505: Epstein Files Reveal Depraved Global Network

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“If you love positive America and want more of my political analysis, you should subscribe to my newsletter,”

the message box. I'm Dan Fyfer, former senior advisor to Barack Obama, and in message box I break down what's actually happening in politics and what it's going to take to beat Donald Trump Magga. You follow every poll and every twist in turn in the campaign, message boxes for you. This isn't just hot takes. Every addition delivers clear analysis behind the scenes insight in practical strategy you can actually use, whether you're working on a race,

organizing your community, or just trying to win the argument in your group chat. So, if you're listening to this, hit pause, go to your browser and head to crooked.com/ESW Dan, because that's a special offer for crooked media fans. You'll get 21% off of the message box for an entire year. So go to crooked.com/ESWDAN. Welcome back to Padsay, the world I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes.

Recording a little early today, because Ben and I are going to go see a Melania Doc

“matinee. There's the uh... the $12 tall of popcorn, have you seen that?”

Yes, I remember it. Yes, the Melania. I was saying yeah, I saw a Melania billboard driving in on LaBrea, and I didn't see it. I didn't see it to face yet. Not that I incurred vandalism. No. Well, I'm surprised. It has something about the black and white color scheme that's a little triggering too. It's very spy versus spy.

Yeah. It's very, yeah. Yeah, they spent $35 million on the marketing.

And, you know, to be fair, budgets for documentary, low budget. PR is usually like that. Yeah, usually it's 100 million. The funny thing about it is that they insisted in an international release, because I could see it. And they won't release those numbers. And they won't release those numbers, right? Because I get it. The Magadaihards will turn out for any fucking piece of junk that you know, who or Pfizer or leader, but the idea that

anybody was going to see that in Europe, it just feels like a troll. Do you see South Africa, actually? Like, part of it from its leaders. Yeah, I noticed

“it had a better than expected. What is it? What are you called?”

Open, like a revenue total in the US was like 8 million, which again, it's like,

it means Amazon's gonna recruit, I think, 3.5 million. They'll get like half of

whatever back or 4 million. And they just wouldn't release the international. Yeah, tolls because they know. Good job. International. Good job, Jeff Bezos. Yeah. You know, we're going to talk today about some great like hard hitting investigative reporting. A lot of it is coming from Murdoch papers. And Jeff Bezos is just buying off Trump family members with documentaries. They would pay for the Washington Post Farm Bureau for

it was 10 years. It's been a long, it release. Yeah. So, in fury. Well, we have a corruption theme today. We have a corruption theme to take around. Yeah, today's focus is going to be a great deal on international corruption. And the rot we are seeing, not just in the Trump administration, but amongst elites all over the world, that starts with this jaw dropping report in the Wall Street Journal about the UAE secretly purchasing 49% of the Trump family's crypto company before he was inaugurated.

And then the advanced AI chips they got in return. We're going to try to unravel like the truly global scope of this Epstein files scandal, just metastasizing daily. We're going to try to figure out what the hell's going on with Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence. She's popping up all

some dire warnings about the warrants who Dan and how the proxy war there has expanded. And then we'll talk about why Trump officials are meeting with separatist groups in Canada and why that could

be post an existential threat to Canada's economic future. And then we have a finally a story about

“France. I think we'll delight all the history buffs out there. And then then you did our interview”

today, what are folks going to hear? Yeah, I talked to a friend of the show, Alivis, who's the international crisis groups Iran expert and just one of the smarter, more nuanced thinkers about what's going on inside of Iran. So we talked about the dizzying, you know, run of events over the last couple of weeks where things stand, what the negotiations are about between the United States and Iran with some of these other countries involved. What the interest of those countries like Turkey,

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar are in trying to avoid this war. And I think very importantly, like what if there is some kind of regime change in Iran, which we still don't know will happen, who might come next? And that's something you don't hear a lot about that Alivis really breaks down a few different scenarios for how that could go. Did you guys talk before or after the U.S. reportedly shut down this Iranian drone? We talked kind of a concurrent to that. But you know,

I mean, Alis sums it up well. We could be here in a week and I wouldn't be surprised if the United States is bombed Iran and removed its leadership. And I wouldn't be surprised if they are announcing that they have some framework for India. We just don't know. That's a madman theory, Ben. That's the madman theory. That's the madman theory. That's the madman theory. It's really genius. What he's doing. See what he did? Wow, so ingenious. There are some genius to framing a wing in it as genius.

Yes. But yeah, here we are. Okay, that's a great interview. And I could not agree more that Alis one of the smartest people in all of the analyst space on this topic and one that doesn't, you know, he's not just a regime change, only like one trick pony like you see from some of these think tanks have T. B. Cough, F. T. B. After the interview, our subscribers are going to hear a Q&A

“Ben will do with some of our members of the Pods Safety World Discord. If you want to hear that,”

please consider becoming a friend of the Pods subscriber. Go to crooked.com/friends. You also get ad-free episodes of the show. It's lots of fun bonus stuff. But also, it's like the most helpful thing you could do for crooked media as a company. If you want to support independent progressive journalism, consider becoming a friend of the Pods. Or just subscribe to the show either on RSS or on YouTube. It really does help us. It helps people find the show when you subscribe. If you're

watching on YouTube and you're not subscribed, please do us a solid. It's free. Yeah, I mean, at speaking of free by the way, Tommy, thank you to the thousands of people that sent it for my sub-tech. I've been cranking them out. I've got a piece in Iran. I had a piece of nice working on something in Epstein. So again, it's free. I just want to share more writing so you can check me out there. Check out Ben's sub-tech. It's called Notes on the Stories We Tell. It's a very

literary title. You'd kind of oppose for me there. Yeah, I did. I did a kind of literary pose. It's sort of a vibe. I'm trying to give a vibe. If people have different title ideas, do you? Let me know. No, I look good title. I'm kind of like it though. All right. Let's start with some great reporting Ben. So this is bombshell scoop from the Wall Street Journal about Trump and the UAE, the United Arab Emirates. The Journal reported that days before the inauguration last year, an investment fund

overseen by a member of the UAE's Royal Family, secretly purchased 49% of the Trump family's

crypto business, Royal Liberty Financial. This was for a cool $500 million. When this deal happened,

World Liberty had no products to sell. And the way this deal was structured, it actually didn't give the new investors any access to at the time was their only source of revenue. So they paid $500 million for nothing. Totally on the up and up here. The Trump family got an upfront payment of $187 million. The Witt Coff family got $31 million. That's Trump's golf buddy, turns Chief Diplomat, Steve Witt Coff. His son is the CEO of World Liberty. And the Wall Street Journal

report really does make it seem like the deal was negotiated by Steve Witt Coff. And Eric Trump during a trip to the UAE shortly after Steve was named to this kind of roving on boy roll. But remember then, this is actually the second shockingly brazen corruption scandal regarding the UAE or UAE backed investment firm in the Trump family. So last year, this Emirati state backed

investment fund called MGX announced they were making a $2 billion investment into the crypto

company by-nance. But they made the investment with the Trump family's new stable coin, which is called USD1, stable coins are a type of crypto that's pegged to the US dollar. That deal instantly made USD1. One of the biggest stable coins in the world in terms of like market cap and circulation. And it could earn the Trump family about $80 billion a year and passive interest. So must be nice. On the Emirati side, the World Liberty investment was led by a

guy named Sheikh Tenoon, Benzayat Al-Nayan. He's the UAE's national security advisor. He's the

“brother of the president. He's a big shot of manages. I think a $1.3 trillion portfolio of businesses.”

I'm not nice. He's been nice, man. Not long after all these crypto investments in meetings

$500,000 of the most advanced AI chips in the world produced by Nvidia about a fifth of those

chips went to an Emirati backed firm called G42, which is chaired by Sheikh Tenoon. The Biden administration had blocked the export of those chips to the UAE, because the UAE, the Emirati's do a lot of business with the Chinese, including like state backed entities like Huawei and there was concern that those chips could make their way to the Chinese military, but I guess Trump just doesn't care. Trump was asked about this quit pro quo on Monday. Here's his response Ben.

Well, I don't know about it. I know that crypto is a big thing and they like it.

“I think the people behind me like it. My sons are handling that. My family is handling it.”

And I guess they get investments from different people, but I'm not. I have all I can handle right now with the ran and with Russia and Ukraine and with all the things we do. So I don't know,

I don't know any other than, you know, I'm a big crypto person. I'm the one that probably

helped crypto more than anybody, because I believe in it. And the reason I believe in it is because if we don't do it, it's got to think we can say then China's going to do it, right? Who cares? We don't do crypto then China's going to do it. Oh, no, China does the fake money. According to the shitter now, too. Yeah, it's tanking today. I mean, I just, this like the most staggeringly corrupt thing I've ever heard of in his responses. Oh, I don't know.

Yeah, I like, the corruption is very obvious. We didn't have to spend too much time on it, but you, you meant the point. Biden had strict export controls on these chips going to the UAE. You know, that doesn't mean there shouldn't be any transition of technology, but usually what you do is you just kind of, you open the spigger a little bit, you know, what they did is they just completely dismantle the entire export regime and gave them the number of the best of the best. They went from zero to a hundred,

right? The no like step up process. Blackwell series, monitoring and verification regime.

“The only two other things I want to say about this, I think it's really important that people”

understand that this is an entirely different kind of scale of corruption. And it's not even just because of the money involved, that's a piece of it. It's because, you know, we're used to kind of, you know, Bob Menendez with the gold bars, you know, remember the guy with like the blocks of cash in the freezer and stuff like that. Oh, yeah. What would Trump is doing? It was in Norlands, right? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think I just named two Democrats, but I'm not, I'm not just part of them,

but what Trump is doing is William Jefferson. Yeah, you know, this is a race scandal, 90 grand and has hit in the freezer of a car. I love, you know, there was some rough stuff in the spoil whenever the hell that was good. But what Trump is doing is he's monetizing kind of the most valuable assets of the United States, right? I mean, like it is, is national security stuff, you know, because that's the most valuable stuff, right? And so the reason it's different

scales, not just the money involved, it's that it's like national interest being traded away. And there's no payment like to the United States. It's just to Eric Trump and, you know, the Whitkoff family, right? So you're not seeing any benefit from this, like, you know,

“it's just going right to the kitty. And the other thing I think that, you know, Trump did,”

the reason this is so much worse in the second term, right? First term, you had like,

I don't know, Saudi's paying top dollar to stay at Trump hotels and stuff like that, is I think what Trump did is he studied, and so far as he's a student. But he paid attention, how does Putin operate? How does Erdogan operate? Like, how do other corrupt regimes operate? And he's like, when I get back in there, I'm just going to do that. And so I think what we're seeing is the United States operating like, you know, Malaysia has a times or like, you know,

Turkey has a times or certainly how Russia has. But I think what's different, again, it's just a scale because what, what those countries don't have is like thousands of the best chips in the world, you know? So he can, you know, it's a bigger scale even than those countries, because of what he has to trade away. Yeah, and then the first term he pretended to care about the emoluments clause and perceived conflicts of interest. And now when he's pressed on this,

he'll just say, look, I got no credit for it tonight. I don't care anymore. So now I'm just these corrupt as I want. And also, you know, he completely flipped flopped on cryptocurrency generally. Like, he was opposed to it. He thought it was, you know, he initially viewed it from like a nationalist perspective as like a competitor to the dollar that might hurt our primacy as a country. But then someone clearly told him that he could make a buck by selling shipcoins. And then they

got deeper and deeper down the crypto path. And they realized this was the best possible way to funnel ungodly amounts of money to you and to your family and to sell, you know, the crown jewels of the US technology business in here. Yeah, and you know, the golf is a piece of this, right, because essentially we're in a world without like a ton of liquidity, right? Some of these people who are also very rich on like screens, you know, they don't have billions and billions of dollars

just throw it stuff. They do in the golf, right? Because of our addiction to fossil fuels, because of the global economy that we built, right? So I'm not blaming them for having that money. Like countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE cut to our others, like they just have a lot of cash

at all in the second here, is just Americans, we're like moths to a flame, right? I mean, this is

a connective tissue between like the Saudi real estate investment conference with the, you know, special guest Hillary Clinton or whoever. And this at the different scale, I don't want to, you know, like Hillary taking a speaking fees, not the same trading way chips, but the common thread essentially is that like this, with the golf is figured out. And I actually don't blame them for this. I mean, I blame them for other things, Emirates, what they're doing in Sudan, which we'll get to. But of course,

if you have that much money, and their people are just willing to line in straight away, like you're going to do it. And so this calls for real structural reform of corruption in the U.S. government. Yeah. If the Democrats can ever claw back power, that has to be part of the agenda, absolutely.

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“All right, so let's talk about Epstein. By now, I'm sure the audience has heard about this massive”

trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein that came up of DOJ last week. This was in response to a law passed by Congress. There's millions and millions of records. They showed us vast web of connections to rich and powerful people all over the US, including Donald Trump and others. We're going to try to focus on the international angle because this scandal is now truly global. So a couple of examples, Ben, so starting in the UK, we have covered the downfall of a

crepe formerly known as Prince Andrew, who has stripped of his royal titles and asked to move from one royal estate to a slightly less large royal estate. But this latest trochefiles includes even more photos of Prince Andrew in Prime Minister Kierstormer is now calling on him to testify before the US Congress about Epstein. So that's kind of the remarkable step for Starmer to make. Then there's going to be some other Americans I'd like to see testified

before a Congress. There's a weird theme here, which is like there's a lot of accountability in British system and none in ours. Then there's a guy named Peter Mendelssohn last September, Peter Mendelssohn lost his job as Britain's ambassador to the US because of a previous troche of Epstein files that showed their relationship with being far deeper and going on longer

resigned from the labor party. He's resigned from the House of Lords on Tuesday the times of London reported that Mendelssohn will face a full criminal inquiry or a full criminal investigation for forwarding along very highly confidential British government information, including seeming to

“tip Epstein off about the EU's response to the debt crisis. I believe in 2010. I guess that's”

what that you know was. He basically told a guy a finance year with Wall Street connections

that the EU was about to do like a 500 billion euro bailout. Yeah. Pretty bad. Yeah.

I think starting with the British piece of this, you know, this has been interesting. I ended up spending a lot more time morbidly scrolling through this content than I thought for a couple reasons. One is just the absolute depravity. And that's where Prince Andrew comes in, right? Just people, men, behaving like the absolute worst versions of human beings as it relates to the mistreatment, trafficking, abuse of girls. I think the other thing that jumps out, though, Tommy, is beyond just

the conduct of the global elite. There were real stakes involved, right? So you take the Mendelssohn thing. That is not a small fucking matter. That is a senior government official trading the most sensitive inside market-based information. You and I were in meetings about the same bailouts.

I remember being in meetings about ECB bailouts. And I mean, I'm not saying I'm pure, you know,

like, I'm a hero. I just, you know, it's unthinkable. It was unthinkable. It was like leak that information. And it's like, hey, I know, and put it, the brazenist, the impunity. Put it in an email. It shows you. Forting this from Gordon Brown. Hey, and I just heard like Tim Geitner talking about this. Yeah. I mean, anyway, all this shit is happening right now because Trump administration officials are using this kind of insider information to bet on events on Kelsey, Holly Market. Holly Market,

right? They're fucking accounts are getting set up being like, Will Maduro be deposed, 100 grand into the into the table that's going to happen by the end of today.

“Oh, wow. I won my bad. How did that happen? Yeah. So, so no, I think it's a theme here that there was”

actual real stakes, power, intelligence agencies, market moving information that was circulating in this web that Epstein had built. I also think that Manelson thinks a big deal because, again, our British listeners know this, but Peter Manelson is a gigantic figure in college politics. This guy inner intercircle, Tony Blair, new labor comes in. He was kind of at the center. Britain is a pretty cluby place, London is in more cluby place, Westminster, the most cluby place. He was the

guy in a guy that was constantly talking to journalists, talking to political operatives like, it was like a master community. I met him. He's a charming guy, like he's a good communicator. Right. And by the way, he's gay. So, he was not like part of the sex crimes. It was just one, you know, I mean, maybe it's not strange. It is just odd that he was sort of like so close with this guy, but also seemingly Epstein funneled a bunch of money to his partner, which he seemed

to pretend he didn't know about, but now there's records of it. And he kind of got off

“just being in the center of the action. And I think that the lesson, you know, we all have to look”

a little harder at our elites after this Epstein stuff. And in the UK case, it said, you know, how did this guy come back? Like how did he get the job as ambassador? The British intelligence in those questions now? The UK has very good intelligence services. Yeah. I would be absolutely flabbergasted if MI6 didn't know the debt to peer-manels since Connection's Epstein. Yeah. So, how did these guys sign off on him becoming ambassador to the United States? It's a pretty important

job after this. Yeah, they must have lied in his vetting or something. Yeah. Yeah. A few more examples of that. So, the royal family in Norway has gotten swept into this. So, the latest bunch of files has revealed that the Crown Princess, her name is Metamarrate, she's the woman in line to be queen, was extremely charming with Jeffrey Epstein. It a bunch of email correspondence between 2011 and 2013, which is well after his plea deal in Florida.

She was chastised by the Prime Minister of Norway for showing bad judgment. And this is happening for a very challenging time for her because her son from a previous marriage is on trial for 38 charges, including four counts of rape. So, this is, yeah, the very scary time for her. I mean, horrible, all that's just awful. But she's not even the only Norwegian VIP to get caught up in this, like the former Prime Minister and the chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Selection Committee was

vacationing on Epstein Island. Now to get that few months of the Nobel Peace Prize on the former a former former Foreign Minister had dinner with them a couple times. There's two diplomats who up negotiate the Oslo Court to have financial ties to Epstein. So, that's bad. We've talked about the former Israeli Prime Minister a week before. He's been named in these files, but now there's even more correspondence between A.H.Brock and Jeffrey Epstein. There's audio files of their

conversations. It's clear that Epstein is kind of like helping him set up his post prime minister

life financially telling him, he's describing to him what Palantir is for the first time in one of

What the hell? I know. Yeah, they're also there's a conversation defensive Israel.

They have a conversation about Obama. I said that to you. I love that.

“Then Jeffrey Epstein has an interesting and very accurate, I think, read on Obama, and A.H.Brock's”

read political playbook, where he was in 2007. He's close to Valer Gerrit. He's like, where's the messade? Give me that brief. In the UAE, there's a top executive at Dubai-based logistics company that's sending porn links around the Slovakian National Security Advisor resigned after messages between him and Epstein came out where they were talking about women and also I think discussing a forthcoming meeting with the Russian Foreign Minister. I just will pause there, but it's just

it's staggering how this guy was able to get his tentacles into so many different people and just like, I don't know, convinced them that he was entertaining or important or could connect them or was a financial genius. I don't know, maybe there was some abilities there that we don't know about, but my God. Look, he definitely operated like an intelligent service himself, almost unto himself in the sense that he built a network. He got compromising information on people who were also

his friends. He found weak spots. These rural families are weak spots in high society. These are people who have a lot of money and a lot of time on their hands and no real jobs and they go to

“places like the Virgin Islands, right? And so he burrows in, I mean, that's why I take away from these”

worlds. Like, this is a way to kind of burrow into the elites and you kind of probably follow that pathway to other people. I thought the Baroque thing, a Baroque thing was really interesting because it shows you how this works. We've said a few times, particularly when we talk about like Jared Kushner, that the payoff for government service, right, comes on the back end. I eat like you do something to scratch the back of rich people and then or say the gulf. And then when you leave

in Jared's case, you get a $2 billion investment in your fund. The A-Brock thing, he's literally

coaching him. He's like, I can get you on this board. I can get you on this board. He's literally setting the guy up. And I think it is a good window for people and to how this kind of revolving door elite works where even people who seem like they're very powerful in some ways are subordinate to wealthy people because those wealthy people are the people that are going to make you money when you leave government, right? And so that all becomes one self-looking ice cream cone of corruption.

I also think like we should just pause on this intelligence question because, you know, there's weird links that why can this guy set up meetings with Russians, right? He clearly was doing a lot of stuff that benefited these really government. The Russian, Russian Israel have two of the most aggressive intelligence services in the world. And there's one email from Epstein where it

“goes to like, I think a former deputy economic minister, a Russian guy, where he's like, hey,”

there's a woman in town from Moscow that is blackmailing a business man that she's slept with. It's bad for everyone. Here's her address. Yeah. Real fucking real infectious. Very stuff. All this stuff, right? It was sorry. No, no, and that's right. I mean, I'm curious what you think, Tommy, because I know you, but these questions, you know, I don't claim to know the answer, but the idea that, you know, based on what we're seeing, that like the, I mean, at a minimum,

the Masad, the FSB, and, you know, who knows about the CIA, right? Like, must have been paying pretty close attention to shooting up at that island, because they know those people are compromised. You know, at a maximum, this guy, favorite trades. You know, he didn't necessarily have to be on the payroll of an intelligence service to work with them and to say, hey, Russia, send me some women and I'll send you some information or something, right? Or whatever the thing is, you know,

so I do think that some people are right to suggest like, why are we not seeing more investigation into this guy's links? And I'm not just boarding it is, you know, I'm boarding it, Russia, and I'm curious about his links to the US, and he'd like, what would this guy

to your point, like, had just a revolving door of some of the most powerful, richest

famous people in the world, come into his island flying on his plane, sending him emails, unclassified emails about sensitive shit. Like, I have to think there's an intelligence pieces somewhere. I would think so, and like, Trump wants this to be the end of the story. I think it's just the beginning of an ex-chapter piece. Now, there are so many documents, so many reporters and investigators can pull on these threads and try to figure out more. And there's all the stuff

that was redacted or withheld for various reasons. And like, we should just be honest, like, the 30-day timeline to get all these documents out was probably not remotely feasible. Yeah. And I don't like, I'm not trying to criticize the authors of the legislation, but like, are you standing up for Todd Blanche? I mean, I'm just standing up for the fact that like, to this day, I was talking to a journalist today going through the archives, who is like, man,

there are still naked photos in these archives that have not been redacted. You know, and it's like just horrible that they put the victims through this and, you know, there's

Donald Trump's, he's mentioned like 38,000 times so far, according to New York Times, but this is like, I didn't use email. This isn't using email. So like, we don't really know. It's like the tip of the iceberg for him. And to your point about Manelson, you know, being potentially prosecuted, uh, there's so many crimes in these, uh, you know, documents. I also add a, you know, real concern. It's so haunting to see, you know, the pictures of these girls with like black boxes.

And are they okay? Like, um, what happened to some of those girls? Like, are they, because it seemed like they were literally being treated like chaddle. Well, you know, there's a, like, occasionally some emails from Epstein to like, could they, one of the victims where he is like a sociopath. Yeah, just awful.

“Well, I think we'll be talking about this again. We know. Yeah.”

So one person who could be on the case here, but is not is Tulsi Gabbard. Um,

transition, you know, but there's like, there's been a critical mass of just like truly

fucking bizarre reporting both Tulsi Gabbard, um, who is the director of national intelligence who we want to check in on her. So remember, Tulsi was a Democrat. She served in the Iraq War, heard sort of top political driving issue was seem to be a sincere opposition to foreign wars, especially regime change wars, uh, put a pin in that one. Um, she was a touch quirky bench. She famously visited Syria in 2017, met with Bashar al-Assad, uh, which was, you know,

surprising thing to do, given the scale of the massacre of his own people at that point in time. But, um, she also seemed to kind of try to hide the trip when she got back. Um, but despite all of that, Trump put Tulsi in charge of America's intelligence community, and it has been a bumpy ride for her sense. So again, uh, despite the opposition to regime change wars, remember last year, she testified for Congress and said Iran is not decided to develop a nuclear weapon once later.

When Trump was about to bomb, he was asked about those comments. And he said, I don't care what she thinks. And then she adjusted the intelligence picture to match his opinion. Um, she also fired, uh, intelligence officials for producing intelligence assessment, they did not repeat the administration's line that now depose of Venezuela and president Nicholas Maduro was linked to the

“gang, Trendaire Agua. Remember so she could fire those guys. But despite all that, um,”

she still seems to be on the outs with Trump because, uh, January 1st, Tulsi was posting photos of herself doing yoga on the beach while the inner circle of the Trump administration was finalizing the Venezuela raid, uh, to take out Maduro, which she was just not read in on it all. So fast forward

to these last couple of weeks. Ben, um, first Tulsi is spotted on the ground in Georgia at the

side of this FBI raid of the election office in Fulton County, which to be clear is nuts. She's not supposed to have any part of a domestic law enforcement operation period. Um, Gabbard says Trump specifically directed her to be there. And according to the New York Times, Tulsi even called Trump on his cell phone put him on speaker phone so that he could talk with the FBI agents conducting the raid. I just, I want you to imagine in your head for one second, if Afriel Haines

was at the side of Mara Logo when they did the classified documents raid. And she put Joe Biden on a call with the FBI agent, just marinate on that one while I do a little more narration here.

“Um, someone who spoke, uh, with the time said the call was like compared to a pep rally,”

but this was my favorite line in that story. Ben, uh, it said quote Ms. Gabbard used herself on to call Mr. Trump, who did not initially pick up. [laughter]

Senator Boyzville. Um, also what the raid was that, like, second deputy director of the FBI that

got Andrew Bailey, who was called into layer, uh, minecraft head, Blockhead Bungino, um, who was on the record saying the left stole the election in 2020, so that, that gives me confidence. Um, here is Senator Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee talking about Tulsi's presence in Georgia for this FBI operation at a press conference on Tuesday. The director of national intelligence does not conduct criminal investigations.

She has no role in executing search warns, and she does not belong on the scene of a domestic FBI search. Particularly one tied to the president's personal grievances, carried out under the pretence of normal law enforcement. Now, director Gabbard argues that her presence was just justified by, quote, broad statutory authority. The broad authority to analyze intelligence is not a license to participate in a sham investigation, and it certainly does not justify

facilitating direct contact between the front line FBI agents doing this investigation directly to the president of the state. So the operation was not authorized by the Atlanta's local U.S. attorney, but it was instead authorized by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, who Bondi is tasked with looking into election interference. Um, it's also notable that the agent and charge of the FBI's Atlanta field office resigned the week before.

So it was connected. Um, on Tuesday, the Guardian reported that Tulsi's running her own separate

there. Um, what the fuck do you think she was doing there? What what is happening? So first of all, just to mark where to come and who I worked for back in 2006, but he does sometimes sound like a guy, and I say to the affection, who was frozen in 2006, and then is like dropped into 2026 and he's like, what the fuck is going on here? You got the right you know, like it's quite all the norms. Yeah, norms. Um, here's like, it's conspiracy theory day because, you know, why? Because we have

no idea what the fuck is going on, right? There's no information. So when there's no information,

all you can do is have a theory. Here's what worries me about this, right? Yes, she has no operational

authority and FB operation. Like the only thread that she could cling to is that not like the DNI's ahead of the intelligence community, but that is not meant to be supervising law enforcement operation by the FBI. That's meant to the domestic intelligence gathering part of the FBI kind of goes into a pool of information, the DNI draw some. I worry about this. The way these things

“could connect is the craziest theories by the 2020 election involved far in interference, right?”

Ding, ding, ding, ding. Like Venezuela or wherever the Iran or, you know, just another country. I'll reach you a true social post in a minute when you're done to give you some more specifics. Why would this matter? Why would this be connected to Georgia? Because if she wants to spend some web of conspiracy theory that there's this kind of ongoing foreign threat to the integrity of our elections, ironic that the Republicans now care about that, given how they've dealt with Russia,

that could be a potential pretence to federalize the conduct of elections in this country. So elections are held by states. They're the ones who put on the voting. They're the ones who count the votes. Trump hates that. You see Trump called for federalizing 15 states worth unblocked on Gino's podcast Monday. I didn't realize unblocked on Gino's podcast. So he's back.

If they're looking for a pretext to cross the final third rail, they've already crossed so many

others of trying to nationalize elections. So states can actually carry out the elections, but a bunch of Trump flunkies can. Tulsi could deliver that to Trump by saying, oh, you know, we're finding all this evidence of the Venezuelan conspiracy. So that this looks kind of keystone cops, but that that's the truly scary possibility. Is it this is like part of that play for the rail, the Democratic Party? Yes. So her authority is only authorized assessing

foreign interference and elections, right? Yes. And investigating Joe Biden or whatever. Yeah. Um, the last week, Trump went on a crazy like late night posting spree on truth social Ben. So that included sharing a message that said the following. So it said that the quote, stolen 2020 election was connected to Obama via the pallets of cash to Iran. It was so perfect, which was funneled through the Dubai embassy to operatives in Italy and

Maryland, and Geneva, Switzerland. In return, this says that Italian officials used military satellites to hack US voting machines using CIA tools, China coordinated the operation, but also the CIA oversight and the FBI covered it up. Um, there's another popular set of claims that Venezuelo

“was involved. Remember this, the ghost of Hugo Chavez was still in the election or maybe Maduro.”

Um, there's another theory that a CIA super computer named Hammer went rogue somehow, changed the election results and the dude pushing that theory is remember back during the early days of the Iraq War. There was one guy who said he could decode Al Qaeda messages and Al Jazeera broadcast and read this whole fucking thing. Yeah. That guy is the one pushing this thing. That's the level of insanity we're talking about here. That is so fucking insane. Um, on every single level,

like, like, what do you do with that? What do you do? Barack Obama and the Italian. And like, Dubai, which is like, I mean, the other thing, so, so the truly scary thing is that this is all just about federalizing elections in certain states and making sure the Republicans

can never lose power in this country, which is the thing that might happen. Um, I do want to say

for the more comic relief, their capacity to kind of take a bunch of things that they have theories about or that they once got mad about and just jamming them all together and like a sandwich. It's like, it's like the wreck. It's not even coherent. If you look at the Democrats, we're like, you know, what Hurricane Katrina blew in some information that led, yeah. It's like, yeah, like somehow it's like, this is kind of like, they just take random quote unquote scandals

from the last, you know, from Fox News from last eight years. And suddenly, you know, Beau Burgdahl, like, through the election 2020 or something. You know, like, it's so fucking nuts. And now, remember when you're a kid and you go to like, soda machine and you make a graveyard, it was like, I love that. I love that. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah. That's what this is. So it's one big giant graveyard because they know, like the only audience that they're speaking to is

like the dumbest fucking bag of rocks who sits in front of Fox News for 12 hours a day.

“Yeah. And that person just hears like, palettes of cash. I remember that. Yeah. Like, they must have”

the 2016 palettes of cash were saved to pay for stealing the election in 2020. For Donald Trump.

task force that Tulsi put together within the DNI's office. They put together a memo that named a

specific individual and like peg that person as the one who had placed the pipe bombs at the DNC and the RNC before the January 6th insurrection. Shock surprised the prize that information then leaks to the blaze. It's like far right wing outlet. And they claim they got their stores. There's stuff like confirmed buying Intel source. Turns out that was total bullshit. The administration then invested somebody else. But like, they just told these teams just smeared

this innocent woman through this election integrity work. After Blockhead Banjino said that they actually caught the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Blockhead. All right. So then there's this like whistleblower issue. So the Wall Street Journal reported that a whistleblower report was filed against

“Gabbard last May. It is described as like so top secret and so sensitive that it has to”

sit in a safe all by itself. By law, the inspector general is supposed to share credible whistleblower reports with Congress in a matter of a few weeks. They have like a week to assess it two weeks to share it. Something like that. But Tulsi and her team have just been sitting on this thing for months and no one really knows why. The complaint reportedly doesn't just involve Gabbard, but also some official at another agency. They say executive privilege might be

involved somehow according to the journal quote representative for the Inspector General said the office had determined specific allegations against Gabbard weren't credible. Well, it couldn't reach the determination on others. But it's worth pointing up and that Inspector General for the Intel community, these guy Christopher Fox worked for Tulsi Gabbard before taking this oversight job. So you know, so it's great. So I don't know. Like it's impossible to know what's going on

here. I thought we might try to do some informed speculation about like what could make her want to withhold something like this at risk to herself via Congress. What would make it so sensitive? Do you have a theory of the case? This one is even harder. You know, I didn't bring

enough tinfoil hats today. I should have brought some. I guess first of all, the executive

privilege is interesting because that would usually be the White House. So again, this is informed speculation, not just a guess. Like when you hear an executive privilege that that, you know, generally only applies to the White House. Like other agencies don't have the ability to claim executive privilege. They report to Congress in a different way than the White House does. So that makes you wonder whether she's talking to some lunatic in the White House and there's any

number than she could be talking to. And again, like if you think about what she's like her only

“job, it seems to be is investigating these election referencing. Remember, it was her a few months ago”

came out with a kind of crazy, you know, theory that about the 2016 election that, you know, said Barack Obama. So this is all she's doing. And so I guess one theory is that there's a maybe a foreign government that is helping her put together these theories, right? And I could think of, you know, a couple of these, you know, Russia, you know, and that would be the kind of thing of like,

well, wait, is it? Because she's always had these connections with the Russians. You have

a little ambiguous. I don't know. I mean, what is clear is this person is just kind of, first of all, clearly not managing the entire community is this kind of this Inspector Clueso for election interference is clearly, you know, not following any protocols. And there's not really any oversight because they're not sharing shit with Congress. They're, they gutted these Inspector General functions or put a bunch of flunkies in there. And this is going to also take more investigative journalism,

more whistleblowers. Like, there are people that know. I mean, this is the thing, this is what is one of the things, Tommy, I'm curious what you think about this like the next two or three years. If we're going to get out of this, it's probably going to have to involve people who know on the inside, yeah, having enough is enough in telling people. And also, like, in the first term, they, you know, people like Vindeman, like others who came forward with the blowers,

did so knowing that there was personal risk, but hoping that the system would protect them. And if you know, everyone senses seeing the system break down and not really protect them at all. So there's even greater personal risk coming out of this term, too, when Trump is like just made clear that he will go to the ends of their to punish you. I mean, and they made clear that they try to give it to all the Vindmans. They kind of professional. And they got rid of all the Inspector

General's and stuff, right? So they don't even care anymore. I mean, yeah, my theory, you could just imagine an instance where someone in the intelligence community blows the whistle on like a top person to Donald Trump. So Jared Kushner doesn't have a clearance. Doesn't have a job.

“Is he consuming intelligence information? Is he sharing that intelligence information?”

Did we pick up on that sharing via our collection on the Israelis or something? Right. So it comes back around suddenly we know of malfeasance through some super compartmented, you know, sensitive collection priority, which is why it ends up the document ends up in a safe could happen. Could someone be mad that Steve Wood cough flies around the world in his own plane doesn't use secure com. Yes, maybe a silly Steve left his like top secret

guessing. But it's just interesting that this IG report involves Tulsi, but then also some other office and another agency, which makes me wonder if she is perceived to have been covering up for something someone else did because she's trying to protect her. That's a, that's a, that's a very

“good theory. Yes, and though. The bad, it's a good one. Remember when she's going to pardon Snowden?”

Wasn't that her other big thing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe he's happy in Moscow at us. We gave up on that one. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do, listen, this is your last chance if you live in New Zealand or Australia to pick up tickets to come see positive America. For the, hopefully just visiting tour, 2026, we're in Auckland on February 11th, Melbourne on February 13th, Brisbane on February 14th and Sydney on February 16th, you can get tickets at

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the one you claim in a while. Not that the Tulsi shit isn't serious. This is all very serious. It's all very serious. We're just like laughs, so you don't cry stuff. But you know, Ukraine, not a lot, not a lot to laugh about.

“So just one important piece of context for folks to know about this conversation about”

Ukraine is that it's been like a brutally cold winter over there. I was looking at my Apple weather map as I was writing this up in, and the temperature in Kiev was zero degrees on Monday parts of Ukraine hit negative 14 degrees, so like deadly dangerously cold. And leading up to this cold in throughout it, there's been this sustained effort by the Russians to take out Ukraine's energy infrastructure, which led to rolling blackouts and people freezing. Last week, Trump said

he got Putin to agree to like a one week ceasefire because of the cold. On Monday, this week he repeated that claim. Let's watch. I did call up President Putin and he's agreed and he's put it out to, they have the same cold way that we do. Maybe different because it's pretty far away, but it's equivalent. And Ukraine's a very cold country. It's much colder than us. It's colder than they say on average, it's Canada or colder. And on top of that, they have a tremendous cold way.

Then I asked him if he wouldn't shoot for a period of one week, no missiles going into Kiev or any other towns, and he's agreed to do it. So it's something. On Tuesday, Ukrainian President of

and 450 attack drones in an overnight attack that deliberately targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure. So don't know the Putin kept his word, and that doesn't really vote well for Putin agreeing to a broader peace deal. NATO Secretary General Mark Ruta took some time off from Kissing Trump's

“ass and what to Ukraine on Tuesday, you know, to his credit. I think like the air defense”

sirens were wailing as he was there trying to, you know, get some done. One small piece of good news ban is that Elon Musk is reportedly implementing a technical fix that should prevent Russia from using his starlink satellite internet service from extending the range of their drones to hit more parts of Ukraine. Last week, the deputy prime minister of Poland kind of yelled at Elon about this on Twitter and accused him of making money and war crimes in response, Elon called him a

drooling imbicycle. But good to see cooler heads kind of prevailed here in Elon's seems to be doing the right thing. Just two other quick things on Ukraine. So the Washington Post had a big report that's worth your time to read that is very disturbing about how hundreds of many Kenya have been lured to Russia with promises of like civilian jobs or security jobs and then just sent to the front lines with no training and they don't even speak the language and this sort of thing could

be happening to men in, you know, a dozen other African countries. And then finally been the last

remaining non-proliferation treaty between the US and Russia is set to expire on Thursday of this week. That would essentially just light on fire two decades of bipartisan diplomatic work and could lead to a new nuclear arms race between the US, Russia and maybe China. So all good news in this section. Yeah, when you put it like that, that's a lot of things stuff here.

“I think that the Trump's credulous nature with Putin is just astonishing to me. But it's also because”

he doesn't actually care whether Putin is going to do what he said. He just likes to be able to go out and say, well, I got him to greet us. And by the way, that clip, I'm sure played, you know, to carry the theme of Fox News forward, I'm sure that clip played on Fox News. I'm pretty sure that they probably didn't cover what you just followed up with, which all of that was complete bullshit. No. So if you're consuming the pageantry of the mega presidency, you know, Trump is telling

you that he got Putin to stop this and he's saving lives in Ukraine, the reality is the war in

Ukraine has gotten much worse with the Ukrainians under Trump, like the violence is up, the attacks are up, like their battlefield losses. They're not getting support from the United States in the way that they did. They aligns at back semis fracturing, right? And this kind of to tile the stick together, you know, I remember when we were back in the Russia hoax days, you know, and but people used to speculate like, what, what does Putin want from Trump? Does he want sanctions

relief or does he want this or does he want that? No, Putin wants exactly what is happening right now. Like, let's just think about what we've been talking about. Right? Yeah. He can just beat the shit out of the Ukrainians and the president of the United States will tell the world that he Putin is agreed to not do that, even though he's doing it. He just watched the NATO alliance fracture over a fucking greenland, right? He's watching the elite of the United Kingdom and the United

States and several European countries be completely exposed as a bunch of perverted criminals in the Epsteinfals. I'm not saying he's behind all of that. I'm just suggesting that like, nobody's had a better few weeks in Vladimir Putin and he's just sitting there and Trump is just wrecking the Atlantic alliance, destroying the dollar, fucking over the Ukrainians. Look, you actually couldn't design it if you were a Russian intelligence person. And I'm not saying

that whether that's because Trump is compromised or whether that's more likely just because Trump is a combination of an idiot and some of the entire Putin, it doesn't matter if it's the outcome that I'm talking. And there's no accountability, like reporters tried asking about this stuff. He just, he doesn't care. Like there will be no accountability for the fact that he said you'd end this war in 24 hours. It's been well over a year. I saw the other journalist posted a photo.

So all around the White House, there's something they're these things called jumbos. It's basically the White House photographer will put up like a selection of 20 to 50 of their favorite photos at any given time and they get kind of rotated. They put up one of Putin and Trump in Alaska

“at the like absolutely disastrous fail. Remember that? Fucking summit. It's like why would you put a”

jumble of that up on the wall? That just suggests you do not, like you fundamentally do not care about the policy outcome of your Trump. You don't. But this is actually the, in like some journalist try like Caitlin Collins. Yeah, she did. So I'm not saying all of these. She has about Epstein and

he told her he's never seen her smiles. Like the most sexist patronized thing you've ever seen.

But the reality is, you know, Joe Biden, we get, you know, yelled questions about why you aren't providing, you know, certain tank system to Ukraine for weeks. This guy said he'd end the

he should be pushed hard on it and more regularly because this is absolutely bullshit. The whole

“reason he invented the eight wars that he ended that he didn't end is to, I mean, this is a distraction”

but it's not like a distraction with action. It's, I'm going to invent these other wars I ended because the one that actually people cared about, you know, it was Gaza and Ukraine. And Gaza, we've talked about it's not exactly a ceasefire and Ukraine is just much much worse. The other where I really wish you would care about is Sudan. So two updates out of there.

So for the, like the third year in a row, Sudan is one of the worst about the worst humanitarian

crisis on the planet. The quick background is this fighting started in April of 2023, it was between the Sudanese military in a rebel group called the RSF. They were once allies in crushing Sudan civilian government but had a falling out and now it's, you know, year three of this nightmare. However, but these, these groups are not fighting alone so that the RSF forces, they get weapons in support from the United Arab Emirates, including drones made in China,

while the Saudis and Qatar have been backing the Sudanese military which, according to the New York Times, they buy a lot of weapons from Turkey, Russia and Iran. So if that wasn't complicated enough, the Times reported that Egypt is now getting directly involved. The Sudanese military is apparently now flying drones that they bought from Turkey from a secret base in southern Egypt

“that the Times, I think, found with satellite imagery. The Times, they said it's not clear”

of the Egyptian or Sudanese troops that are actually operating these drones but what they think happened was after the RSF took this major city of Elfashir, the Times thinks that, you know, the LCC, the Egyptians, got worried that the RSF was going to fully take over Sudan and they were

already pissed at like 1.5 million refugees had flown from Sudan into Egypt and so they decided to

get directly involved. And speaking of Elfashir, Ben, we still don't know the full death toll from that massacre. There are some analysts who believe that up to 100,000 people could have been killed in that one single siege of a city. But now experts who are warning about what was going to happen in Elfashir and were right are sounding the alarm about a region in Sudan called South Cortifon, which is like one of the 18 states that makes up Sudan. The Norwegian refugee

Council published, a press released yesterday, saying, quote, "The world is once again failing civilians in Sudan with a clock ticking on further widespread atrocities." We got a voice note from the Norwegian refugee Council Secretary General Yon Eglend, who were just back from South Cortifon. Here's a clip. Those who flee, are mostly women and children. We saw very few men, they seem to be dead missing or detained or cannot leave. The women walked for days

together with us more children to the refugee camps where we tried to give them as much aid as we can with our local Sudanese partners. But we're overstretched and underfunded. I've hardly seen in my many years as a humanitarian worker, so little available aid in such a tremendous emergency. Now we're in account down to a famine of biblical proportions, if we cannot search aid within the next three months because the rainy season starts in May and then the bad roads

that are now difficult to navigate, they become impossible in the six months of rains. So catastrophic situation, according to the IRC, they estimate more than 150,000 people have been

killed, 12 million have been displaced by the fighting in over 33 million people, which is about

two-thirds of the population of the entire country of Sudan need humanitarian relief. So again, man, like the Trump wants the Nobel Peace Prize, like if he turned his attention to ending this

“conflict, I think he would earn that thing. But he just doesn't care. Well, in a lot of the”

countries that are involved in the proxy war, we've talked about the UAE and they're backing for the IRCF. These are countries that Trump can pick up the phone, definitely. Especially whatever. Mad man, that he is and say cut this shit out. This is a solvable problem and part because of how much external power has drive the proxy fight. The other piece of this is, would you talk about, you know, in God bless Yanegland and the Norwegian refugee council and the

IRC and these organizations, because USAID would have been marshalling, not only providing these systems, but marshalling these systems from other countries, and that's gone now. So, I mean, if people have resources, you know, the Norwegian refugee council, IRC saved the children, like the people that have to operate in these spaces, like a lot of them took hits from the USAID going away,

bigger problems with less resources. You see the, the, the Lancet, which is this distinguished medical journal, how to study out today that said the global aid cuts that were led by the

kind of USAID, uh, deforestation by Elon Musk, could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030, because we

make our cuts that a bunch of other countries sell the suit. And it could actually end up being worse

“than that, because that's what you can project out based on nutrition and health. But these wars,”

where, I mean, that's often, you know, where you're rushing assistance to, like this is just not there. Yeah. That's uh, devastating. Okay. Our second last story today is about oil, fringe, separatist groups, treason, and then Donald Trump's lust for revenge, Ben. So, it's the fun one. So, last week, the financial times reported that the Trump administration has met with far-right separatists from the Alberta Prosperity Project three times since May.

So, the APP, they're pushing for a referendum for the Canadian province of Alberta to break away from the rest of Canada, uh, become its own country for, you know, economic governance, cultural, and human rights reasons. Now, I imagine some listeners are thinking, like, who cares? Why do I

care about a random province in Canada? The answer is oil. Up to 84% of Canada's oil production

comes out of Alberta and around 60% of its national gas output comes from Alberta. So, they're obviously a bunch of other implications for, you know, what losing a province would mean

“for a country. But that we're going to focus on the, the oil part, because that's what Trump”

cares about. Um, these separatists are hoping to meet again with Trump officials to, quote, discuss our feasibility study regarding a $500 billion US line of credit to support the transition to a free and independent Alberta. So, not only do they hope in a break away, they want us to finance it. Um, here is the head of the Alberta Prosperity Project, a guy named Jeffrey Rath, talking to CTV about his plan. Let's watch.

I understand that there's a lot of Ontarians and people in Quebec that suffer deeply from Trump's arrangements syndrome. But we're not doing anything untoward. It's absolutely, you know, from our perspective, we're just conducting due diligence on behalf of our fellow Albertans. We take what we're doing very seriously. And obviously, the attitude of the United States towards Alberta independence, which incidentally is overwhelmingly enthusiastic, is something that informs our movement

going forward. If the United States said, oh, God, we can't tolerate that flies in the face of, you know, the communist new world order. We'll last slap a 300% tariff on Albertans if they leave, because we want you to remain resource slaves of the communist government in Ottawa. You know, it would be a totally different conversation. But that's not the case. We're gratified that it's the case. And quite frankly, the Trump administration shows Albertans far more respect than is shown to

Albertans by the government in Ottawa. Love that like an Albertan separatist looks like Robert Ford in the cowboy. Yeah, yeah. So this is like a great scoop by the FT, but the Trump administration hasn't really been hiding there, interest in this plan. Here's a Treasury Secretary Scott Besant talking about the referendum on a right-wing podcast a few weeks ago. Albertans, the natural partner for the U.S., they have great resources. The Albertans are very independent people.

Rumors that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not. Sounds like you may notice something up there. People are saying people people are talking. Many people are talking. People want sovereignty. They want what the U.S. has got. KG fucking soybean farmer. So Ben, up in Canada, this whole idea has gone over as well as farting a pickup truck idling at a Tim Horton's drive-through. Can you? I'd share my inter-axle route for that. Okay,

prime minister Mark Carney told reporters, quote, "We expect the U.S. administration to respect to Canadian sovereignty. The British Columbia's premier went so far as to call the group's actions. Trees in, according to a recent poll, only 28% of Albertans support and move towards independence. I'm sure even fewer would be excited about a plan to become the 51st state.

“But Ben, it's like it's an incredible story. I think about the links to which this administration”

will go for oil, for greed, and to just punish a country that used to be one of our closest allies

in the world, because they will not take its orders. First of all, I just want to point out that our

producer Michael is very focused in the story almost health. Especially, I don't know what his ties are, Albertan separatists. There's a crypto flow around. There's fair some looking into. No, I actually think this is a really important story. And for a couple of reasons, like you remember when Trump got elected the second time and he started talking about Canada's 51st state and he started talking about Greenland. And they were talking about like William McKinley

remember like, you know, that he's the president who kind of started formal empire of the United States, right? Like, I think that in a world with no where Trump could do whatever he wanted. He would like Alberta to be, and when he says Canada 51st state, I just think he means Albert. That's what the resource is. That's where the oil is. It's also kind, even though I

it's right wing, it's more conservative, you know, and so they look at that and they're like, well, you know, wouldn't be great if we had Greenland and the Panama Canal and Alberta. Like, I actually think that's, yeah, and Venezuela, which has the most oil in Latin America, right?

“And I actually think that that is what he wants, like that's what Trump would want.”

And of course, like that to happen. And so this is something that he actually will pursue, right?

And I don't know that it'll like invade Alberta, but like, this leads me to the second point,

which is it is so striking to me, and this comes back to my Putin theme, that their play is so Russian, right? Remember the the the the separatists in Donetsk and Lansk who Russia had to invade Ukraine to come to the aid of the separatists, right? Like, this is not some new plan invented by Trump, but they tried in Greenland. Remember they sent Don Jr there to find the separatists in Greenland. He couldn't fucking find anybody. And he's like, you know, trying to

take people to lunch or something, you know? But like that's what they want. It's so obvious what the playbook is. It's like, find like a bunch of guys like this fat ass in the hat, you know, you allowed to say that. Sure. Okay. Who like say they're declared themselves separatists. And then all of a sudden you have a wedge and then you got Scott Bessent, you know, the seemingly serious man in the administration, although he's talking to like real America news or whatever that is.

Yeah. Like that's like a pizza gay guy. Yeah. Yeah. It was taken in the mirror. But a Canadians pay attention to this because this is, I mean, I don't think it'll work. But, you know, this is what they like. It's an Albertan separatists that we have to come to the aid of like they're in Donetsk and we're the Russian army. Yeah. To me it's a story of, I just think the kind of relentlessness with which these guys are coming back. Like they don't have to roll tanks across the border into Toronto, but like,

you know, they're being kind of creative. And you're right, they're they're they're stealing kind of a a time-honored playbook here of, you know, promoting independence in Greenland and Canada. But they are being creative. Yeah. And I'd say the Canadians at a minimum beware of like, right, we media coming up there, like, you know, social media bots, like they will try to run this

play and foster separatism and all the rest of it. Creepy stuff. Finally, Ben, I just want to tell

you guys all a story about a young French man who's situation rapidly went from bad to worse. And we'll talk about how to escalate it. So this is not about a manual Macron. This is about a 24-year-old who showed up at hospital and to lose according to a police source quote, in a state of extreme discomfort having inserted a large object up his rectum. Right. So that's bad. Then the doctors tell him that to get it out, they need to perform emergency surgery. Right.

So that is worse. Right. Then they do the surgery and the doctors realize that the object was an unexploded artillery shell dating back to the first World War. Now we're like, it's so much worse that I don't even know where on the continuum we're at anymore. You know what I mean? Of worse. So they call in bomb disposal experts. The hospital had to be evacuated. It turns out that the shell dated back to 1918. And it was about eight inches long. Congrats. And had an inch in girth. And

less. So with a pointy end, perhaps worse of all Ben, it was a German shell. Talk about a beaten back behind. So anyway, all's well that ends well, I guess. But a reminder to all you history buffs

“out there. Be careful. Be careful with what you're up to. Just where did you get that story?”

It's like the daily milk or something. That was hot. Hot in the crooked slag. I wanted to try to imagine the thought process in series events that led that occurring. So I guess it's just a story

Tommy about the unintended consequences of war. Yes, they never end. They never end. I also think

if you know anyone who's worked in an ER, they spend an ordinary amount of time removing things from a new season. But boy, what luck has not been my thing unexploded shell. Yeah. Fuck man. Also, he might face charges of Miss Handel and Category A munitions. That's good to jail for that. Let me tough. How do you explain that to your cellmate? No. Say back. All right. Okay. That's it for the news. Yeah. So it's worse than this segment. Stick around though. You're near your Ben's conversation

with Ali Viahs about what up the hell is happening around after the protests, whether Trump might bomb them, who might come next. So very important timely conversation. You will not want to miss it. Patee the world is brought to you by Hayah. There's something unsettling to consider as a parent. Our kids are the first generation growing up on ultra-process foods. And we are only now

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is not available on the regular website. Go to h-i-y-a-h-e-a-l-t-h.com/world. You get your kids the full body nourishment. They need to grow into healthy adults. In message box, I break down what's actually happening in politics and what it's going to take to beat Donald Trump mega. You follow every poll and every twist and turn in the campaign message boxes for you. This isn't just hot takes. Every addition delivers clear analysis

behind the scenes insight in practical strategy you can actually use whether you're working on

a race or organizing your community or just trying to win the argument in your group chat.

So if you're listening to this hit pause, go to your browser and head to crooked.com/eswedan because I have a special offer for crooked media fans. You'll get 20% off the message box for an entire year. So go to crooked.com/eswedan. I'm very pleased to be joined by Ali Viz, who's the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group and friend of the pot over here. Ali, welcome to the show.

Great to be with you Ben. All right. So it's been a pretty dizzying few weeks here. Just a recap. We had a massive protest erupt against Iranian regime. They felt different. They were much kind of broader based across the society. Many factors informing that. You had President Trump threaten US military action. If people were killed, saying help is on the way, thousands of people were subsequently killed. And the US took pretty

normal action. Some additional sanctions as if that's going to make the difference. But then he sent this quote unquote, "Armada" towards Iran. It seemed like we were renting back up to strikes. He was threatening again. Now they're negotiating. It's going on to stop things from progressing. So that's where we are. I want to get into a few pieces of this with you, Ali, but

“I mean, how would you describe where things stand now for our listeners?”

As you said, Ben, it's really a dizzying turn of events. And just before coming online, I was checking the news. And it appears that the meeting on Friday in Istanbul is now in doubt, because apparently the Iranians are asking for meeting to be moved to Oman. They're all sorts of other rumors of why it might not happen. But Bahunos, I wouldn't be surprised if by Friday, or this weekend, President Trump has bombed Iran. I wouldn't be surprised if

the outlines of a deal has been announced. Yeah, that's exactly where I am. Let's start. I want to get into the deal. Then I want to get into the regional players. And then I want to get into kind of the politics of Iran. I know it's a lot, but I think we can get through it. On the deal, what we keep hearing is familiar to me, actually, because it was what was in Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to

“Congress way back in 2014. Some of us remember that. It's no domestic enrichment. So essentially,”

no nuclear program. It's no ballistic missile program. And it's no support for proxies. And I hear that. And I understand why the Iranians would want to negotiate because they think they could probably drag out negotiations and avoid being bombed. But I also don't see the supreme leader of the Iranian leadership accepting those terms. I mean, what do you think is

Okay, so let me first say that there are several issues with diplomacy. One is a question of style, the second is scope, and then third is substance. On style, what is different now is that Iranians

“seem to rely much more on regional mediation than was the case in the past. As you remember,”

the Europeans were always the intermediaries between Iran and the U.S. But there are still some

serious differences between the two sides. Apparently, the Trump administration's position is that they don't want to waste time in direct negotiations. They want direct talks with Iran. Iran still insists, as long as the U.S. poster was around a so hostile, they're not going to have direct talks, and they want others in the room. Interestingly, since the last September that Europeans snap back the sanctions, U.N. sanctions on Iran, and have now also designated

drug-lutionary guards as a terrorist organization after the protests, Iran, Europe relations are at a historic low. And the Iranians have decided to replace the E3, which are France, UK, and Germany, with what I call the M.E.3, the Middle East, Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar. These are the countries that also signed the Gaza deal with President Trump, and of course, the key criteria here is that they have personal and good relations with the

President and have direct access to it. So that's a question of style, and it regardless of what of the talks happen in Istanbul, this Friday, or at some point later down the road, there will be regional mediation. We can discuss why the region is now so interested.

Second, it's the question of scope. As you said, there's always been this pressure

to try to get non-nuclear issues also on the table. Every administration has been interested in that. Almost every administration has come to the conclusion that the nuclear should be the priority, because it was the most urgent. But what is different now, even compared to last early last year when the Trump administration had five rounds of talks with Iran, is that the facts on the ground are different. Iran's nuclear program has been significantly degraded.

Iran has not enriched a gram of uranium since the 12th-day war last June. And so, suspending uranium enrichment is no longer a red line for Iran. It is fact on the ground. And maybe that provides some space for maneuvering without necessarily Iran giving up on its

right to enrichment, which as you remember, again, going back to the Obama years, has always been

“a major issue from the Iranian perspective. Then there's also the question of proxies, right?”

The Iranian non-state allies in the region have also been significantly degraded. There is so much harder for Iran now to send arms and money to his Bala in Lebanon or to even to the Houthis in Yemen than was the case in the past. So maybe issues like that could also be put on the table. And then finally is a question of the substance of negotiations on what will Iran get in return for these concessions? Would we get some sort of a agreement on principles

and then fill in the details later, which seems to be the method of choice for the Trump administration? So there are lots of questions that are out there. And I would say that the gaps between the two sides are still pretty significant. But one thing that brings them together, I think is the realization,

“the alternative, which is a conflict, is so much more attractive. And do you think the only thing”

you did mention there's ballistic missiles, which seems like it would probably be the hardest thing for Iran to concede, right? Because it's their potential insurance policy to say we can hit US bases or we can hit Israel in an existential conflict. What do you look for in the substance of ballistic missiles? Yeah, I didn't open that count of worms because it's it's a much more difficult thing to tackle. The reality is ever since the 12 they were in June, the Iranians concluded

that actually their ballistic missiles are the only credible, viable tool of defending themselves. The policy of forward defense of having these partners and proxies away from Iran's borders didn't protect Iran in a way you can't even say it invited and attack Iran. But their missiles did get through Israel's multi-layered defense system, did inflict the kind of damage on Israel that the country had not experienced since the 1973 Yom Kippur war. So every Iranian official

best defenses are fence and their best option is to invest on their missile program. So I see

“no possibility of Iran giving up on its missile program or accepting Israeli terms, which are to limit”

the range of Iranian missiles so that they would not reach Israel. I mean, Ben, if you look at the case of Israel in Lebanon, a group that was almost defeated by Israel ever since October 7th and especially in 2024, Israel hasn't been able to manage this arm of Israel. It's impossible to imagine that a state like Iran that relies on this on missiles as court with national security would ever give up this cart. But order other options. For instance, you can imagine a scenario

in which Iranians would agree to put limits on testing satellite launchers that could basically provide them with options for intercontinent ballistic missiles. That would target US interests directly and President Trump can sell that as a major victory. President Obama could

never get anything like that. Biden could never get anything like that. So there are other options

if both sides step aside from maximum distance. Yeah, no, that's a good point on ICBMs, which they don't have as it is. So they're not giving up something they have. One thing that is we just didn't talk about was protest. Trump's kind of giving up the game in some ways that these talks are not really about defending peaceful protests. But the momentum seemed to be a regime change type strike, whether it's an actual decapitation, the Iranian regime, or whether it's kind of

really blasting regime targets across the board, the RGC, the Basij militia who were involved in the crackdowns, maybe some regime leadership and you kind of take a shot and see what happens. Thus far that has not happened, that could still happen like you said. To me, it seems like the reason it hasn't happened is at least in part, you mentioned the ME3, Turkey, Egypt, and Qatar.

“Behind that, I think the Saudis are at least a silent partner, but I would imagine the Saudis”

have, I saw the Saudi Defense Minister come out and say something that suggested they might be okay with strikes, but everything I know about the Saudis suggests that they're probably pretty wary of a regime change war in their neighborhood. They've had a reprośmal of sorts with Iran in recent years. Why do you think that particular set of countries is intent on preventing a war? And Egypt's an interesting participant in that because in the past they've kind of been

at odds with the Iranians in part because they're Gulf patrons and the Emirates in Saudi War II, but why do you think we see those countries trying so hard to divert this outcome? It's a very interesting question. So I would say two reasons, two main reasons. One is that the countries in the region have seen this movie before. They know what happens when the U.S. tries regime change and not part of the world. Even when the res policy process, when the

res is a plan and even seemingly well intentions, it ends in grief. And they are the ones who pay the price for it. There will be instability, radicalization and refugees spilling across their borders. Turkey is already very concerned. They lived with Syrian refugees for many years.

Iran is a country five times the size of Syria. A country of 92 million if it becomes a failed

state, it's a major problem for everyone. And before we get to that stage of the U.S. turning Iran into another failed state, they might be caught in the crossfire as we saw in the hot summer of 2019. When Iran was cornered in President Trump's first term in office, it lash out against ports in the UAE against Saudi oil infrastructure against shipping in the Persian Gulf and the state of hormones. So everybody would pay a price for that kind of confrontation.

“But there is another reason that I think is often overlooked, which is the fact that as much as”

the regional countries might welcome a weekend Iran, they don't want to vanquish to Iran, because that would eliminate the last obstacle or counterweight to Israeli hegemony in the region. And that's not what they want. So I think Israel's assertiveness, it's aggressiveness, it's a sendance, especially with the attack on Qatar last year. Has been a wake-up call for a lot of countries in

Israel even more. Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, it seems like that Doha Strike is kind of what

“finally got the ceasefire such as it is. It's not exactly holding, but over the line. But if I”

mean, I mean, just think about how extraordinary it is. Egypt, a country that doesn't even have diplomatic relations with Iran, is doing so much behind the scenes to make this happen. Yeah. And President Trump is hearing the exact same thing from the leaders of Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi, Arabia, Turkey, UAE, Qatar, Oman, and even Russia. It's really quite stunning concerts of regional countries coming together. And these are all people he listens to you, I'm like more than I'd say,

like a Lindsey Graham. Well, on Iran itself, I mean, you've done great work over the years and just trying to understand both the leadership dynamic and Iran, the public opinion dynamic and Iran. If we do, I mean, one of the questions that has not been answered, including, you know, Marco Rubio acknowledges in recent testimony, he was asked who would come next and he said, nobody knows. If we do have a regime change scenario, either because of U.S. military action,

or just because of some kind of, you know, we wake up one day and, you know, it's like Syria, people are on a plane to Moscow. What is your sense of what comes next? I'm sure you get this question all the time, but like who are the players that we should at least be considering as

“viable alternatives to the spring leader? Well, I think we should first make it clear that there is no”

viable, organized alternative outside of Iran. As much as there might be publicity around potential

alternatives, the reality is that nobody has infrastructure on the ground in order to be able

to hold the country together if there is some sort of a political vacuum at the pinnacle of power. That leaves us with options inside Iran. Inside Iran, you have, as a friend of mine says, a lot of Nelson Mandela's, but no ANC, no organized opposition inside the country who can take over. So people like Nobel Laureate Nargesma Ahmadi, former politicians, most of our targets, so there's been in prison for 11 years, even former Prime Minister Musavi, the leader of the

Green Movement, who's been under house arrest now for 15 years. All of these people have come out very courageously, have said that time is up for the Islamic Republic and this regime has to go.

Again, the problem is that they don't have any organization on the ground to be able to fulfill

“that objective. So you're left with either of these three scenarios, I think. One is some sort”

of regime transformation, similar to what happened in Venezuela, meaning that some parts of the structure decide that for their own survival, it is necessary to push aside the supreme leader, put a pillow to his face, ask him to resign or go teach at the seminary and go on or whatever other ideas that they can come up with. And then you would have a version of the Islamic Republic, which is fundamentally different than what we have today. But it would be the same crowd more or less

it would be in charge. The other scenario is a scenario in which you would have basically a coup. So this is the first option was more of a soft transition and transformation. The second is a hard transformation. And some people inside Iran are openly asking for some sort of Iranian bonapart, a strong man who comes and takes over. There's a lot of speculation about the character

of Muhammad Bakr Pahlibov, the speaker of Parliament, former commander of Revolutionary Guard

Navy. And he's been in government for a long time and has very good ties with Revolutionary Guards and it's a very ambitious man, surrounded for presidents several times. So there are options like him or others that are being considered or discussed. And then the final scenario, which is a far-fetch scenario because this is a regime that is not just deeply entrenched but also deeply benched by that. I mean, when in the 12th day war Israel took out 30 top Iranian generals,

they were quickly replaced within hours. And Iran started punching back. So in a scenario of the US dismantling the Iranian state completely, which requires not just a few hours or surgical

that you will have civil strike. You will have chaos. Because, as I said, there is no one

who can hold the country together. And there is a lot of resentment within the Iranian society, not just against the regime, but also against, there's a lot of infighting among different political groups, minorities, the Kurds, the values cheese, the Arabs, they've been mistreated then every other segment of the Iranian society. And Iran has the same fault lines that have resulted in civil war in Syria and Lebanon and Iraq in Yemen and so on. So it will be one of these

three scenarios I believe. And none of them I would argue are necessarily better for the US or

for the Iranian people. Yeah, and that leads to kind of the last thing I wanted to ask you

“which is about the diaspora. You know, I think it's important both because it's a large”

and influential diaspora. Also, if people who are not close to Iran marchers or just kind of consuming things online, what they're mainly seeing is the diaspora, right? Because there's been an internet block out in Iran. And you know, Reza Palavi, this son of the Shah, it's kind of not suddenly put himself forward as a potential kind of guardian of some transition. He's also kind of appeared with Benjamin Netanyahu, kind of unsettling embracing the US and these really government and

encouraging them to militarily conduct regime change. And look, I should say, I have a lot of friends

in the diaspora who have sincere interests, obviously, and seeing a better future for the Iranian people being able to return to places that they either themselves left or their parents left. But I want to ask you, what is the gap between people inside Iran and the diaspora? Is this is it challenged that the diaspora is just kind of not organized enough to, you know, help be a part of a transition is a challenge that they're kind of out of touch with what's actually happening

in the country. You know, in Libya, we worked with the diaspora transitional council that just had no ability to manage the transition that's part of how Libya fell apart and I put that on us in the Obama administration. But what is the role of the diaspora here? And how would you

“describe kind of the difference between, say, a Reza Palavi movement versus what is feasible in Iran?”

You touch on a little bit, but I think it's worth unpacking. So, I say this as a member of the diaspora. It is actually a sad place that the diaspora is in right now. I do believe that there is a lot of sincerity and a sense of nationalism that drives what the diaspora does. I mean, when you see scenes of literally tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands showing up in protests in European or US cities and support of the Iranian people, that's quite

something. And I do believe that they've done a lot in trying to grab the world's attention on what's happening and shed light on the atrocities that this regime has committed. Especially this time around Benit, it is fundamentally different. You know, the speed and ferocity with which the regime brought down its higher and fist is really without precedent. We can discuss why, but again, part of the reason you see the Iran case, grabbing much more international attention than in some other countries.

“And the world where a lot of bad things happen there as well, I think is thanks to the diaspora.”

Having said this, you know, it's for a lot of them, it's 46, 47 years in exile and they have not managed to create a broad umbrella. They have not managed to create a realistic formula agenda that would be able to rally everyone around the same cause. And a lot of them are as intolerant as you would expect the Islamic Republic to be. You know, I think one of the reasons that Ayatullah Khomeini in 1978, 1979 succeeded in leading the revolution from the exile is that his formula was that you're an ally

if you agree with us only a 10%. The current diaspora's mood is, and I will definitely be harassed in attack for saying those. But their mood is if you agree with us at 90%, but you disagree just a 10% Uran enemy. And this is, I think, the reason that they haven't managed to come across as a serious alternative. Now, Rezo Palavini himself, I think he's it's undeniable that his stock

There's a sense of nostalgia about the prosperity, economic prosperity and social freedom that defined his father's era. And a lot of the younger generation in Iran and abroad don't

“remember the authoritarian tendencies that he had which and also resulted in his downfall.”

But the key point is, if you look at what he did, he called for mass mobilization on January 8.

And I do believe that a lot of people came to the streets because they invited them to the streets. He had no plan for the day after. He had no agenda on how to protect these people unarmed protesters who had come to the streets because he had called them out. And when the massacre happened, he had this interview on Fox News, where he said, you know, this is a war and there is always collateral damage in a war,

which I think is highly irresponsible. He's hope was that Israel or the US would bomb Iran. But you know, returning to Iran on the back of US fighter jets is not really a formula for building a better future for Iran. And his followers want him to re-establish an absolute monarchy. I mean, he says he wants to be a transitional leader, but his followers want him to basically just like his grandfather and his father to be an absolute monarchy. And that alienates a lot of people.

But here's the bottom line. At the end of the day, we just simply do not know how much support

he has put in Iran. I don't think it's in any way close to majority, but I don't have the data

“and nobody else does. And the only way that someone like him can present a viable alternative”

is to reach out to forces inside the country and to build a coalition with them. And he has simply not done that. So this is why I think overall the diaspora would all the well intentions that they have, unfortunately, have not been able to move the needle. Yeah. It's just an incredibly difficult situation. Like you, I admire the solidarity. It's been shown the attention that's been drawn, but I think there's kind of a good lesson there

and the need to really construct that viable alternative both inside and outside of Iran. That's the only pathway to something different and better, whether it's soon or whether it's after the spring-litre dies or whenever it is. We'll look, Ali, people should watch you follow your work at Christ's group. You're prolific there. You're on social media. So people should follow you there.

Thanks so much for joining us to come on Pack All This. Always a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Thanks going to Ali Vise for joining the show, and talk to you guys next week. Potitive world is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Elona Minkowski. Our producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our associate producer is Anisha Bondergee. We get production support from Saul Rubin. Our executive producers are me Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is engineered mixed and edited by Jordan Canter.

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