was mostly limited to the mag of billionaire sector.

In addition to David Ellison and the Crypto.com CEO, MMA enthusiast and masculinity advocate Mark Zuckerberg was in attendance. Maybe not quite out of Delas baggage claim yet were executives from anthropic who apparently

flew to the capital last minute to meet the Trump administration on Monday on Friday, the administration slapped export controls on the company's top AI models, which forced anthropic to take fable five

and mythos five offline. Anyone want to talk about what this is all about with anthropic and whether it has anything to do with their earlier dispute with the Pentagon? This to me, actually, it's similar to the Eric Trump thing.

“It's because we know that they picked this fight”

with anthropic a few months ago, it's actually hard to know.

What's true, if you read the details, there does seem to have been a legitimate concern with access to the models that were raised by Amazon and others, but then it appears the administration, which has a vendetta against anthropic maybe went too far

in its reaction and now the executives have to fly to DC to make nice because it's not about what's in the interest of the Pentagon or the country, but it's about personal relationships and ego. And so they have to figure out how to smooth things over.

And it is just very hard to tell the difference between penalizing anthropic because it's now an enemy of the administration versus actually stepping in because there may have been an issue or for it somewhere in between. Yeah, I mean, so there was a concern about

anthropic's model and the ability for it to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exploit them. So they limited the distribution and then these researchers at Amazon got access to Fable 5, which is like mythos with guardrails that they released to the public.

They were able to trick it, essentially, to giving them restricted information and then the Amazon CEO titled, "The Scott Besson" about what happened. Now, normally, like, it's like, it's really dead. And normally, I'd be like, actually, that's a good.

That's like how the system should work because you want, you know, sort of a circuit breaker there in some way, to prevent the distribution of these models to bad actors. Like, what the administration did was they cut off access for foreign users.

But, yeah, I mean, it just the thing that was so odd about this is, all the little Trump propagandists went to Twitter and they tried to dance on Anthropics grave and they gave all of us reason to think, "Oh, actually, this is just part of this ongoing pissing match

"between Anthropics and the Pentagon." And because Anthropics doesn't want to create autonomous killer drones or be used in bulk mass surveillance of American citizens. - Yeah, it was hard to read between the lines

and the Axios story about it, too, which is also, it's like, you know, that the Axios story kind of came mostly from the administration. And there's some administration official on background saying, like, the real problem is they don't

know how to, Anthropics doesn't know how to communicate with this administration and the ideological differences are really getting in the way. And it's like, what does that have to do with a potential security vulnerability that you're saying

was the root of the problem here? What is the ideological differences in communication have to do with anything? - Also, if you know that, if you have insight enough to know that they're communicating effectively with you,

then you seem to know what they're trying to communicate. - Yeah, so, hey, like, you're not being nice enough and how you're handling me. If you want me to do what you want, you better be a little bit more sensitive to my issues and my needs.

- In Anthropics, preparing for an IPO. It seems like a great way to damage them in advance of that. - Yes, yeah. - But for what it's worth, we should say, Dana White in a bunch of other participants

at the White Us event, condemned the comments about Michelle Obama, which was nice to see. Now, the right thing to do would be Donald Trump

So sorry, that was disgusting, but that'll obviously be.

- But the White Us folks sort of like, wouldn't even make a, just sort of brush, brush, bastard refuse to apologize. - And in the moment, you can actually see Rogan's face as soon as he said it and Rogan was sort of like,

you like back to way, like, as you see, was smallest tie was, it was very,

“- It's like a half a time, like what do you want to hear?”

- You could tell that, like, the, yeah, the Dana White's, the people, and Donald Trump was like, yeah, like Donald Trump was probably like, yeah, he probably loved her. - He was reposted to stuff like that in the past.

- Well, the guy then gave his like metal to Donald Trump, the guy who made the comment, Donald Trump accepted it. So it's just like, you know, - Trump posted a video of the two of them. - Right, there's apes, like, we're sort of six months ago.

- Through the look and glass on that one.

One more corrupt date that broke, as we were preparing to record, this Gavin Newsom said in a video Monday morning, that he and his wife are being targeted by Trump's DOJ, saying that federal agents have been knocking on the doors

of their family friends and former employees in Newsom's words. He said they're digging through, quote, years and years of documents and, quote, abusing the grand jury process, trying to, quote, look for crime. Then there was this line, Donald Trump isn't just coming

after me because of my mean tweets.

“He's coming after me because I'm considering running for president.”

He then went on to attack Trump on corruption for several minutes. We didn't get a ton of detail from Newsom's statement, other than the DOJ seems to be focused on Jen, his wife. I saw some takes about how this will be great for Newsom's potential presidential campaign and fundraising, sure.

But it also seems like a fairly chilling preview of what's

to come in 2028 for any Democrat who runs for president.

I don't know what you guys think. - Yeah, look, it's nice to say it's great for fundraising before we know any of the details about what the charges could be, have series it is, what they're trying to do. But I don't think anybody, even if it does make them get

some attention, is excited to find out that there's a grand jury trying to indict you. And we have gone from Pam Bond to you as like a client and willing to do Trump's bidding, as you could imagine, until we got to Todd Blanch who somehow even worse,

Trump just put his personal attorney in charge of the Southern District of New York. We have a completely politicized Department of Justice. I'm like anything we've ever had before in our history. And part of the job will be about not only preventing those things

from impacting our politics directly, but also figuring out how to create car rails and fix it in the future. One's Trump has gone. - Yeah, as much as I understand the kind of galaxy-brained political takes, like the human take is Gavin Newsom sits down

at dinner and is like, hey, honey, this is going to help me in the early states. Like, what are we talking about here? It's like horribly chilling for your wife to be potentially prosecuted by the Department of Justice.

Even if she did nothing wrong, it's scary. It'll cost them money, it'll cost them time. Yeah, I like the maximally cynical view as the Trump is doing this because he thinks Gavin's talented and a possible competitor through Republican Party

and wants to take him out of the race preemptively by going after his family. Maybe it's all on the merits, right? There was a Gavin Newsom's former aid. It was just prosecuted, maybe it's coming out of that.

What we know is, Trump is openly called on his attorney general to go after his enemies. He just tried to install Bill Polty, a man with no national security experience as the director of national intelligence solely because that man

has shown a creativity in using his access to information to go after Trump's critics. So it seems like part of a pattern. Yeah, I mean, it is the cynical view. It's also the like everything we've seen from Trump over the last

decade leads you to believe that whoever he thinks is leading in the race for the Democratic nomination. He's going to look to see if there were any kind of possibilities for investigation, right? Like that's all it takes to is.

So yeah, so Gavin Newsom's former aid, right? Who ended up being convicted or taking a deal or something based on activities that preceded her time working for Gavin Newsom at all. But doesn't matter, you know, like Gen Newsom has some kind of a non-profit and is there, is there questions about the non-profit

and the payments like any thread that Trump and the his administration can pull on any of these potential contenders they will. And probably knowing that they can't actually investigate all of them at once when they're on the primary stage together, they're going to go after the people who are leading in the polls.

“And really, I think the only way you're going to avoid investigation”

from Donald Trump is if you were last place in the polls and suddenly surprise everyone and then win, win a race. And then, you know, then they'll get an investigation going pretty fast. Yeah, but that's like he's going to go. We need like a junior soprano to be the kind of to be the face of the

operation while Tony's running things behind the scenes. So Ben Jacobs, I'm Twitter was like, this is a good case for Hunter Biden being that I'm in Epson's. He was already part of that part of the investment. Yeah, he would get a good money.

Yeah, it's flooding himself for this. But that, I mean, it is, it's pretty, it's to me, it was like a preview of even now where we're like, okay, Democrats could do all in the mid terms, everything's fine. Like we're heading to 2028 and the idea that this is just going to be some kind of a

fair fight. And even if there's a lot between Donald Trump refusing to leave

swimmingly and nothing happened, there's just a ton of room between

“week. I think we just can say whoever is the Democratic nominee.”

Regardless of what investigation will launch for the primary, there will be an intensive effort to try to paint them as a corrupt criminal between sort of say sort of June and the election, they will use all the power at their disposal, they will try to muddy the waters. And by the way, like part of this is, this is why selected prosecution is so

dangerous. We live in a free society and we know that if you start digging into anyone's finances, taxes, history, you can, you can try to drum something up, you can find a discrepancy, you can find something that you can use to bring to a grand jury. Like the, that is what it is so dangerous to have a

DOJ like this and you know that the client, right, we media if they find

anything, they will say, well look, this is this was a legitimate investigation, they found this IRS discrepancy, this needed to be punished and without sort of any understanding of how dangerous it is to have people being chosen as targets to look for crimes. Did Kevin front run this? Yeah. Yeah. So the time sorted, I wonder if they got a call from the time saying we're running this

and they've got to head a bit or how this went. Because the time story does have some of the some new some officials on the background in there. And it also has some officials, I guess from the Justice Department as well, though the Justice Department won't comment officially, obviously. They also said that it was like started by federal officials in California, not in Washington,

the investigation. But I do think that it was, we haven't talked about like

the politics of this, but I thought it was smart that new some got out ahead of it and was able to frame it as Trump coming. Yeah, I mean, like it just shows how much communications have changed over the last decade or two. He is normally when there's some sort of criminal prosecution or investigation. You don't say anything. You let your lawyer speak or you don't comment and you don't want to put anything

else into public domain. They view this as a PR battle, which tells you, you know, they probably feel confident about the legal side of things and they just want to get ahead of the political fight. I just think this is going to be a collective action problem because everyone's interests are obviously not lying to here, but for the other Democratic and no one's announced yet, so it doesn't work right now. But as we get into this,

like all the other Democratic candidates, someone gets targeted like this, even if it's your potential rival, you got to go out and say that it's absolutely bullshit.

“Oh, yeah, stick up for them. I think I'll go stick up for each other. Yeah, I think that's also”

free, by the way. I don't think there's a lot of equity for people who are judging, like I think Trump has a point about new some. I don't think there's a lot of, and there's a difference between waiting to get asked about it and saying that and then coming out strongly. Yeah, that's and saying it's going to be a fucking problem. What about going down to John Bolton's present and singing him some sort of song through short. Yeah. Is he where is he right now?

Because I saw his a comment. He was kind of deal, right? He's cutting a deal, but he could, I don't think it's gone through the process yet, but I think you could get up to five years, even with this deal. He was just money. I thought he was just paying money. The, the reporting I read was fine, potentially up to five years, and hopefully for his sake that there'll be some leniency, but like the dude was like sending emails to himself and to his wife and daughter

with classified information. It was like the dumbest thing you could possibly do. Look, I've said this before. I'll say it again. I hate what Donald Trump has done to the DOJ. I will not be angry if James coming goes to prison. Wow. 86. I will be savoring over here. I'll be, let's say, I'll obviously be upset about the injustice, but I'm just saying he used a couple nights behind those bars to

“think about what he's done. I'm just so tall, and he's made so many mistakes. I think it's morally”

reprehensible. I don't think it's a good thing. I'm just saying, I think he's a lot of what he does. Everything he does, I think that has been an imprisonment all of its own. Oh, sure. I'm in the guineas. Sure. Sure. Inside of a jail cell. Just saying. No, he's a bull work exclusive. There up at that ceiling. And support it. Run that tin cup across the bars, James Comey. MSNBC reports that the Trump administration has been pressuring DOJ officials to come up with

the case against Gavin Newsom. Yeah. I mean, so there you go. All right. When we come back, Tommy talks to Senator Mark Warner. Potta America's brought you by Mill in our polarized climate. There's one thing that unite us all, dealing with communal household and office trash is terrible. The food waste, the smell, the constant overflowing trash cans. That wasn't until Mill took care of it.

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My guest today is Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the Senior U.S. Senator from Virginia. Senator Warner, thanks for doing the show. Thanks, Tony. So, we are speaking on Monday afternoon Pacific Time. We're still waiting with a baited breath to see if we'll ever see the actual text of whatever Donald Trump negotiated with Iran about their, you know, the straight-of-arms. What do you know about this digitally signed

memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran? What do you make on sort of the leaks

“and reporting on it so far? I know Zippo. I know nothing more than you and I think, frankly,”

even my Republican Senate friends have not seen any of this. We do wonder whether this was time

for his birthday or to try to affect the markets today. We do know I think this is less than what it appears and we knew at some point Trump was going to declare victory. And the sooner we get out of this war of choice, the better. But if it's a to kind of like suck up, but if you look at your, your tweets today, you know, you are absolutely right on all four of the goals that Trump laid out. We're not close to any of them. Yeah, in terms of like we maybe have an agreement

to have more talks where they will try to get to an agreement that's about the nuclear program, the ballistic missile, support for proxies, et cetera. But it's all forward looking as far as I can tell, right? You know, the things we do know are this. The regime is more hardcore now than it was before. The new leader, since we killed his dad, his wife, his kid, more hardcore. We do know that the Iranians have been masters for years at trying to hide the ball on their enriched uranium

and the idea that we're somehow going to get this without troops on the ground or by some international agreement. God willing, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The fact that the DOD and Higgs have misrepresented how much we had taken out of the Iranian ballistic missiles, obviously not the case, since they're still shooting them off and that doesn't even count their drones. And then we've taken what was an international open gateway of passage straight to four moves and Iran will have

something to say on a going forward basis. None of that makes us, none of that makes our golf allies, none of it even frankly makes Israel stronger than when we started 107 days ago. Yeah, I mean, I noticed in the run-ups of the war, the Iran hawks trotted out of the new talking point, which is that Iran could create a ballistic missile arsenal that was so great that it might be able to prevent the US and Israel from taking out their nuclear infrastructure in the future.

So I just want to ask you about the state of that ballistic missile inventory and their capacity

“to manufacture new ballistic missiles. What do we know that you can discuss publicly?”

Well, we know that we have degraded some, it's both the missiles and their launchers. We took out some of them. The earlier estimates, and I can say this, because it's in the public, that we had eliminated

70, 80, 90 percent are just factually not true. And they have had many of the launchers as well

are still interested. They can, they can obviously reconstitute some of these missiles. We have not been able to blow up how all that started. And these missiles are significant, but again, we took down many of them. But as we go into this war of choice, what we have done, and this is the part where the Iranians, I think, will come back, unfortunately, and by us, is they have been dribbling out their missiles. We have been using both with the missiles and the

drones, very expensive interceptors, because, you know, two and a half million dollars a piece, and they have blood down our supplies, our supplies, golf allies, even Israel supplies, so that if they have anything close to what we presume, they can continue to bleed that down. And at some point, we won't have the capacity to take them out. One of the reasons why it was so insane that we didn't take the Ukrainians offer in December, where they were going to say, we will give you

our anti-drone technology, which they have the best in the world, which could have at least taken down the Iranian drones. Right. Right. And you mentioned the new sort of set of leaders. I mean, the previous Supreme Leader of Iran was quite well known. He'd been around for a while. As were a lot of the senior members of the IRGC and the Iranian military, then Israel and the U.S. killed a lot of them. Now it's around it's led by this new crop of leaders. The

Supreme Leader's son is apparently really wounded and hiding, but presumably more hard line,

“than maybe his father, since we killed his dad. We killed his wife. We killed his kids. I think”

reportedly, now there's a new crop of younger IRGC generals who seem to be more firmly entrenched.

There is absolutely zero evidence that anybody in the new crowd is more pragmatic,

“that is more westward leaning. They may live in fear. I think we have put fear of God in them,”

but the idea that they're more willing to make a deal. There's been no evidence to date that I've seen in any intelligence on that. And that are fact. The destruction of Iran was the

always had, they have a government and they have a formal military that's a little bit separate from

the IRGC. The one thing that is the case is that the government, which was sometimes more moderate in the more traditional military, they have lost power in this last 108 days. So IRGC, more radical, more empowered. Excellent. A big win for us. What we think is maybe the outlines of a future deal would require Israel to honor a ceasefire in Lebanon against Hezbollah as well. Do you have any confidence that Netanyahu or Hezbollah will honor that ceasefire? Because it seems like

Netanyahu was a pretty decent political incentive to blow up the deal given the initial response

“to it in Israel. I have no confidence that Baby who's got his own political problems. And I think”

in many ways has really hurt Israel's reputation in the region around the world. And in the again, tragedy on top of tragedy, I think there was a moment in the fact that Israel is negotiating with the Lebanese government. If we could have actually put some oomph behind that and help the Lebanese government who does have a military actually disarm has belonged. The people of Lebanon might have come out of this better. They are not now. Instead, you've got the Netanyahu

government bombing. Not only does she but unfortunately Drew's Christian and Sunni villages in the south. And my fear is pushing some of the Lebanese, you know, back into the hands of Hezbollah. Yeah, and it turns like Israel is not agreed to pull its troops out of Lebanon. My understanding is they're occupying up to six miles over the border. I'm just wondering how an ongoing occupation is not likely to lead to renewed if non-increased conflict.

Was that called a softball question? Yes. Yeah, and we've seen, you know, Baby's got his own political problems. He's under indictment. He has to maintain this far right agenda. And my fear is not only Lebanon, but what also is taking place and one of the reasons why I voted against even giving any more bulldozers to Israel, the other tragedy that's taking place is what's happening on the West Bank as the Israeli settlers, frankly do awful things on, I just some

of the Palestinian villages. Yeah, just big picture. I mean, I'm struggling with how to talk about

“this as a Democrat because I think the best option available to Donald Trump was ending the war”

as soon as humanly possible for a variety of reasons, but especially because I was worried that this was gonna lead to a famine in places like Sudan and mass starvation in death because fertilizer and fuel just wasn't getting through the straight. At the same time, I don't think we should give Donald Trump a pass for launching this catastrophic unnecessary war because all the outcomes he might get through this negotiation process you could have gotten just by talking to them in the first place

and not bombing them. So how are you thinking about how to talk about this? Tommy, it is such a that is a very fair question. I don't want to Trump gets no credit for this war of choice and where we are and that doesn't even count the

$100 billion of assets we've lost in the region. It doesn't cost the $60 billion of increased

gas prices. It doesn't cost the effect of in Sudan and elsewhere. But I'm not going to, yeah, but the question is, I'm not gonna just blast him for ending it because ending it was, this agreement will not stand the test of any scrutiny. I'm not gonna give him credit, but I'm glad he ended it rather than continued where what could have led to even a worse circumstance. So I'd actually think on this one, there is no way even a Trumpian figure can turn this to anything other

than what it is, is that we America and our friends are in worse place than we were at the end of February. Yeah, agreed with you there. Switching gears a little bit. So Trump tried to install a man named Bill Pulti as the Director of National Intelligence. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why you think he made that selection, whether Pulti even would have net the statutory requirements for the job. I should say he yanked Pulti's nomination after

Democrats in the Senate said, hell no, no way. And did that selection make you even more worried

about how Trump might have used the intelligence community? Absolutely. Bill Pulti is a third generation

taking what would be a relatively benign oversight of the mortgage, Fanny and Freddie was able to take private information about Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve and I'm shift on my colleagues and weaponize that. I do think figures in the White House tried to prevent Trump from doing this,

but as always the case, Pulti or whoever speaks to the president last, he got him, he got him

put in. And I am, you know, and this came in a moment and time when we have to reauthorize something called Section 702, which is a critical intelligence tool that the Biden's Obama's everybody supported. And we've used our leverage to say, you know, we're not going to reauthorize 702 if Pulti is there. Now my concern frankly is 702 has got enough bells and whistles and audits that if he misuses

“that, it will be, I think we'll find it. I'm more concerned about the fact that this guy who doesn't”

even have a national security clearance suddenly gets the keys to 18 agencies, maliciously are not gets exposed to things that could be a huge security risk. And our challenge right now and this

goes down the rabbit hole, you know, Trump is finally appointed somebody else, someone who, you know,

I've worked with it times. I still need to ask him, Jay Clayton, it was the former SEC head and and the current U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan. You know, I want to make sure he's not going to interfere in our elections and, you know, basic constitutional rights. But if we delay getting him in, Pulti could still serve and there's nothing we can do as an interim for a few days. And, you know, I think the Democrats in the Senate will have to decide,

do we wave to get this through? He will get confirmed. I hope the sooner the lighter so that we don't

“have Pulti in this office, hopefully ever. Oh, so that's why you're trying to fast-track Jay Clayton's”

nomination to try to shrink the amount of time that Pulti could be in that job. Yes, and again, and it's like, and the irony and there's the thing, you know, I had huge problems with Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. She was going to stay until the end of the month, Pulti tried to fire her. Right.

And they advanced her leaving date till this coming Friday. If she would just, I never

say, I want to say, Gabbard, say, but if she would stay until the beginning of July, we could get it done in two weeks. Right. Whether we get it done in one weeks, we'll be frankly up to my democratic colleagues who, you know, they can vote against Clayton. They can, you know, vote against 702. But please, let's separate keeping Pulti out of the job and the, you know, the renewal of Section 702. Yeah. But I'm with you. I'm prioritizing keeping Pulti away from all of

that information. I didn't ask you about Pfizer Section 702, but because for those who aren't familiar, this is the provision that lets the intelligence community get information from American Telecom companies to turn over the electronic communications of foreign persons located outside of the United States without a warrant. And civil liberties advocates have long been concerned about 702 because of the potential for abuse and also because communications to and from American citizens

and those foreign persons are often captured in the process without a warrant and could be reviewed and, you know, by people investigating them, the information. So in the past, I have mostly felt like on balance that Section 02 was defensible for a variety of reasons. It is the thing that

“national security professionals will tell you is the most important tool in their toolkit.”

But I'll tell you after the Pulti selection, I no longer have confidence that Trump won't use all of these tools to abuse his authority. So why am I wrong? Like what, why am I wrong? The Democrat should fight this? Well, first of all, Section 702, which has had prior abuses. We've gone through three rounds of reforms. The FBI used to be very callous about how it used it. They went from only 60% compliance to 98% compliance

on making sure that appropriate Section balances are dealt with. Number one. Number two, my concern with Pulti is so great, not about 702 because there are enough reporting that he will at least be discovered. Now, that may not assuage you, but there will be an audit trail whereas he could try to get other information that doesn't have near the same audit trail. And then I do think there is a one of the things that took me a long time to grab my head around this.

So you've got two Russian spies. What a Moscow one in Paris. They're talking about these.

collaborating with the Russians or someone the Russians are going after to see if they can hack

into Tommy and actually be a victim. And the idea, this is the part that I don't think people fully understand. If we want to look at who else Tommy has called. Because we've got Tommy's name,

“we've got his number. We can only look at, you know, the numbers but not the content. If you want to”

look at the, you know, and say on an email, like Tommy sent something to mark. If you want to look at the content, you have to get a warrant. But the idea that you could get a warrant, because there is the circumstance that this could be an active live terrorist event. And you don't know whether Tommy's about to go do a bomb. The idea that you could get a warrant when you only know the name, when 20% of the time, 15% of the time, 20% of the time, Tommy is the victim, not the the bad guy.

It is, it is, you know, at the end of the day, I've come down that this is such an important security tool. President Obama supported President Biden Trump. It is 70% of what we was in the presidential daily brief, but I understand that people have feel the other way. And we have added

“additional requirements that if it's a politician, if it's a religious figure, if it's a media”

person, you have more hoops. If it's somebody where information might be about their constitutional

rights, because you're out protesting ice, you can't use it there. It will never be for friends

like Ron Wyden, who is a hardcore civil libertarian, we're never going to, I will never satisfy him. I do think there will be at the end of the day, you know, somewhere around 15, 20 Democrats that will still say, absent the problem, because here's my problem, this goes away, God forbid something happens. And Donald Trump then says, we wouldn't have had this incident if we had this tool. And the irony just one last point on this is, I don't think Donald Trump actually even supports

the provision that much, because it took until like six weeks, seven weeks before the bill expired, that he even came out and formally said he supports it. Right. Well, what wouldn't the actual

“kind of existing authorities not expire for almost another year if there wasn't a reauthorization?”

That is, again, the where the rubber hits the road in 20, there is the ability that the authority is certified once a year and it would be maintained until March. Right. When this came up under Biden, what we heard from the telcos, and this is mostly telcos and the Google Wilson, you know, hyperscalers, they said to Biden's security team, if this expires, we are no longer going to participate because we don't have indemnification. This expired on Friday night.

So we're now into an area where, you know, who is right, will they continue to participate or not? One of the telcos today told me, thank goodness, that they will participate. The others, we don't have an answer and what is insane to me is I'm the freaking vice chair, which former chair of the Intel, I should know whether they are participating or not. Right. Right. And in a normal world, the justice department, if we still have real lawyers, would have tried to get an injunction to try to

force them to continue to participate until it was mitigated out. So we don't end up with this gap. My understanding, they've not even filed suit yet. So we will, there will be this, this gap, hopefully not too long, but we will find out whether the concern I had that they won't participate without indemnification is true or not. Okay. Just as long as I'm treating you like my, my deep state therapist, I mean, is it wrong to focus on the DNI when cash betell is just as

unqualified and has more authorities to conduct do things that are abusive or against Americans via the FBI? Well, I have gone through a long letting me have cash betell abuses and mistakes and he should not be there. The DNI does get keys to all 18 agencies. Frankly, the DNI, to go nerdy again, that whole role needs to be slimmed down. Probably re-examined. It came out after 9/11 well intention, but grew too much. But no cash betell scares the hell out of me. And what also scares the hell out of me is

we have seen intelligence professionals in other agencies. The NSA, which is our spying organization in terms of listing in, you, they fired the guy who, Tim Hawke, who was there. It was a career professional

because Laura Luma went after her head of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the truth about the first

obliterate the nuclear program. Obviously, the truth, or we wouldn't be back in on this. So you've

“got plenty of, I got plenty of reasons to keep you up at night in terms of concerns.”

Yeah, you ever seen cash betell Chuck appear? The guy doesn't spill a drop. Let me tell you, man.

Just don't, just don video, although I will. I won't even, I, I, I hesitant to say this, but there's

“some colorful videos online about Mr. Paul T as well. Oh, oh, I've, oh, I've seen one of those.”

Gentlemen for him seems to be having a good time. Senator, thank you so much for doing the show.

Maybe when we learn what's actually in this deal, we could talk again. That'd be nice.

“Love to water. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it.”

Godspeed, take care. That's our show for today. Thanks to Senator Warner for coming on. We'll be back in the feed on Friday with a special episode. The three of us and Dan will be recording in Chicago at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center. Fun. Nice. Talk to everybody soon. Positive America is a cricket media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Sol Rubin,

McKenna Roberts and Ferris Safari with re-churlin, Elijah Cone and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt de Groat, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlottelandis, Kirill Pelaviv, David Tolz, Mia Kalman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the Writer's Guild of America East.