Rational Security: The “(Deep State) Friends We Make Along the Way” Edition

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What's going on here exactly? Yeah, so there's this commentator, I don't know if you've heard of her named Laurel Dumer, and so she has taken a visit to keep, to go check in on the state of the war, and she's really saying some interesting, incisive things.

“And I really think that, you know, we all should be tuning in to our lady and keep at this moment.”

You know, I have to say, like, obviously, I have some profound discrements with Ms. Limer, but you got somebody who's willing to grow, that's part of the business. And a lot of people aren't willing to acknowledge that I was wrong and really wrong. And she came right outside at the other day. It's a refreshing, a little bit of willingness to reconsider one's views that could find more out our application, perhaps both with Ms. Limer and for people more broadly.

First, the Marjorie Taylor Green, now Laurel Limer, I really don't know what to do with myself.

Well, you know, maybe it's just, you know, the real treasure is the deep state friends we make along the way. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Rational Security. The podcast for being by you to join members of the law fair team as we try to make sense of the week's big national security news stories, whether they are in our lanes or not. I and your host Scott R. Anderson back for another week with a talented panel of my colleagues

to try and make sense of some of these big announcements and big speeches we have been getting over this past week. Joining me this week is multiple attendee. She is probably who I've done. I've only done this to two people, other than Benjamin Wittis, to force them to be in back to back episodes. And I have now done it to our latest public service fellow Julia Curley, who's back with us again on Rational Security. Julia, thank you for joining us in back to back episodes.

Greatly appreciate it. I know it is a burden, but we're thrilled to have you back on and given your unique insights. And to at least one of our stories that we're talking about this week, it would have been my practice not to have you back. So we really appreciate you making the time.

Thanks, Scott. God, it's been like crazy week. Like law fair is basically gone 24/7 ops following

the President's speech on last Thursday. It really had to be like that. It's kind of all the time. It was very stressful at the time, but thankfully we've kind of sanitized things a little bit made a little more manageable, but you know, occasionally we have to dip back into our old ways. And joining us as well is the other person to whom I have done this double back-to-back in recent memory, but not this time because she was not on last week is law fair seen your editor

Molly Roberts, also back on the podcast joining us once again. Molly, thank you for coming on.

“Yeah, happy to be here. I think I got at least a one week break this time.”

There we go. Exactly. Exactly. I try and give everyone a little bit of a breather except for Ben Duomo, nothing. So that's great. But happy to have you back on the podcast joining us. And joining us again is recurring guest, another law fair seen your editor, Eric Columbus. Eric, thank you for joining back on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Scott. Well, let us get into our three topics. We've a lot to talk about and they're pretty juicy

topics for this week. Topic one, the Manchurian candidates. In a prime time addressed to the nation last Thursday, President Trump declassified a trove of intelligence documents that he claimed prove America's elections are dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference, specifically in this case by China and to some extent by Venezuela. And he also revived his longstanding evidence-free assertions that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

The order of the Just Department to prosecute those he claimed were involved, but intelligence officials passed in present as well as documents themselves draw a sharp line between foreign influence and actual interference with the vote. And none of it clearly materially supports the sorts of claims that any votes were changed or the outcomes of the elections were affected. That President Trump seems to be leaning on. What is actually in the

documents that President Trump has declassified? What does speech tell us about his intense for the midterm elections in the 2020-28 elections beyond? Topic two, leak and he shall find the Trump administration has dramatically escalated his campaign against leakers, culminating in grand jury to be in a served, including by federal agents at their homes, to several prominent New York Times journalists over their reporting on security concerns relating

“to the new Katari gifted Air Force One that has been a signature item, I think it's fair to say,”

of the Second Trump administration. The Pentagon ingest Department to stood up

a joint task force to identify and prosecute leakers and New York Times is fighting the Venus in court, calling them an attempt to intimidate the press and that treads on first amendment.

leaked instead the reporters are simply witnesses how much legal jeopardy to the reporters actually

face and the media more broadly, and is this a genuine national security effort or an assault on press freedom? Topic three, advise and dissent. Two of the administration's most consequential nominees, Jay Clayton, who has been nominated as Director of National Intelligence and Todd Blanche, who has been nominated for as Attorney General, sat for their Senate confirmation hearings last week, Clayton, who is currently the illustrating for the Southern District of New York,

repeatedly declined to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election while Blanche was grilled over the now, dead anti-weaponization fund, the F.T. files, and the New York Times impedance I mentioned just a minute ago, both face fairly narrow paths to confirmation complicated further by the sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham. What did we learn from the hearings and what are the prospects for each nominee's confirmation? So for our first topic, Julie, I want to turn to you

because you have a very unique perspective as a true veteran of the intelligence community. We all in the broader public got a weird window, maybe, to some of the intelligence communities work,

but as always I think a lens, which I say in the context of sometimes you have lenses that

“shape how we perceive and change how we perceive things, that's what President Trump seemed to be”

doing this past third day. We saw this prominent prime time speech that was clearly teed up to be a major event in draw public attention, with I think it's fair to say mixed success of not only a number of major networks opted not to cover the remarks, so that also happened to President Biden when he made a not entirely unrelated speech at some point in the first half of his administration. You saw him bring forward a number of these

what it looked like, and many cases do appear to be intelligence community products of different stripes, asserting different sorts of conclusions about foreign involvement, foreign interference, or influence, and it's impact on our elections. But all of them are quite the same. It's a weird hedge podge, a little bit of a patchwork quilt of different products, different conclusions, that President Trump then provided his own gloss on tying it all back to his longstanding claim,

false one, by I'll be able to be available to us that he did not, in fact, lose the 2020 election. So talks with a little bit about what came out on Thursday from the I.C. What is it that we see

“that we have reason to believe? What are the products that may not be what they seem to be?”

Walk us through that a little bit, because you and our other colleagues, including the folks on the podcast, wrote a phenomenal useful piece for law fair, fighting all of this, and I think it's a great place to start talking about what the actual evidence is underlying the speech. Yeah, thanks, Scott. So I think there's two big things that I want to focus on, that the President

did in his speech. First was the conflation of influence, Ops versus direct interference

in the election, and he definitely said the latter occurred, but strangely 99% of the documents that were released actually say the former undercutting the President's case. So to be clear about it, the 2020 election assessment said that China did not deploy interference efforts, and considered, but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the election, and even the dissent, which was published alongside the mainline assessment, said that

there's no information suggesting that China attempted to interfere with the election processes, and nothing that was released on Thursday actually contradicts that with one exception, which we can get to in a second. This deliberate mischaracterization of what is in a declassified set of documents, is following on the heels of several other administration efforts to use the same playbook. So we saw this at the beginning of the administration with DCIA Radcliffe over the 2016

assessment, rescinding it, giving some sort of a statement that the President was right all along, but then when you read the reissued report, it still stands by its main conclusions, and then we saw DNI Gabbard do this repeatedly with the so-called Fauci files with Havana syndrome and biolabs, she'll put out reports when if you just took the time to read the documents, you would find that they don't say what she said, they said, and the President did exactly the same

thing this last week. So you mentioned an exception, let's talk about that exception, but in a little deeper into that, because there's one document I think that stood out as in some ways, seeming to lean more forward in back and put the President's said, and then also looks different from the others, looks different frankly than a lot of other sort of icy products that other people who've worked in government, may have encountered a deal with declassified documents.

Talk to us a little bit about that and your sense of that document. Yeah, that's right, and prepare

“yourselves to nerd out on Directorate of Analysis, Manusha here, but it's I think it's important.”

So what you're talking about is the tale of two documents that were purpose built for this announcement, whereas all the rest of the reporting, we're individual files, or emails declassified,

of Analysis with all the bells and whistles, with the text box, with confidence, estimate of

“language, it goes through what is there and what's not there and at the bottom of it is the”

office that produced it, the Directorate of Analysis, and the date in which it was produced. The contrast between that and the PRC assessment is the whole story. So you look at the PRC equivalent of that document, and it is only information that justified the president's allegations of Chinese interference in US elections. So talks about this plan, beginning in mid-2018, to ensure that the president was not reelected. There's strangely no redacted language in any

of it, seemingly, just retyped by whoever was tasked to produce it, and it doesn't contain any of the normal features that one would see in CIA analysis, and the most strange of all to me is the redaction of the office that produced it and the date in which it was produced. Now, a redaction is a choice, and it sends a message that this information is somehow too sensitive to share with the public, but the rest of the raw reporting was not, and so

I looked at that as a deliberate effort to obscure the background of who and how and when this piece of information was created, and it wouldn't be nefarious except for the fact that it was being used to directly support the president's attack on the integrity of US elections.

I will say that in 20 years of being a CIA analyst, I have never seen anything of its kind.

Certainly, the intelligence community, CIA, should not be in the business, furnishing the White House with evidence that it can use in public to message the American people delegitimizing US elections. It's hard for me to find it a more egregious abuse of the intelligence community than that, and this is certainly a warning sign if this is done again of what could happen this November. So, I want to take that broader arc and turn to you on that, Molly,

because you have spent a lot of time tying together different threads of the grain conspiracy, which intersects with 2020 election allegations, and all the different moving pieces of which this is clearly a part of a broader whole. That is, in part intended to, maybe there's being two not generous, but a switch that you go to the president by providing some sort of official gloss and some sort of parent institutional support for his longstanding assertions that he did not lose the 2020 election.

And then also to tee up potentially other actions, whether it's the safe American, cat act, this legislation or something that looks like it that he's been pushing hard through Congress, but does not appear to have any legs, at least in the false form. The president wants to see it, but that they've been trying to push through, which would install a variety of measures that would be intended to restrict things like alleged non-citizen voting, things like that,

but also have the impact of potentially making it just harder for lots of people to vote. And potentially everyone's worried about this being a narrative to justify broader actions, whether it is one of these emergency declarations that we've seen deras of circulated by people proximate to the president or proximate to the president's movement, although we haven't seen any clearly manifest as of yet. So where do you think this fits into this? What is the idea behind this

“speech? And how successful was it at it? I mean, I think people, maybe this is a case of like”

not living up to the hype, but I think on Tuesday last week, I was expecting something of a particular scale, scope and significance, and what actually happened Thursday was a lot more muted. Still highly deeply problematic. I don't want to undersell that, but it was in quite like the huge declaration either true or untrue that the president seemed to be teeing up and that frankly a lot of the rumors about what he was talking about is going to tee up. Is that a sign that this failed?

Is that a sign that this is just a first kind of drop in the bucket? Where does this fit in this

broader art? Yeah, you were disappointed. The right wing media was disappointed. You see, Vannev was very upset about the degree to which this wasn't kind of enough and the life. I'm sick of Bill Pulti restraining our president and keeping him within his legal checks. A director of national intelligence, what I'm trying to say, we need to get some of one of the presidents guys in there. Well, we'll talk about the confirmations later, right? And this is part of

the reason Steve Vannev so upset because he was hoping all of these, we don't have Jay Clayton and yet we have our guy Bill Pulti and he's going to get this done and it doesn't really look like

“you got all that much done. So I guess a few things. One is, what are they doing? Are ready with this now?”

And if you listen to the president's speech at one point he says, "Oh, we're going to work with

ineligible voters on their voter roles." Nonsense, this is on their voter roles. We're going to

flag that they have them and I'm directing the Department of Homeland Security to direct them to take them off the voter roles. I'm pretty sure he legally cannot direct the HS to do that and the HS cannot direct the states. But he says he's going to do that and of course the next day, Mark Wayne Mullin gave a press conference where he said that too that he was going to direct the states to do that and he said that officials who don't act on it can face fines,

penalties and even prison time. And it seemed like he might have gotten out a little bit over his excuse on that given that he can't put them in prison. But on the other hand, letters have already been sent by Hermit Dylan, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, two states saying the

same thing that they're in legal jeopardy. Again, it's really not clear what that legal jeopardy

would look like. They're not able to cite what statute the states would be violating. They weren't of eating and abetting non-citizen voting, but they don't identify the underlying crime. Then they also talk about conspiracy against rights, which is funny because you mentioned

“the grant conspiracy and that's what they're looking to do there too. So there are concrete”

threats here. It's not just I'm mad about foreign interference and here's all these non-examples of foreign interference. So it's a little more insidious than just rhetoric, I would say, and, you know, then just saying I want to say that past. So there's that. But then I think that really the more important thing is that this is laying groundwork for whatever action they may or may not choose to take in the wake of the midterms. And that really is going to depend

in part on how the midterms go. And it also might just depend on the appetite that they have at the time. And they really might not know yet what they're going to do or not do. But I think focusing on foreign interference is alarming because it is kind of the most aggressive justification you can make for the most aggressive actions, whether those are seizing machines or ballots or whether they're having some sort of federal military presence on the streets around election day.

“And I'm not saying any of that's going to happen. But if you see this now, I think it makes it”

easier. You've primed the public for deploying it later. Yeah, although I'm not sure how many of these allegations here, military on the street would actually help, exactly. Seizing voting machines one thing. But it is kind of like, it is one of these things where it is this complete

pastiche that never fully links together and that includes the whole realm of policy remedies

that we hear circulating around the story. Which, to me, a lot of is because if it's vibrant, echo chamber, media that feeds into this, that has direct line to the administration. Sometimes we end up festin policy that's come forward with these ideas, that a lot of them are pipe dreams. Because there's a variety of practical reasons, there's legal reasons, and frankly, big political reasons why it would not be a wise thing the president did do. And this

president doesn't listen to everyone, but even people around the president who he does listen to,

“I think have some sensitivity to some of that. There are things that's probably the president”

is fully willing to do. Where the line is, that's like the big question at this point and how far that goes on that. We did get a sign of what the president may not be willing to do. And Eric, I want to come to you on this. The big perpetrator and all of us have still out there in what the president claims to have revealed on Thursday is China. But we saw remarks, I think yesterday the day before yesterday, when asked by the media about whether President Trump intended to take

you know, retributive action or punishment against China for its actions, he's equivocating, saying essentially, it's not the same China as it was in 2020. By the way, yes it is. That is it really has not changed that much. You can say that about maybe Venezuela, the Maduro regime, although frankly, even that's not entirely that different. It's just a different person at the top of it. But you know, it's hard to actually make that case about China. But we know this administration

has on its variety of fronts for the last, you know, six months to a year, really played friendly with China. Mostly frankly, because it seemed to be under CNN how the China has real leverage over the AI supply chain and a couple other real pressure points. And that even though they've pressured them on tariffs. And a few other fronts, they've worked to find strike a conciliatory tone, find, come ground and kind of deescalate on a variety of fronts.

So I guess what does that tell us about the limits about where the president can go with this, whether foreignly in terms of foreign policy, whether in terms of domestic policy, and, you know, how committed the president is maybe to doing and pursuing the sign of line of thought. These inconsistencies, when the president says, if the president were to say, we have to mount people to the streets to take care of this problem. But, you know, the foreign actors really,

consequences. And while the president may not care, you know, the people you do ultimately have to

persuade about this, do care about this. Is this the less of a problem that I'm making it out to be, or is this inconsistency, does kind of undermine the president's case for doing what it, it seems like he might want to do at least some days? Yeah, I noticed that too, and I would say that it's kind of part for the course and this administration that they are kind of consistent in their lack of consistency. And as you noted yesterday Trump said, you know, 2020 was put a long time ago.

“I think China is different now. He also said, look, we do things to them too. So he was kind of going”

out of his way to, you know, not to all those Chinese elections, where all those Chinese elections that we've interfered in, and which someone reminiscent of the way, which when I think during the

2016 campaign, and maybe also his early years as president, he would go out of his way when people

brought up Putin killing journalists and stuff like that. He would say, oh, you think our country's so innocent, which is, if perhaps even more bizarre in this context, when he is being asked his questions only because he, the White House, had just accused China of, of, of doing bad things, and he's kind of giving a rebuttal in some sense to his own speech. And then just today, I think Rubio is doing the same thing. He was asked, was there an agreement on election interference when

you were talking with the Chinese Foreign Minister? And Rubio said, oh, we didn't discuss that topic.

“So it suggests that a lot of this is to, and I think Scott, you, you said some words about,”

I don't recall your exact phrase, something about massaging the ego of the president. The prime goal of anyone who works for Donald Trump is to support his lies about the 2020 election. And if you're, you're doing that and probably up the delusion that he won in 2020, then you're doing your job. And I think he cares a lot more about winning in 2020 than he does about winning in 2026. It's not all clear to me that his heart is in disrupting the elections.

And a benefit, you know, side benefit of all this stuff, is that he provides some of ready-made excuse if the party loses in in 2020-26. I mean, he has, in some cases, said, oh, you know, incumbents usually lose midterms, blah, blah, blah, so he's kind of prespinning it, but icing on the cake, if he can say that it's also because of those damn Chinese people interfering.

“Yeah, it's really kind of remarkable. And I think that's a two-bladed possible justification”

motivation. Here is, the president has always kind of laid the foundation for these alternative

explanations. Going back, frankly, to 2016 campaign about why I always may not come through and I'm actually going to win, but it may not actually come out to that sort of outcome. That election, which we have good reason to believe, you know, if you're reading a regime change or any of the other books on this right now, the president genuinely thought he was going to lose, but still had spun the narrow about why he was really actually going to come out on top of it, even if the actual results

didn't spin that way. And this definitely fits into that as well. So, Julie, let me, let me come back to you on another aspect of this. So, we've talked about including you, I mean, this week last week on this podcast, about the dangers of Bill Poltiet, ODNI. This is obviously like a damaging and problematic set of disclosures, particularly in terms of the public perception. And frankly, I think, you know, confidence in the United States government, particularly among people

who do these things sort of critically. Like, how much seriously can we take anything that comes out of this administration now if there is this intent to use legitimate and illegitimate intelligence products or things adjacent to them for these sorts of narratives. But fundamentally, it's also not what we thought Bill Poltiet was going to pull to the floor. We hear of media reports that at some point, there was an intent to name certain people that were allegedly involved in withholding

information from the Trump administration or from other, not relevant parties that didn't appear to happen. Their media reports that Bill Poltiet was too, too, unrelated to do so. And was worried about potential consequences from writing fronts for doing so is not clear whether it's legal or reputational or where exactly that comes from. But we're worried about something too scared to do it. There may have been some common human decency mixed in there at some point who knows when likes to

hope. There is also, you know, the question of, we were really worried about him coming forward in disclosing and declassifying a bunch of really damaging information about individuals. The idea that, you know, perhaps the emails that XYZ potential Democratic candidate in 2028 was scooped up in some sort of intelligence coverage could be disclosed, selectively in a way that shapes perceptions, not unlike the Hillary Clinton emails may have done in 2016.

this to be the end of the road for the Poltiet kind of moment at Odinite, particularly because it

does, as we'll talk about our third topic, J. Clayton has had his hearing or expecting a committee vote

“on his nomination next week. We don't know how it's going to come out, but I think there's”

reasonably good odds, not least because it appears to be tied to Section 702, which people want to move forward. So, you know, you're not going to have Bill Poltiet in there. J. Clayton is still, you know, a loyalist. He'll let me work for the president, but also somebody who has at least some more conventional qualifications and things like that. So, you know, is this a sign that maybe the worst possibilities of what a having a, you know, true loyalist at Odinite could result,

there's still enough constraints and limitations to keep those in check or is just a sign that we haven't gotten there yet. There's still more to come down the road either on this or in other files. Well, Scott, I'm very concerned. Even if we don't have Bill Poltiet to kick around very much anymore soon, we still have the Poltiet method or the Gabbard method, which is to selectively declassify information that fits what the president wants to hear, and it's just taking

a second on this point about what happened. So, raw reporting in the intelligence business,

the United States collects an incredible amount of information from around the world, which I'm not

obviously going to get into here, but there's a joke around the intelligence community that you can effectively justify anything if you want, because there's going to be a report that says that, but we have created an entire discipline, a profession, which I did for 20 years that's called analysis, that is supposed to take that raw reporting, put it in context, examine the sourcing, see what is credible, what has happened before, and provide the best advice or the best context

for senior policymakers. And what we saw in this case was the elevation of fringe reporting that is contradicted by the main line assessment, and the firing of the very individuals and institutions that would have provided that credible check on the raw reporting. So, we had the purge of the senior officers looking at Russia and China at the NIC, just a couple of a few weeks ago, and that's building on top of the dismantling of the Formal Line Influence Center at the ODI and the FBI's foreign

Influence Task Force. So, I guess you don't need professionals when you hand investigations over to your political grownies and expect them to deliver what you want to hear. The problem with all of this is beyond just that, and we've talked about, there's been real institutional damage dealt to the CIA and other institutions by this episode. If I were an analyst still there, if I had had any involvement in the election influence assessments in 2020, I've now been put on

notice that my career and livelihood could be ended by this investigation that supposedly has been launched. If I had concurred with the majority position that the IC took six years ago in an assessment, that will have an effect on the willingness of officers to continue serving or provide their best analysis to the president. So, you're going to see the cost paid for this episode for probably

years in warning is never delivered, options never presented, and then ultimately decisions

“made in the dark by uninform policy makers. Well, I think that is a good point to wrap up this”

conversation on for now. But your mention of sourcing brings us to another topic, our second topic, and that is some interesting efforts to uncover the sourcing of a number of prominent New York times. Journalists New York Times has had a series of pieces about the Guitari gifted Air Force one that President Trump has very proudly received that is purported to be kind of the new high-end presidential plane. As of, I think last week, subsequent to these spinners were about

to discuss being issued, if I recall correctly, they published a story indicating, in fact, their force one is going to be put on the shelf and put forward for some different modifications and security procedures. So, it wouldn't actually be in service for the next foreseeable future, but certainly will be at some point. And this sourcing, the story appears to trigger a real point of concern in the executive branch, because we soon got reports that a

number of subpoenas were served on a number of New York Times journalists. In one case, federal agents

“not only serve them on their homes, and one case may have approached one of their mothers. I think”

was one of the stories I read about this. I can't recall that it's for a subpoena to her or a subpoena to the journalists. But we're going to say degree of kind of directed, clear, and transparent, and palpable, and vascular activity aimed at these journalists. That is a lot of questions, because it's the sort of thing that raises alarm bells for many journalists who work in the national security space who do receive different types of leaks and

sensitive information, and where there's a kind of dense network of norms that usually governs

degree of self-restraint from the executive branch about how they approach it, particularly from a criminal matter. And that appears a part a little bit here. I want to come to you on the story.

I guess talk to us first about what we know about these subpoenas, who's gotten them what they're

aiming after, what the motivation is, and how it's been justified by the administration. Now, after a few days, particularly as we've gotten through both the Clayton and the Blanch testimonies part of their confirmation hearings, some justification for what the administration is trying to do. Talk to us about that, and why that's raising some alarm bells among the media. Yeah, so these subpoenas were hand-delivered to three New York Times reporters

“at their homes on July 10th, I believe. And this was after they reported on, as you mentioned,”

the Cotari donated Air Force One, and the sort of kerfuffle involving its weaker security, and the president had flown over there on it, and then hadn't flown, I guess. To Britain on it, in the meantime, anyway, everybody was wondering why they figured out why it was because it had weaker security. It was embarrassing for the administration, because they'd

gotten this $400 million bribe plane, and didn't even, didn't do what they needed it to do.

Well, that's good. It was a gift. Sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. They used gift authorities to receive it. I am almost positive, so technically it's a gift. All right, it's not a bribe plane, a gift plane, but a gift plane that many felt was improper to accept bad optics. Okay, optics get even worse when it doesn't have the proper security measures needed to be missile resistant. And of course, now it's going to

cost a huge amount more money to update it to that standard. And then we had to fly on the old unsatisfactory Air Force One back. So it was very embarrassing when the New York Times reported on all of this and why that had happened. And then these subpoenas show up at their homes. And then there's a second wave of subpoenas that comes after that. And those are two carriers

“to phone carriers for the reporters and their relatives. So two spouses, one mother, I think.”

So that's where the family members come in. So what were the subpoenas looking for? Well, the initial round, you know, said it's testimony, it's related to the reporting on the Catari donated Air Force One. The phone records to Pina's though reached back to the beginning of the year to January 1st and that raised alarm bells among the reporters and press advocates because the thinking there was, well, they're not just looking for information about this

particular leak. They're looking for information generally, about leaking. And so that's kind of what brought us to the court where the Times moved in the Southern District of New York, which is where the subpoenas came from, which is Jay Clayton's district, to coash them. And the judge there, Judge Aaron Subramanian, froze the enforcement of the subpoenas until

“hearing. I think the hearing is still scheduled till tomorrow, but I'm not sure whether it's going”

to happen because of what I'll tell you next, which is that after some back and forth, the department of justice wrote a letter to the court saying that actually it is going to hold the subpoenas in a band, while it takes additional investigative steps that may bear on the court's decision of whether to coash the subpoenas. And all it's going to do is ask for records preservation in the meantime. And that looked a little sketchy too, because basically what the department of

justice was saying and what came through in these hearings, too, was we did what our internal guidance

requires that we do, which is we exhausted other options, and we only did this when it was essential.

What they're saying in this letter seems to be, actually, we're going to take additional investigative steps, perhaps we didn't exhaust all options. And that was when the New York Times's argument was, they violated their internal guidance and just generally this is in bad faith, because the protections for journalists are pretty minimal here, for the most part, they have to turn this over. And if they don't, which often they haven't, they could be held in contempt,

they could be jailed, which has happened in the past. But if the subpoenas are proven to be in bad faith, then they have a lot more to stand on legally. Do your current managed services really help run your operations, or are they just running in circles? Running isn't enough anymore. With PWC's managed services, your operations don't just run, they evolve continuously, powered by AI embedded directly into your workflows.

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lead stronger. Yeah, I want to come to you, Julia, for a little bit of the National Security apparatus perspective

“on this and the kind of network of authorities. I think we have, at law fair, kind of different”

communities that sometimes arrive at a little bit of logger heads of this. A lot of journalists who

do National Security reporting really think it's essential for the public to have a responsible

understanding of our National Policy and National Security Policy as a country, there needs to be the ability to publish sensitive and sometimes classified information. Otherwise, it would be too hard if you had two firm aligned, if you interpreted the first amendment too narrowly to completely exclude that, then too many journalists would just not be able to talk about what is some of our most important National Security policies. On the flip side of

that, I think many people in the National Security community and in government would say, well, hold on here, because there's a lot of genuinely sensitive information that we talk about regularly, that if it gets outside, really is going to cause a lot of legitimate problems. And yes,

maybe it's newsworthy, but the relative public interest in the newsworthiness doesn't necessarily

“outweigh the public interest in the better US policy and allows us to advance. I think the biggest”

kind of flashpoint of this in my mind remains WikiLeaks where we saw this huge drop of, you know, often just secret level, not even the highest, most classified level until the information, but broad, broad swaths of intelligence-vation dropped without any sort of effort to withhold names, vet it, check with the government about the responsibility and the potential consequence of disclosing it, steps that many mainstream media organizations do pursue and

dropped it. Now I was in government at the time, I was involved with a little bit, and I will say without getting any more details. I think there were genuine national security policy, costs from that, there were substantial, and genuine human costs that came from that, that were of substantial. The cost of benefits, it's a bigger scale that more of a conversation I can get into, but I do think there's a real security concern on the side of this. So what is your perspective?

And what is the kind of intelligence professionals perspective on the people who live in the skiffs? How do they think about the role of national security journalists? And how do you navigate this relationship? Is there a bright line rule, or does it really rely upon, you know,

“to some extent, some good faith among the two different sides?”

Nice softball questions, guys. It's all for us, Julia. You don't mind. Yeah, well, you put, you put me on the spot. The other day someone referred to me as a journalist, which nearly gave me a heart attack. It's weird. I agree. What happens to me, too? It's weird. Having spent 20 years thinking of journalists as spies, or worse than spies, at least spies worked for a foreign government. I'm having to grapple with some of my

own words on this subject here. I think that there's room for discretion here in prosecutions, I think, and it's clear that the way this was conducted is a lot of the part of the story where it's trying to send a very chilling message to people who are leaking information, especially information that is of a particular kind of denigration of the administration. I think that's pretty obvious what the intention is. From an intelligence officer's perspective, yes,

obviously leaking classified information is a terrible setback for national security. The inability of the United States to keep this information secret makes it much less likely that individuals will share this information with us. The foreign governments will cooperate with us. In the case you mentioned with WikiLeaks, that was one of the most damaging mass releases of classified information in my lifetime. I would have a very high bar for seeing any of that

as being acceptable for the officials involved. I will say that the journalists are not bound by the same non-disclosure agreements that I have signed and putting the screws to them,

coursing them to reveal information seems like a pretty clear cut violation of the first amendment,

and I'm deferred to the lawyers in our list on that. And it sends a pretty chilling message to everyone involved about the lengths of which the administration will go to hunt down those that are leaking negative information about them. What do you make of the nature of this reaction? I mean, look, one of the parts of this case, that is weird, although it's so consistent with how this administration really approaches these things is that

this is the story that is decided to go nuclear over, right? It's about the president's plan. On the one hand, you know, look, the presidential security is a high-nash security priority. I think that's certainly true. If this were disclosing, genuine security concerns in a way that make the president vulnerable to attack, I think that would be a completely legitimate reason to say,

That doesn't appear to be at least from what we've seen that's come out in the reporting

media, in terms of withholding something. That's not what's actually being revealed here. Instead, it's much more about details about the handling and use of this plane at a very broad level. Nothing that would be clearly to me compromising. In other words, it's information that's

“in primarily politically damaging and embarrassing. How much it would even be classified?”

I'm not 100% sure. Probably some of it is because it is about presidential security. It's an offices that do that work as my suspicion, but would it be the sort of thing you would assume it would be classified otherwise? I'm not sure enough. A lot of cases it would be. That's my gut instinct. That's right, you was right, truly. How sensitive is the information that's out seem to be?

And if it really is, this is the bulk of what these journalists are getting,

is this a good test case for pushing the envelope in this sort of way? Yeah, I mean, it was very clear from the circumstances what happened here. It was because it had hit too close to home to the president's travel. Perhaps they're in addition to the mad scramble of the courtiers trying to do something to make the boss stop raging at the storm. Over this episode, they may have overreacted. They did overreact. And now they're needing to cover themselves

“with the paperwork. I think that there is always going to be a legitimate case to help”

otherwise obviously politicized actions by the administration. It is a problem that the president is surrounded by individuals who were talking to the press about his travel arrangements. That

should not be occurring. It's just been part of the broader situation with this administration

that individuals are feeling like they have to in order to get the word out about really abnormal behavior by the commander-in-chief. I wish that was not the case because I think there are real security concerns. Not in what was shared in this case, but just sort of the fact of the president's decisions regarding the planes and movements were being disclosed. Yeah, I mean, my understanding is cash fatale was at the White House all day. The David Sapena's

were issued and that Trump had asked him to look into this. I mean, that's just so irregular and so different from how a media leak investigation would go even if you as an administration have decided to be more aggressive about media leaks, there would be a proper way to do it in an improper one and this seems pretty clearly improper. You know, the other sort of buzzy news item on media leaks recently was when there was a search warrant executed at the home of the Washington

Post reporter Hannah Natenson and a search warrant that is a more aggressive step than the subpoenas in this case and a lot of what people said at the time was well, it should have been a subpoena and that's totally true. On the other hand, what that was related to had to do, my understanding is with Venezuela and also it had to do with, you know, they had identified someone who had leaked and then it seemed pretty clear that it was part of that investigation,

you know, they already had brought him to court that they were going to go and they were going to try to get information from Hannah Natenson that would bolster their case against the leaker and this just doesn't feel like that. This just feels like we went straight to the journalist immediately because we're mad that they embarrassed us. And the nature of serving the subpoena really does kind of enter in here. Like when you have investigators approaching journalists at their homes,

you don't have to do that to serve subpoenas and I don't know with the normal practices that B.I. actually that's something we should ask our colleague Mike Weinberg. I'd be a little surprised if that's in the ordinary case because it is so transparently intimidating, right? And there are lots of other contexts where you get these subpoenas and they're communicated through, you know, a variety of methods. You don't necessarily have agents showing up at family homes or with other

family members or at a minimum they can go the office. Not in a way that, you know, exposes people's children's spouses and other people to these sorts of forces of armed individuals at their house. Even though most of B.I.G.s as we know are cuddling in front of me as Mike is. So, you know, it is, yeah, it's an interesting element here. And all this enters into the leaker path because

“that's why I want to come to you Eric as for your sins, the other lawyer on the chat right now.”

How do you think this plays out in the courts? This administration has a habit of leveraging legal tools aggressively at the front end in ways that hinder their long-term sustainability. So, you know, the LaTisha James prosecution, the James comedy prosecutions. Like these are all examples of cases where things the administration leaned forward on very early, rhetorically, communications from the present, all these other things really undermine the case,

at least could have undermined the case. I think there are other complications that kind of got in the way. If it had preceded as a word of procedure, at least there seems like a real risk there.

over a story about the present that's politically damaging? Something that with the limited now security nexus in a way that the present appears to have been directly involved in, at least there's reporting suggesting as enough does that actually weaken the ability to follow through on the implicit threats of the subpoena, which is that if you don't tell us we're going to

“hold you in contempt or is it not clear that that's actually going to enter into much in the equation?”

What's your sense on this? I'd say it's hard to know. I mean, I think if you're a judge,

there's always in the back of your mind, whether you know it's there or not,

a question of how righteous the government's action is, even as when you're applying legal precedent that doesn't necessarily take those things into account. And in this case, it seems to me if I have the timeline correct, that the times reporting was not really that earth shattering because what we already knew, I believe before the times had published its report, was that Trump had swapped planes before he traveled from, I think, Turkey

to Great Britain. And he put forth this completely implausible explanation for why he had done so. He said that he swapped planes because you ought to fly to England because the soldiers are the base there wanted to see the new Air Force one from Qatar that they had asked to see it,

“which is just patently absurd. And so I think by that point, people had a kind of a fair”

sense of what was going on and why you would not want to be flying on a certain plane within possibly within range of Iraqi missiles. And when the times then a day or two later,

I think it was the times posted story, it was basically confirming what people already knew.

So the national security argument, even though I had seen this fairly likely that classified information was disclosed the times, the national security argument is kind of hard to to create as being a serious issue there. And that's something that courts very well may take into account either expressly or perhaps in the back of their minds as they decide how to proceed here. Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert in this area of law at all. I have a counter, you know, on occasion

of our idea context. And like my recollection from my law clerk days really into DC Circle, I'm pretty sure the second circuit has similar, so the case is that there is something like a qualified privilege that journalists can benefit from. And so you end up with these multi-variate

tests that say, "Okay, well, what is the relative interest in protecting the source versus

disclosing the source and how does it come in?" And that's part of the reason why the government has has been picky about which cases it pursues and leverages these things on. Like most of the cases have really dealt with like more clear, national security damaging classified information because that's where you have the clearest case of government equities and the clearest allegations of criminal conduct on the part of the leaker. That's a harder case to make here.

So I have to think, fireworm, you know, Caspedel's lawyer or is a Justice Department's lawyer,

“which explains the lawyer, who I think authorize these subpoenas, you know, I'd have to say, yeah,”

I mean, we can issue these things, but are we actually going to make good on the threat to by the Mac? And frankly, if you were going out of during a variety of journalists, maybe that would be less of an issue, New York Times is the one journalists in my operation that's not going to sit down on. That's, I mean, they keep a very, very well-staffed, well-experience set of attorneys there who are more than willing to fight this out. I mean, they know who's on the other side of the

V from Sullivan and a variety of other case in the States. And they see it. They understand the precedent. I think I suspect view it as part of kind of their institutional legacy and responsibility to vindicate these sorts of things. You're not going to get away with them without a fight. So I do wonder, you know, this strikes me again as one of these things that like strategically doesn't really make sense from the White House. If you think they're acting in a strategic manner,

but maybe if you are trying to satiate the demands of a person who simply wants to see action and views things through a more short-term lens, that's only way it can really make sense to this. Otherwise, it's hard to really square with how even you would want to go about this from the government's perspective. But I could be wrong. Maybe they'll have more looking court than we will arrive at. Yeah, so there's a little bit of the pot calling the kettle

black on all of this when the president is in the press, darkly commenting on things we might be doing to China in public. You know, he wants shared classified information in the oval with Sergei Lavrov. They're inviting Benjamin Netanyahu into the sit room and they have frequently described covert activities in public in order to make them look good or burnish the administration sense that it's you know, high tea and going after the enemies with all the power of the United States.

looser in what they're willing to share if they're watching the boss do it on TV. Yeah, it's a it's a good point here. If nothing else, if you're the justice department, this is a case where you are really going to miss that presumption of regularity that they used to get in the courts, but don't don't regularly anymore if you start legating this because without that

“presumption in your favor, I feel like your case gets a lot harder to make. I think you're right”

and I think it also further erodes the presumption of regularity if it ends up that the judge

determined that these subpoenas were issued in bad faith. Oh, 100 percent, 100 percent.

So let us now turn to our third topic, which implicates some of the people involved in this exact decision. That is, of course, Jake Clayton currently the acting is turning for the Southern District of New York, I believe. And Todd Blanch, the current deputy attorney general nominated to be the attorney general. I guess he's acting attorney general now. Eric, I want to come to you on this. We had two pretty interesting hearings in regards to these confirmations last week.

Frankly, six months a year ago, I think we would have expected these confirmations to sail through, but it is a sign of to some extent the declining capital this administration has even with Republicans in Congress around certain issues to extent which is burned through it. Also, a sign of the political moment, the fact that in part because of the president's choice of candidates in Republican primaries around the country, you have a number of blame-deck

Republican senators that are able to be a little more yellow at this late date than they might have been willing to be if they were still a viable candidates and stand up on particular issues that they feel strongly about that are contrary to the administration. And then on top of that, a search of circumstances that was not foreseeable for the administration, you have the death of Lindsey Graham, which I mentioned in last week's episode, an important senator on a variety of

issues, but not least because of his very influential role in the judiciary committee. His persuasive ness is ability to shepherd candidates through something that people fully expected him to do for the administration. He played that role with a number of important nominees before the judiciary committee in recent years for this administration among other Catholic. I don't know if he's on the intelligence committee, I don't think he was, but it could be wrong about that. I should actually

look that up. So, Eric talked about what we learned from these hearings, what's interesting about

“them, and what the road ahead for these two candidates looks like. Sure Scott, that's why”

first kind of tedious up by talking about the somewhat different legal circumstances that they're in

a blanch and Clayton and how blanch is actually very unusually situated. As we've discussed, there is currently an acting director of national intelligence bill, Pulti. What Trump is basically saying to the Senate is, "Look, you confirmed Clayton or you're stuck with my henchmen, Pulti, who will do all sorts of bad things." And this is exactly the situation that we were in in 20, I don't remember precisely, but I think it was 2018 when, in the first term it ain't right,

when Trump named Richard Grinnell, Grinnell to be the acting DNI after he fired the original DNI and then who was the former senator from Indiana, Dan Coats, and then nominated Texas Congressman

John Radcliffe to be DNI and basically it was the same deal. Like, "Look, you either confirmed Radcliffe,

who just not have a tremendous amount of experience, or you're stuck with Grinnell, who is a little bit of a hothead and does whatever I want him to." And the timing of, oh, the Clayton hearing was that it was originally scheduled to be a week or two earlier and then Trump was like, "No, no, no, no, this is too soon." And he didn't say it in precisely those words, but it was pretty clear. He basically, he wanted the hearing to be taken down and Senator Cotton, who was the

chair, who was like, "I will were proceeding with the hearing unless you formally instruct him not

“to appear." I think Clayton had said, "I'm not appearing at one point." And then Trump did that.”

And the theory was that Trump wanted Bill Pulti to cook a little bit more and do whatever and affairs things he was going to do. Now, this is already strange because what does it mean that like, that Jay Clayton is kind of too pure to do these things? Maybe, who knows? But anyway, no way to run a railroad, a top blanch on the other hand already has the job. He already is the acting of training general. So, what does it mean for him to be confirmed? It may not mean a whole lot.

He can, basically, under the law, remain if his nomination stalls for some reason. He can probably remain under the law acting attorney general as long as Trump wants him there. And we

2023, the deputy became the acting labor secretary and was also nominated to fill the vacancy

“in a non-acting capacity. But the Republicans were against her as we're Joe Manchin and”

Chris and Cinema. So, instead of nominating someone else, the White House just kept her there. And she was Biden's quote, "forever nominee" in the words of Axios. And she remained until Biden's last day if we're almost two years. And Todd Blanch can probably do the same thing. Which raises the question of why are we here? Why are we going through this whole exercise? And it's done entirely clear. It might be, a few things kind of come to mind. One is that the administration may

believe rightly or wrongly that blanch has more power within DOJ and across the executive branch if he has like the presence full blessing and the Senate's impromotor and they may believe that he is in fact likely to be confirmed. It could be that blanch himself wants the glory of being a bona fide non-acting AG. You get your portrait outside the office of the attorney general, which doesn't happen for acting. There's also a possibility that there could be an appointment's

clause challenge to a lengthy blanch appointment. I wrote a piece on all these issues and I go through the appointments clause analysis there. But he's probably would prevail on it, but they think one

can never be sure with these things. Turning out to the hearing itself, none of, absolutely none of

this was discussed in the hearing in the blanch hearing, which focused a lot on basically hot by issues that have been in the press, such as Epstein, such as the 1.776 billion-dollar weaponization fund that blanch insists is not going forward. And blanch is a

“saviour guy, I would say, in Pam Bondi, he and he comes across as more reasonable and is I think”

therefore more effective with with Congress in that way, he didn't have a burn book next to him to resort to. It did not launch into any personal tax. I didn't have any senators, he even avoided mentioning that the Dow was at 50,000, but he didn't really give a whole lot. And he kept it in response to questions about the weaponization fund. He kept saying, "Look, it's dead." And we've put it and they say, "Well, why didn't you put it in writing?"

And he says, "Well, we've put it in writing in court filings." The next question is, "Well, why didn't you submit a declaration in those filings?" Like Judge Brinkema in the Eastern District of Virginia, asked you to do. And he said, "Well, there's a longstanding precedent that judges can't ask

“cabinet secretaries to do declarations." And then he says, "Well, why don't you rescind the order”

that you issued that established the fund?" And he says, "Well, I don't have to. There's no need to do that because the fund is dead." So he's giving answers to questions that, but not really giving Congress kind of what they want. He did say one point that he was willing to work with Congress to enact legislation to clarify that the weaponization fund would not go forward. That's kind of an easy thing to say when you're sitting in a hot seat. Like, "Yes, I'll work with

you on this issue," Senator, when you can obviously drag it out and not give the senators what

they eventually want, and basically more over time when the cameras are off. And it was a little

bit frustrating that the senators didn't ask him the question that, I mean, he can give legalistic answers, but he could be asked, like, "Well, what made you think it was a good idea to do this in the first place?" And if it's not going forward, why is it not going forward? What made you change your mind? And there aren't really great answers to those questions from Blanche's perspective. I mean, this does not strike me as the type of action that Todd Blanche, if he could pick his

present or pick his president's preferences, it would be on his own accord going with. And that's doubly true with the aspect of the deal that provided immunity from for any tax audit of any past tax returns of Trump or of the Trump organization or of the sons. And no one asked him, like, "Well, Mr. Blanche, what made you think that it made sense to settle a lawsuit over accusations that Trump's taxes were leaked? Why would you settle that by giving him immunity from, from tax liability

and he was not asked it." Yeah, I mean, it was a fascinating set of hearings.

So there's one big differentiating factor between Clayton and, I mean, there's lots of differentiating factor. For the one that really seems to weigh heavily in Clayton's case. And that is Section 702. These, of course, are available to authorities that expired just as tells a gap it was resigning. And Bulti was stepping into the acting role at ODNI. And precisely, because of Bulti's ascension to that role, Democrats in Congress essentially declined to support the

continuation of those authorities until you had a more permanent nominee. I don't know if we've

“seen clear statements on this from Democrats, but I think the widespread suspicion of that”

J. Clayton is considered credible enough to allow the reauthorization of Section 702 at least by enough Democrats in Congress to make them forward. Julia, I want to turn to you on this, as somebody who knows 702 better than any of us, as I suspect, or at least the significance of 702 better. How much soleless does that give you? How much soleless do you think it should give two members of Congress making this difficult decision? And what are the real tradeoffs? We've

heard Ben Wittis, who's long been an advocate for 702 renewal on a much more permanent basis, say it absolutely saves Americans' lives and Americans will die if we don't have it. And yet, he still expressed reservations about reauthorizing it, certainly under Pulti. And I don't have an asking about J. Clayton yet, but maybe we'll have that going back on to ask, where do you fall on this, as somebody who's really seeing both sides of the coin of this issue? Yeah, so I tend to come

down where Ben does, which is that this is a crucial national security tool. It is a bedrock of a lot

of the most important collection that informs our policymakers. And it's lapsing is a terrible blow to national security, but it was justified not giving this tool to an individual who's looking who's shown his willingness to use all the available tools of his office against the president's political enemies. And so this is a self-inflicted wound on the United States, but compared with the alternative of handing in this weapon, I agree. It couldn't be done, especially with the

public elevation of domestic groups as being a priority for this administration to target the seemed like a justified decision. It's just this hostage situation with 702 and with bullpulti still in the job that the Democrats are being presented with. It's either give hand over this weapon

“to the guy who's currently pointing a gun at the hostage. It's a really bad situation. I think”

perhaps a trust but verify approach would be necessary if they do vote to give 702 back. But I would keep a laser focus on the use of these tools in the coming months, especially running up the election and the rest of the president's term. So, you know, Molly, let me turn to you on this for another aspect of this. And that is kind of a little bit of the political calculus for the administration at this point and how this fits into some of its other sorts of calculation.

I think Eric has spelled out the very different stakes that we have here. With Jay Clayton, you've got, frankly, people in the Senate, probably more interesting getting him confirmed than the White House at this point. At least Tom Cotton saying it was certainly simply the way he's been the one really driving and scheduling these sorts of action and relatively prompt fashion. In large credits, despite Motivate Best Action 702, maybe to some extent concerned about what

exactly do you or let Odeni will yield, I suspect the less for the people. It's targeted and perhaps more for the political consequences of some of those uses for the president, for the

“public and party, but both kind of, you know, I think fair concerns on Senator Cotton's part.”

Where to what extent should we expect this administration to make capitulations to get

blanched through, but we know this is sticking point. We have two senators basically saying, hey, look, we need

you to meet with obscene victims, to kill and more physical fashion, the weaponization fund, take a number of other concessions. That looks like this vote is going to swing on and, you know, that is a set of demands that those senators, both whom were out of a job, at the end of this Congress, do not have any real reason to capitulate on other than, you know, feeling like they've gotten enough of a win out of the administration to kind of play ball and be a teamwork or the

administration. Does the administration have the incentive to actually play ball with them, set aside what Blanch may want, the legal consequences, which I think are, as Eric described, properly, there's a risk there, but it's not clear that 100% you won't be able to still do

fight, and which way does it break for the administration to say to, you know, these established Republicans and senators, no, we're not going to give up your two demands to you on such high profile items as the weaponization fund and Epstein victims. Or is this a case where they are going

“to have to roll and that's going to be enough to get blanched through? I think on Epstein,”

they've pretty much given to us what he asked for and he's satisfied and he got his cover and it was not costly for the administration to give that to him. So I think that was a pretty easy calculation on both their parts and I would expect, tell us, at this point to vote, yes, even though he said he cares about the weaponization group too, it seems that Kornin is the harder sell on that. So on the weaponization thing, what should the White House's calculus be or what will it be?

I mean, I think that it is very easy for the administration to say and to tell Todd Blanch that he can say we will work with you on legislative text, like we mentioned. And my guess is that that is just how this ends, that that will be enough for Kornin to say, okay, I got a win here and for the administration to have given up something but not to have changed this underlying

“settlement that would make the contract not enforceable in Kornin and I think that that's probably”

what Trump doesn't want them to do is that. I also think it's easier for Todd Blanch to say, no, I didn't go and redraft this thing, the Congress wrote text and if they actually do manage to do that, which we'll see, then it's a lot easier essentially for the White House Blanch anyone to not act as if they really gave anything up, it was Congress that wrote this. So that's kind of how I see it playing out. I mean, I see, I see I'm getting confirmed, I don't know.

I feel like they never vote no, and it's odd because they really don't have anything to lose.

But I would be shocked if Todd Blanch didn't get confirmed. There we go. Eric, you have as a closing remark, I can't put a weight at all on the odds of our two candidates here, or two contestants, or the fixed side.

“I say that for Kalshi, no, I'm kidding. I think it's likely that they will both be confirmed.”

You know, I'm not going to bet the farm on it. I would add also one more point on the weaponization fund is that as Anna Bauer and I wrote in a piece a month or so ago, they can even if the weaponization fund disappears completely. The administration can still funnel money to its cronies by the Federal Tort claims Act, which allows them to use their own judgment in settling tort claims filed against the government, no matter how frivolous,

out of what's basically a bottomless appropriation known as the judgment fund.

And some senators picked up on this, and I can't say they picked up on our pieces, necessarily, but they raised, I think Senator Padilla raised it in the hearing, and several senators raised it in questions for the record that was submitted to Blanch after the hearing, and he was very Blanch is very steadfast and refusing to give an inch on restricting the types of folks who would be eligible for payouts under the Federal Tort claims Act.

Well, there you go. We all have to keep an eye on the career future career prospects of Mr. Clayton and Mr. Blanch. But for now, we are out of time, but this would not be rational security. If we did not leave you with some object lessons to ponder over in the week to come, Julia, what do you have for us this week? So with the breakdown of the ceasefire in the Gulf, the renewal of the conflict with Iran,

and me reaching my mid-40s, I can't help but notice that we're still fighting the same god damn wars we were fighting when I was in my early 20s. So I find solace, however, in the trying to make sense of what is happening and understanding why America can't get out of the Middle East despite all these years. And I turned to the noted scholars of international relations and modern warfare, Don Henley and Glenn Fry of the Eagles.

In reference to the Middle East, it seems that we can check out any time we like, but we will never

be able to leave. And so for my object lesson today, I brought my guitar, which I would be happy to play a riff from the Eagles for you, from Hotel California.

car where they had Hotel California playing 24/7 on constant loop strictly instrumental. So you're

bringing back post-traumatic memories for me, but a lovely rendition of nothing else.

“We appreciate that. Eric, what did you bring for us this week?”

Well, I can't top that. And this is, in previous times, I've brought an actual object. This one is not one and I suppose I could bring the actual object, but you'll understand why I don't. And I'm just going to endorse the composting in January. I'm with you on this one. I like this one. Particularly the DC, where I say strictly speaking, the composting is not done by most residents, but by DC itself. You can separate out your food waste and in a little bin, and as we do,

and with the compostable bags, and then there's a collection of maybe like 50 or so drop off locations around the city. And when you're a little bag is full, you can take it there and just drop it in and feel virtuous. And I assume it has some benefit in terms of reducing landfill and saving money. So I think it's a good thing. It's fun. And actually, it's kind of remarkable when you do this, you realize how much food waste you create. And like our, we take out the garbage a lot less frequently

now, the garbage garbage because there's no longer in food waste in it. So that's my recommendation. If you're living DC, you can find it on the internet. And if you live somewhere else, it's quite possible that there's a program somewhere near you. I've got news for you Eric. Actually, you don't even have to take it to the bins. DC has a food waste collection program with a collected from your trash can location and give you a special bin to like, protect it from the rats in.

You may have to be part of a pilot program, but I joined the pilot program a couple of years ago, and I've been doing that regularly since. Because we're at my whole of households vegetarian. It's been up with a lot of like food scraps. You could have a lot of peels and cores and things like that. So yeah, highly recommend a great recommendation for up to there. And if you do the, at least the collection program, you get a little bag of compost at the end of it every year,

which you can dump in your garden, which is nice. It's not a lot, but it's, you know, two pounds or something like that. So we'll take it. Well, for my object lesson this week, I am returning to a beat that I have neglected for far too long, and that is the Muppet beat. It used to be a prominent feature. I feel like I'm

outskirting my first to go for a couple of years. And then there's just isn't that much Muppet news,

you know, which is a real bummer. I wish there was more. But uh, but there is some Muppet news. I missed a few months ago. I finally got the opportunity to partake in, uh, which I do highly recommend so far, though. I've only gotten to watch like less than a full episode, but I quite enjoyed it. And that is that the Muppet Show return this year on Disney Plus, uh, in a new rendition, uh, coordinated by Seth Rogan, Maya Rudolph, and Sabrina Carpenter, which suddenly seemed like an unlikely

trio, but Sabrina Carpenter, uh, not really definitely with the music, but I'm being clearly honest, but I, uh, really enjoyed her completely absurd and bizarre holiday special. She released two years ago,

“which is, again, I think it was called an absurd or, uh, a nonsense Christmas something like that”

special. It was quite good and really, really strange and absurdist in its humor. She seems to be bringing that to the Muppet Show, uh, which is a good place for the land with a little sharpening and honing, I think, by Maya Rudolph and Seth Rogan. It's really enjoyable. I'm really enjoying it. I'm looking forward to catching the rest of it. So, uh, I hope folks check it out. And, uh, you know, to tune in to the Up on Disney Plus now, uh, and hopefully maybe this will be the beginning of,

uh, some additional Muppet Show content, uh, come in the forward. So we'll see. I'm sorry. Scott, there was other Muppet news in the past week. I don't know. Oh, what's that? There was, uh, the, uh, World Cup half-time show, at which I missed it somehow. I don't know, Shakira was doing it, right? Shakira was doing it, uh, but, uh, they got, they got a, um, uh, a bigger star than Shakira, uh,

to, to play, um, electric mayhem band. Really? No way. Oh, yeah, I missed this. I'm devastated. I was on a plane during the finals. I actually missed the whole thing, unfortunately. Oh, I have to go back and check. I've actually not, I've get to watch it, and maybe once

“once we're done, I think I should go go watch it. But, uh, the, uh, uh, animal on drums and Janice”

was there to, uh, Dr. Teeth was not apparently. And they played, I believe, separation army.

Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. That's great. I thought the guitar might become in

back out. There, there we go. Uh, well, with that, uh, Eric, you're, me, officially, uh, be nominated as our deputy, uh, Muppet correspondent with this little bit of news that you've scooped me on, uh, which I'm excited to have the help and excited it to check this out. So, uh, a double Muppet recommendation for everyone listening. But for now, let's turn us to you, Molly, to bring us home. What did you bring for your object lesson? I definitely have a Muppet one for

down the line. So this is good to know that it's popular here. All right. There we go. But this is extremely not Muppet related, we'll bring us full circle to Laura Loomer and Kiev. So I'm a

I have a cool MDMA, like D.A. Taskers one because Molly, I used to wear that on my jacket. But anyway,

“I didn't bring that. This one, I think, I think there's a really, easily,”

purchasable version of this online. And basically, it is a patch that has an image of sort of a

skeletal mother Mary. And it says, give us this day, most deadly aim instead of our daily bread. But that's really easy to get. This one, you can't get commercially. I'm pretty sure you can only get it somewhere in the government. And it's the same patch. But she has a Jdam and I believe you

“get it from the Ukraine units. So anyway, I thought it was a cool and topical new pickup.”

I love that challenge coins are so yesterday here. I'm glad we're shifting over to them, or I'm

sure. I know exactly. Now, we're, you have my little thing on your desk. This is kind of thick stuff space. Yeah, you got to dust it. It gets all dirty. Well, a great set of object lessons. But that brings us to the end of this week's episode. Brashless Curdy is, of course, a production of law fair. So be sure to visit us at lavermedee.org for our show page for our links to past episodes for our written work and the written work of the law for our contributors and for information on

law fairs, other phenomenal podcast series. Well, you're out of be sure to follow law fair on social media, where you socialize your media, be sure to leave a rating or review wherever you might be listening. And I have to become a material supporter of law fair on Patreon for an adf version of this podcast among other special benefits for more information visit lavermedia.org/support. Our audio engineer

producer this week was me of me. And our music has always was performed by Sophia again. We are

once again edited by the wonderful Jen patch. My guest Julia Eric and Molly. I am Scott our Anderson and we'll talk to you next week. Till then, goodbye.

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