Rational Security: The “Predestination” Edition

That's the world-wide series, Phenominus Zurück. The fight for the island is known. On the 22nd June, there are the 3rd Staffel House of the Dragon by HBO Max. Here, you find the whole world of Western Russia in one word. Game of Thrones, a night of the Seven Kingdoms, and of course, House of the Dragon.

3rd Camp of Ging Drachen, Terrarians Ging Terrarians, intrigues, parades and epic slashes. All this awaits you with a new Staffel. Also, streamed up the 22nd June, the new Staffel House of the Dragon, and all the series from Game of Thrones. But, on HBO Max.

[MUSIC] Egal wanted to see the game on the Apple Paleaver, which looks the same for everything you've got. The Apple Paleaver was still alive, but he was still alive. The new Trico, Hutsnecks in the Halbside,

Übernim die Rechnung und feier den Sieg, einfach dein iPhone dran halten, und fertig. Apple Pay kannst du überall nutzen, wo Kontaktlosers bezahlen akzeptiert wird. Doppler Click, Face ID, dran halten, fertig, so einfach wie ein Einwurf. [MUSIC] Alan, sit your back on, I feel obligated to ask you how the weather is in Minnesota.

It was so nice for a solid week, but today it's rainy and kind of gloomy. But, you know, that's good for the plants, which I think is the thing that, as a midwesterner,

“you're obligated to say every time it rains, you have to say you have to in tone,”

but the plants are happy, so it's fine. You just have to put a shiny gloss on whatever might be happening out there. Or is that from the farmer origins? I think it's from the fact that Minnesotans are such extreme gardeners, because it's cold, and we only have limited gardening season, that you then have to just get very excited,

but anything that will make your plants happy. And I'm not the gardener in the family, but I am the manual labor for the gardener in the family. So, that's my contribution to the cause. I feel like Garrison Kieler would blame Calvinism, right? Wasn't that the usual stalking horse for most of them with their norms?

He's always blaming Calvinism.

Blaming Calvinism is always a fairly safe bet in Minnesota. [MUSIC] Hello, everyone and welcome back to Rational Security. The show we invite you to join members of the Lothar team. As we try to make sense in the weeks, big national security news stories.

We have a full house this week, because we have a lot of news percolating. We have a few people joining us for just one segment, because it was one topic that we're hoping to get to discuss a few weeks ago. And now we actually get to discuss at least a little bit preliminarily. Joining me this week and thrilled to have everyone here.

We are joined first by Ari at Tapetabai, a former public service fellow, and now contributing editor here at Lothar. Ari, thank you for coming back for just the first segment. We're happy to have you for that far, at least. Always fun.

Thanks for having me. Wonderful.

“Also, join us is Thailand McBrine, who I believe I've previously described as the third”

mass of rational security, because it was frequency here. Tyler, thank you for helping keep the ship afloat. Always a pleasure. Also, joining us is I think it only be conceived of as an old broken, crappy mass that we broke off and discarded, and now use mostly for firewood.

Coach Emeritus, I love our research director Alan Rhodes, you know, thank you for coming back on the podcast. I'd like to think of myself as flotsome and jetsome that's been thrown over and is just kind of like barely clinging on to the rat's ship as it steams through the water.

Honestly, you can always be good, watch recently.

The basically, yeah. I basically just watched Master and Commander again for the first time a couple of weeks ago and now I have all these nautical metaphors in my brain. For the first time, my god, like, talk about it in the first time in a while. I watched it.

That was like my dad, of course, drove me there, but we may be watching it a hundred times when I was a teenager. Like everybody's dad. So good. But I do know that I'm a dad.

I tune back in. I got to say, pretty top notch.

“But joining us for non-nautical metaphors, if I'm aware, I'll feel free.”

If you're up for it, is no, none other than our latest public service fellow edition here at Lafair, Julia Curley, Julia, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Scott. So I'm like a 10 year listener, first time caller, I guess, to rational security. This is like, I have briefed presidents in my life.

Vice presidents met four and leaders, but this is the first time my mom gets to watch me work. So this is pretty hard. There we go. We don't know how the hell you got our phone number, but we'll take it.

We're glad we got you called in. And just to be, just to be clear, Julia, this is much, much higher stakes than all that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. No, no margin for area. That's the whole point of the show. That's okay. We are, I've a lot to get through this week, and I want to get right into it.

Topic one for this week, fish in accomplished. After nearly four months of war, the United States and Iran have reached a deal to end the conflict. Perhaps. With Trump declaring it complete, an authorizing the reopening of the straight of her

moves ahead of a formal signing ceremony set for June 19th in Switzerland. We think. Maybe. But the agreement leaves enormous questions on resolve from the fate of Iran's enriched uranium to sanctions relief to whether the ceasefire extends to Israel's campaign in Lebanon,

is this the durable piece that Trump and others claim, or a fragile pause if that, papering over the hardest issues in the conflict? Topic two, model misbehavior.

Days after anthropic publicly released its powerful new Claude, Fable 5 model, the Commerce

States from accessing it, forcing the company to disable the model worldwide. The administration says anthropic recklessly refused to fix a dangerous jailbreak. Anthropic says it was a narrow, non-serious vulnerability in that the order reflects a misunderstanding. What does this episode tell us about the government's expanding use of export controls

“on AI, and it's increasingly adversarial relationship with one of the country's leading labs?”

Topic three bad vibrations. One of our final acts as director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, rescinded two Biden era intelligence assessments that had cast doubt on whether a foreign adversary was behind Havana syndrome, the mysterious ailments, reflecting US intelligence personnel and diplomats around the world, Gabbard's office says the prior assessment to cherry-picked intelligence

supported predetermined conclusion, but critics worry about a politically motivated rewrite, analytical findings on the way out the door, which we make of this last-minute reversal, and what does it mean for the future of the Vana syndrome debate, as well as Gabbard's legacy as DNI?

So our first topic is a topic that I originally had you on, Ari, a few weeks ago, to talk

about the first time we've told us and promised us that, in fact, a deal was about to be done. Then none came about, and we had to on the show and we talked about how there was an a deal.

“Now we're kind of the same position, I guess.”

We think the deal is about to be signed Friday, both sides seem to agree something's going to get signed in Switzerland on Friday. Nobody's released it publicly yet. We've gotten a bunch of media reports about what it contains, although those have been almost uniformly contested by people in the administration, so we don't know how reliable they are.

The one thing everybody seems to agree that it agrees on is that we'll have a 60-day pause in any sort of hostilities, extending the ceasefire deepening the ceasefire, I guess presumably, because it seems to suggest it'll be more than just the ceasefire in terms of a cessation of hostilities, and that there will be some opening of the straight of her moves, although it also seems to be suggested and most people seem to be considering

with some strong degree of Iranian and Omani, the two kind of countries bordering the straight control. All other issues, the nuclear file, other files, are getting kicked to that 60-day mark, or they're going to have 60-day window to try and reach negotiation on those. There may be other elements of the deal.

We've seen media reports saying that sanctions relief is included, but it's a substantial

sanction relief in even this first stage, but we don't know yet that hasn't been confirmed.

Price President JD Vance has said no U.S. dollars are going to the Iranians, that doesn't mean that you're not going to see sanctions really allow Iranian dollars frozen to go back to the Iran or portally Iranian dollars or other foreign money. We don't know exactly what these other parts are yet, presumably we'll find out at some point.

But we're not 100% sure, it's been a few days now, we don't have any more details. So let me turn it over to you. We talked about the potential for an agreement, what an negotiated end of this conflict might look like on this podcast a dozen times at this point.

“How does this fit in with your expectations, your concerns, your hopes?”

Where is this on the spectrum of pessimism to optimism, and what are you looking at? What are the big parts of staying out for you that are remarkable and worth noting on? Yeah, I mean, I think it is essentially aligned with what we expected and unfortunately because and we should start with a premise that you mentioned at the outset, which is that we actually don't have the official text yet.

What we do have is a bunch of pieces of the text and then a full text that was essentially posted by Iranian state media. The president said that's not the real text this morning, Bloomberg and CNN and others have been posting essentially that text and now saying that they've confirmed with US officials and other officials from the G7 countries who've been briefed on the deal that this is actually

the text and it highlights all of the things that you talked about as a 14 point text that is actually very thin in terms of the details.

My first reaction, looking through the 14 points was did a lawyer approve of this because

let me say that from my experience and Scott, you'll notice too and others will as well in this conversation, when we're negotiating a nuclear agreement a few years ago, I do not think that our lawyers would have left us, you know, leave the room alive if we had walked away with this kind of text that leaves so much unsaid that leaves so much gray and so much room for maneuver and interpretation down the line.

So that's the number one thing would love to hear your perspective as an actual lawyer on some of the language that is used here. The second thing is that as we had expected, this deal really does focus on the deepening if you will or formalizing of the ceasefire that has been in place, it does not really touch on the issue of the nuclear program, which is why we're here to begin with.

It kind of kicks that can down the road to the 60 days from now when we have an actual agreement that is deeply problematic because we still have a significant amount of highly enriched uranium within Iran, the international atomic energy agency does not have the continuity of knowledge that it would need to be able to verify that Iran's nuclear program is indeed peaceful. And the Trump administration does not seem particularly bothered by any of these details.

certain things on behalf of Israel, including the fact that Israel is going to essentially hold back

“and Israel has made it clear that it is not party to the steel, which it is not,”

and that it is not going to abide by the steel. And so the risk for Israel's operations in Lebanon or elsewhere kind of you know, derailing this whole process are real. So back to where we were a couple of weeks ago when we last had this conversation, okay, we now have more of a framework for if you will, I've been calling it an interim deal because it's not a real comprehensive deal.

We may have this interim deal, although even this morning the president was saying something to the effect of the text that are floating around, like those are not real texts.

We haven't really fully agreed to these things. So it's all very murky as to what's real,

what's not, et cetera. But nonetheless, this interim deal just seems like a stepping stone to the next thing. It seems to really kick down the more challenging, more substantive, more complex issues to later on. And there are a number of spoilers and number of factors that can still essentially derail this whole process either between now and the 60 days from now or even after that. And that includes also an addition to Israel opposition from the president's own base.

We know that a number of Republicans, and we've talked about this before on rational security, a number of Republicans both in Congress and within his own administration have for a long time opposed any negotiations with Iran. And then to kind of up front, essentially tell Iran

“who are going to get billions and billions of dollars, remember the pallets of cash from the”

Obama administration that was so controversial. Like this is essentially giving Iran a lot for

not a whole lot and return for essentially a vague commitment that they want pursue a nuclear weapon, which by the way, as far as I've seen, the draft doesn't really mention the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, but they're already supposed to not be pursuing a nuclear weapon of the NPD. So it's not really clear what we get on the nuclear front. It doesn't really touch on the proxies and missile programs. And I'm not even going to start talking about the human rights issue,

which is its own bucket. And it's obviously not addressed in any of this. So in essence, the deal barely touches on any of the issues of concern that any Republicans or anyone who's, you know, kind of watching this space might have with Iran, which tells me that this is not particularly even if we end up with a signing ceremony on Friday and Switzerland. And it sets the clock for the 60 days and we end up with a deal. I don't know how sustainable this whole process is going to be

and whether it's going to lead to viable agreement on the other end of it. That was really helpful, but can I just ask you a much more basic question from the perspective of not an IR expert just a guy who reads the New York Times? Did we lose the war in Iran? Because it really feels like we just lost the war in Iran. And I mean, you know, people lose war sometimes, but I don't know, it's hard for me to read this and not view this as anything, but we return to the status quo

except we drop all the sanction against Iran and Iran now gets to skim money off the street of her moves. What am I missing? No, I mean, you know, people have been describing it as the status quo.

“I think it's actually worse than the status quo because the status quo would imply that we did not”

just drop billions and billions of dollars to degrade very cheap Iranian capabilities that they can rebuild pretty quickly, pretty easily on the cheap. And by the way, we're apparently paying them to do so. It would imply that you don't have this kind of rift between the United States and Israel that is now more and more out in the open. It would imply that we don't have a regime that is more radical than it was three, four months ago. And look, the administration's talking point seems to be this

morning. I'm very, you know, news shows and so on that, you know, we're we're really looking at Iran changing its behavior fundamentally. This is a very different regime than the one we had, you know, six months ago. And it's just not true. I mean, I've been raging on this on rational security for months now. Yeah, aren't the crazies running around even crazy. You're now that the crazies that you still run around before we kill all of them? That that that that is a

very good way of putting it. Yes, but you have a much more radical, more inexperienced crew there. And by the way, if you've been paying attention, I will go back to human rights issue. If anybody's been paying attention and the same on national and just a couple of weeks ago talked about how this regime that we are now negotiating with and giving billions to is using the war as a cover to further continue to repress people that, you know, it's been essentially conducting mass arbitrary arrests.

It's been intensifying repression that executions according to another human rights report just this week, or happening at a pace that has been unmatched in recent decades. So we are not dealing

this not just the status quo on today. We've dropped billions of dollars, the pleater stocks of munitions and gone damage to our bases and lost service members and by the way killed a bunch of people throughout the Middle East to end up with a worse regime than we had a few months ago. And that

“to me is so, yes, the short answer to your question, Athens is, I think that this is a pretty epic”

and the name already of the operation but it's a pretty epic defeat, I think, for the United States. Julia, I want to pull you in on this as well. I know there's an issue that you worked on.

I'll do a quick, quick nod to Ari's because she invoked lawyers, which is always a mistake.

So I'll do as a former State Department lawyer. I'll just note that generally in MOU's term that general use rate non-binding political commitment, not something that the binding does not have to be. There are MOUs that are considerably binding. That's generally the assumption. And so, it'll really depend on the verbiage because this is a draft. I suspect this may not have gone like a final scrub if it goes through a final scrub but for between

people who are familiar with US like agreement practice because there is some weird verbiage that you would normally see State Department lawyers trying to scrub out of this if they want it to be non-binding. Importantly, nobody, I think they really need to argue. Now, that's non-binding. We're going to be covering on the nuclear file because they touched on the nuclear file.

“I think there's a really strong argument, Congress has to review this agreement under”

NARA. That's a law that had passed in 2015 review the JCPOA which involves, among other things, opportunities for Congress to disrupt this. Maybe that's not something that Trump administration is worried about given Republican control of both chambers, given the fact that I think everybody wants this rate of firm MOUs reopened. But it does complicate things certainly on the timing front that they've laid out that they don't need to be taken into that into account here. So my

guess is they're going to argue this doesn't have to go through NARA because it doesn't do anything on the nuclear file yet. That's going to come after 60 days. But there is a little tension there between some of the rhetoric the administration is used to describe this and the other outcomes of the sort of conflict. But Julia, let me come to you more on the policy substance. For folks who haven't are familiar with Julia, it's just relatively new with us. She is a better than intelligence community

and the National Security Council on his work on issues related to around the Middle East, off among a variety of other issues over her time in government. Talk to us a little about your assessment. Where this came out and how it fits into the broader strategic consideration that's gone around Iran. And issues set that presidents of both parties have really wrestled with for 20 plus more than 20 years. But at least the 20 plus years around dynamic really similar to this

through the JCPOA and then for the 10 years since that's been next more or less. So where does this fit in on the range of potential outcomes there and how do you assess it? Thanks Scott. So first fall since you mentioned my background I have to say up front my views on this podcast are based on the open unclassified record and of course you're not necessarily representing those of the United States government. That all being said, I don't think we should mince words. The United States

won every battle of this conflict. The US military accorded itself as the finest fighting force in the world. But the United States lost this war. We lost 14 service men. We depleted

critical munitions. We alienated our allies. We all paid the price at the pump. And we showed

ourselves impotent to reopen the straight. If you don't think people in Russia and China have observed this and drawn the conclusion that President Trump will back down in the face of serious political costs or that the US lacks the endurance for a protracted conflict. This has been a strategic disaster regardless of how the deal is eventually signed and worked out in Geneva. One thing that I've just been frustrated by and wondering about throughout this entire saga

is this question of legitimacy. So in terms of, you know, my experience is trying to follow the negotiations every time Trump posts untrue social or gives an off hand comment to a reporter that a deal will be signed within a day. A deal will be signed with this provision. And then it becomes like a New York Times news alert and then it doesn't materialize or just wildly misrepresented. And I found myself sort of relying more on comments by the Iranian foreign minister

as as reliable more so than the US president. But I was also thinking about the other side and maybe you are our best position to answer this or Julia of the legitimacy of this forthcoming deal in Iran and whether that's even, I don't know, the correct frame. I did hear one interview on

“with an Iranian, I believe official that it was portraying it at some betrayal of the regime”

and just the fact of the negotiation. So I don't know, is there, is there even a way we can get a sense of the popular support of a deal this deal, the negotiations in general? I'll start at, I'm really curious what Julia thinks too. So look, let's start with the premise that it's just difficult to know how people feel about this conflict just because, you know, I've said this before, you know, it's hard to characterize the views of 93 million people, very diverse country and also, by the way,

we don't have great polling and we haven't even, that's great polling now. But the truth is that you've

that led to the greatest kind of, you know, repression that the country has had in decades and decades,

thousands killed, many more arrested and, you know, there was this brief, I guess, moment of hope that maybe that would lead somewhere. And then on the back end of this, you end up in this conflict that kills, again, thousands throughout the region, probably a few thousand at least in Iran, schoolchildren bombed, all of those things. And then leaves the Iranian people were self-essentially, because it has entrenched this regime. And in some ways, I hate to say it, legitimize, like,

we are currently, by way of this MOU and future agreement and with this administration saying, again, and again, this is a different regime. We can live with this regime. The president having really nice words to say about the new Supreme Leader, who is ordering said repression and who is graniting the attacks on, you know, our bases and so on and so forth. Like, there's a degree of

“legitimization that is happening that is just, you know, just unfathomable to me. And I think that”

we would be having a very conversation, different conversation around it if this were not a Republican president, if it weren't Donald Trump specifically. So all of this to say that I assume that a lot of people in Iran do want this war to end, because, you know, it is just a smart way to live. But I, I, I don't know what, you know, how people feel about what comes next. And I think there's a sense of despair that, at least anecdotally, people are being, are capturing and the reporting coming

out of Iran that, you know, this is, again, that they're now, after weeks and thousands of deaths, people thought that maybe a reform of some kind, maybe a change in regime and some kind was possible that none of that is going to happen. And they're just going to continue with the same kind of infrastructure and the same, you know, regime structure, but just to Allen's point crazier people in place. So, so yeah, so I, but then to also pick up on your last piece, their Tyler

“about, you know, some people have been opposing the deal. You'll always have some of that in that”

system, right? People will always come out and say, well, you know, any deal, it's kind of the mirror of this side in a way. There are people who fundamentally do not want to negotiate with the United

States. And you'll always have that crew, but ultimately it doesn't matter, right? Like the

system is going to push into direction at once to push in and right now it views this deal as putting it in a better place than it was a few months ago. And so it is going to agree to it. Julia, how about you? Yeah, it does seem like the IRGC in the besiege are fully in control and nothing has weakened their grip on the population. You know, if you look historically at other conflicts and error only campaign, if you look at Serbia and elsewhere, often tends to reinforce

the regime and delegitimize the opposition who doesn't feel like they can come out in the street while their own country is being bombed from above. And so it'd be quite natural that this would

“reinforce the regime. And that's what I think what we're seeing. I would also say just in terms of”

the negotiating posture, Iran has observed the United States shift goal-pokes in this conflict several times. At one point, the president was declaring the need for Iran's unconditional surrender.

And now we are basically trying to get to a ceasefire deal that would restore the status quo

anti and perhaps accept a nuclear deal that's worse than what was on the table before we entered into this conflict. So from that perspective, negotiating with the United States, I don't think the Iranians were going to be in a hurry to reach a deal. When they know we will continue to negotiate with ourselves and they'll likely end up with a better deal if they just wait a little longer. I think that's really the key of understanding the dynamics here. Like we talked

on this podcast and past weeks about the weird pressure valve of horror moves, right? For the Iranians and for the global community. The Iranians, if they keep a complete shutoff eventually, that is going to push the rest of the United States, we have to do something here. Even if it is a use of force, even if it is something we don't necessarily agree with. It's not actually in Iran's interest to completely shut off the straight of our moves.

They need to release some of that tension. But if they release it enough that you can get the United States and the international community kind of accepting a new status quo relying on it, all of a sudden that gives you a political tool that's really valuable. And when you're not actually at the political tool, you have a new source of revenue. Because one of the concessions they've extracted from this appears to be some ability to impose a fee structure on

transit. Now like that is something that would raise real international law questions instead of a problematic precedent. If it was structured as a passage fee, there are circumstances where you see countries imposed things like services fee for piloting and things like that in particularly dangerous straits. Like I think Turkey does this in the bus for us to stuff like this.

visa and countries around straits, around international bodies of water. Maybe you can structure and presumably this is going to be structured that way. There's a great discussion with I think the editor-in-chief of Lloyd's List, which is kind of like the leading publication on international shipping on around the latest the telegraphs around podcasts just in their last episode. I highly recommend it. It goes through all the weird contours of the industry around the space,

but it would be a really problematic precedent. But even if you can square it with your national law and there may be a way you can do that here to some extent at least kind of paper over it. It's still another revenue stream that around that they did not have prior to this. Prior to this, ships could pass through these waters relatively freely. And now around if it wants to can shut that off that flow relatively easily, they can do it in a quiet passive way by saying,

“oh no, we can't give you the license you need to pass through this anymore, maybe because of some”

pretextual reason and begin to pressure that way softly or they can do it harder by shutting it down. Or they can maybe able to reinstate a more selective basis for transiting things. And the real damage of this conflict, I think, is that the United States and their actual community

has shown that it's not able or willing to force the straits open, like I think it was always

assumed they could or would if around push too hard against them. If you really want to know the extent to its United States has been put in a difficult position, listen to that podcast I just mentioned. He describes how the United States Navy has basically been leading shadow fleets of vessels along the Omanee side of the strait to get some traffic reflong for the last few weeks. This is the kind of quiet follow on to the project freedom initiative that was abandoned a few days after

in early May after the 60 day deadline pass that some effort, virtualized, proceed quietly, but it requires all the vessels to turn off all their tracking devices, turn off their lights, go silent, it's not something you can do at a high volume, and it's a very high-risk maneuver, otherwise they wouldn't have to be taking all these measures. That doesn't mean the United States couldn't do more than actual community couldn't do more, they could invade Southern Iran and

occupy it, right? But the cost of that are so dramatic that their willingness to do that just isn't

“there. And I think it's shown around that it actually has a lot more leverage over her moves”

than it assumed it had going into this conflict and that probably is going to mean a higher willingness to use it, I suspect. So, you know, I think to me one of the biggest costs of this conflict is that we have allowed Iran to validate as doctrine that it had been developing for decades. As you've been talking through the various kind of scenarios that existed for the strait and what it could look like going forward, I think you know, Iran had obviously been

planning for this for a long time, but this conflict really allowed for it to kind of refine that whole scenario planning and things through the costs and benefits and things through what implementation would actually look like. So, one of the biggest things for me is that we, you know, in these types of scenarios, if you're going to go in, you're going to go all in and you're going to have to kind of take care of the problem. And if not all you're doing is you're allowing the

adversary to learn a bunch of lessons and it's not just Iran, it's also Russia and China, right, who are going to be studying this conflict, I suspect. And who are going to learn a bunch of lessons from how we fight, where we fight, what we do and don't have the appetite to do, and it doesn't help that you have a president who sits there and talks very plainly and openly about, well, we don't have the appetite to do X, Y, and Z. And, you know, that was to Julia's point,

right, it's been made abundantly clear in this conflict with no tangible results, what our weaknesses are, and that's to me as DP problematic. So, Julia, I want to come to you another part of this. In conversation that I've had with other veterans of the intelligence community,

they underscore that this outcome, to some extent, was always a point of concern.

“Now, people can watch the conversation. I don't think this is a secret. I think people study”

Iran and look at Iran from an academic perspective from other policy perspectives. How does it look concern? Is that if you upset whatever the powerful problematic the status quo anti-was in Iran, if you seriously upset it, you don't want to know what's going to come next, and you have lots of equities that can be toppled in different ways from a collapse of the regime that could lead to all sorts of regional problems to the assertion of a new robust, more hard

right-wing regime, which may be what we now have in Iran, to things like the straight-of-arms who's disrupting global traffic, which is probably the most immediate consequence. And the Trump administration actually still seems sensitive to this last year in the last summer

when it did its first round of strikes on Iran, extremely limited into the nuclear program,

and then immediately led to a cessation of pressure on Israel to cease its broader military campaign. The rhetoric around that Mark Rubio and other people said is that we are worried about regime stability. I'm not quite in so many words but that's how I've read it. I went back and reviewed it this week because I was like, "Am I was I'm making up that they actually had that view?" And it was there, it's in the talking points. So that view really shifted, at least in the president.

That means that's not surprising. We all know Trump is mercurial. We all know he had a direct line to Netanyahu who reportedly had, could persuade and take this action. And he tends to follow the advice for the last person he talked to, so maybe he's the last person he talked to before

Maggie Haberman about the decision to go to the war where it relays. It says, "No cabinet

official actually back Trump's decision to do this." They just weren't willing to say, "No." And then it kind of celebrates JD Vince, the person who got closest to saying, "No, without actually saying." What does that tell us about the state of decision making it in the heart of the

“administration and what are the factors that are contributed to that? I think it's fairly obvious”

that it's been uninformed. The Iranian ability to close the state of Hormuz, the regime's ability to survive the death of the Supreme Leader, most of the problems that we've been talking about in this podcast were foreseeable and have been foreseen in innumerable war games and assessments that have been made public over the years. But we should think about what occurred in the run-up

to this conflict. The administration, in several public moves, clearly sent a message to the intelligence

community that dissent would be punished and punished with the end of a career, the stripping of clearances in the public firing of senior officials such as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who was fired after his battle damage assessments that his agency produced publicly contradicted the president. Analysis at every phase of this was shut out, punished, or ignored. So this is the price of politicized intelligence so that the U.S. is blundering into foreseeable

“crises that no one is willing to forecast. Before we close, and as I do want to talk about”

Israel's position and all of this, again, and I'd like someone to explain this to me because I have not the IR professional in the room. This seems very bad for them, right? I mean, off the top of my head, it seems like Trump is going to sell them out, which again seemed obvious in retrospect that he was going to sell them out the moment that's got difficult. And also now, you know, Israel's standing in the international community already somewhat tenuous is that much worse because Israel

contributed, right? And we can debate how much oh, but clearly they were motivating factor in all of this in something that was quite disruptive to the global economy. And then in the United States, I mean, the amount of antisemitism that this is going to provoke on the left, on the right, God knows where and support the idea that, you know, American foreign policy is run by shadowy Jews. I mean, it seems really profound because in this case, there does seem to be at least a

kernel of truth to the idea that America got into this war in part because Israel pushed it into it, which, of course, doesn't justify antisemitism, but it's again, it's not a great data point. So again, this seems like this seems bad for the Jews, which again, it's like not the only question anyone should care about, but you know, to the extent you care about it, this seems like a disaster. Again, in my wrong or is this really, really bad? I would say it's probably not great.

Yeah, I did a long conversation with Joe Braun, about this last week for the Loffer podcast. Charlie recommend folks check that out for Loffer daily. You know, and what we talked about this is that it's not just that this isn't going to go to work or on, that was definitely a net guy who was kind of the indispensable element of that and his conversation, at least if we take the Maggie Haberman account accurately of that kind of initial decision, we then also had the decision

of Israel to open another front with Lebanon, where they did see some provocations or some rocket shot by his Bala, but they responded with a very aggressive military campaign that has them now occupying big swaths of Lebanon south of Lothani. And you are in a situation where the domestic pressure on Nanya, who is, we've got to find a way to resolve this conflict with his Bala, because Northern Israel's under a constant threat as to kind of have been for a year, multiple

years at this point, really kind of centrally after October 7th, led to the creation of a Lebanon front, often on and they want a solution to this. And if you can't get a military solution, and it's not clear what a military solution looks like if you're still occupying southern Lebanon, something that was, is a big cultural point of controversy and touched on for these realities from their last very harmful and poorly remembered experience occupying big swaths of Lebanon.

You are, you can't get the military solution there, then you need a diplomatic one. And here we're in a situation where Net Yahoo has put himself in a situation where Lebanon is being dictated by the term of the Iran war by the United States. He cannot, he pretty clearly now cannot drift too far from following the United States' prescription, in regard to Lebanon, as that is in turn being driven by Iran's demands in the Iran-U.S. negotiations without really compromising the US's really

“relationship. When you have President Trump openly rebuking BB Net Yahoo, saying, "I think he's crazy”

and he's lost it on these particular points and he owes me for keeping him out of jail." That's not a great sign about the state of the relationship. And BB went all in on the relationship with Trump. In a way Israel has, over the last several years, that has big ramifications. We already know the Democratic Party views of the US relationship with Israel has been shifting

in a way that's still strong in a lot of fronts but also critical on others and sees a real

problem, particularly in the departure from the two-state solution. And now we've got this wing

frankly, people with a lot of connected with J.D. Vance, a potential feature leader of the party,

and a lot of people around Trump who have a line and may be able to inform the views moving forward. And when you consider that, for instance, things like the United States and Israel are up to renegotiate their long-standing security systems agreement under the administration, given that the centrality of the United States to defending Israel from rockets, various stripes, from Iran, from Hezbollah, from others over the last several months and years. Like, there's a lot of

pressure points that can be brought to bear. Also, some BBs gone from having Trump as his closest ally to somebody who could actually use that leverage against them. I think that has a lot of Israelis

“pretty upset. And that's why you've seen a really strong reaction against this by these railies”

and attacks by the people who are going to be challenging BB elections later this year,

including mostly from the right, honestly. A lot of the rhetoric has been really focused on saying BB's not being hard enough on this sort of issue, but their capitalized on the fact that he hasn't left himself spaced the maneuver at this point because he's pushed everything so far and so aggressively that there's just nowhere else he can really go and let that really risk his US relationship. Is that on generous Julia, do you agree or disagree? I know somebody I know who's followed this

stuff? No, I think all of that is right. And I think it also points to the lack of durability of the ceasefire. If Israel is a co-beligerent in the conflict, but is not a party to the ceasefire and Netanyahu is under continual pressure to strike targets of opportunity in Lebanon. So, whatever influence the president has over our Israeli partners, it's not perfect. He will respond to his domestic political requirements. And this will be a persistent problem as we try to keep

the ceasefire alive. Yeah, yeah. It's a fair point. I mean, that's this big spoiler point.

“I think it's Lebanon and how committed Iran and the United States are to their partners there,”

respectively. We'll have to wait and see. That's the world-wide Syrian phenomenon is back. The fight for the island is known.

At the 22nd of June, there's the third star of House of the Dragon by HBO Max.

Here's the whole world of Western Russia, an item worth. Game of Thrones, a night of the Seven Kingdoms, and of course House of the Dragon. Dragon, Camping King, Dragon, Targaryens, King Targaryens, intrigue, Varat, and epischish-lachten. All that awaited a nine-starvel. Also, streamed up the 22nd, 26th of June, the new Starvel House of the Dragon,

and all the Syrian from Game of Thrones, Nur on HBO Max. So we are going to come back and talk about this deal. I know that once we see a final draft, 60 days from now when we see actual acts on the nuclear file, we have other big national security news stories. We need to spend some time on this week. So let us shift our attention back to the interwebs. I guess somewhere wherever geographically they may lie, the machine, the machine god,

Scott, the machine god, where we have a really pretty dramatic development happen on Friday, where we saw the fable model, which is the kind of consumer facing somewhat sanitized guard railed version of the borderline mythic mythos model that anthropic has developed. That's supposed to bring huge, huge dividends in terms of particularly cyber security, in terms of how it's applied, both in terms of identifying vulnerabilities. I'm potentially exploiting them if we're to get into

the wrong hands. We understand that on Friday evening, the Commerce Department gave a letter to anthropic indicating that it was subjecting fable to an export license or export control that would require licenses for any transfer of that technology, not just to foreign countries, but also to foreign nationals even in the United States. That in term, according to anthropic,

“or I think there's been strong suggested by people around the anthropic at least,”

made it impossible for them to actually work or offer fable because so many other employees are foreign nationals and there's no way to identify the nationality of users, at least not currently built in the system. So they ended up pulling fable off-line just a few days, I can three or four days after they released it. And now it's become this new chapter in this tension between the Trump administration and anthropic that we saw going all the way back to efforts

to put supply chain, threat risks and other sorts of labels on anthropic that are currently being challenged in court. Alan, you've been following this closer than just about anyone, you've written about it for us for a lot of air. Talk to us about this latest action, where it fits into this broader story, and what we should be thinking about making sense of all of this. Yeah, I mean, so this is a very, very big deal. I mean, this is the beginning of essentially

a de facto licensing regime for frontier models, where if you're anthropic or presumably

before you can release one of these powerful models because if you don't, the government

“can slap export controls on them. I mean, it's notable that this comes, you know, it feels like”

it's like weeks and weeks, but it's all happens like every three days. There's a new thing. This happened literally a few days or a few weeks after the administration released its AI cyber security executive order, which was notable for being extremely light touch and hands off. And, you know, merely allowing for a voluntary, it started off as a 90-day period, but that was too much, so then they cut it down to a 30-day period, where the United States government would be

able to get access to some of these models to analyze them for cybersecurity risk. You know, that EO was explicitly, literally said, this is not a licensing regime. And while it is true, that it is not a licensing regime, then a week later the United States government acts in a way that creates a de facto licensing regime. So all of this is to say that the administration's policy towards AI is, as with so many things, not super coherent and rapidly changing.

So I wrote about this for law fair on Monday, and then after I wrote about it, the letter from Latinx, the commerce letter leaked or was disclosed. Now, what's interesting having had a chance to read the letter is that it's actually not clear to me what commerce has export controlled. So if you read the letter very carefully, right, you actually trace the authorities back to export control law, what commerce is doing at least,

“is it's exporting export controlling the model, right? That's what they say. We are export controlling”

the model. But what is the model? Well, ultimately, the model is a, I don't know, multi-gigabyte

file of weights of parameters, right? You can think of it as sort of vaguely comparable to a compiled binary for traditional software. So that would prevent anthropic from taking the model and putting it on a server outside the United States, okay? And it would also prevent anthropic from allowing any of its foreign employees. So non-US citizen, a non-lawful permanent resident, a non-green card holders, from accessing the actual model weights itself and working on it. That would be a

big deal, because I assume that at least some of anthropic's employees are here on, you know, just temporary employment visas. And if that were the case, that would have a profound effect on the ability of frontier AI companies to get the best talent. But it does not, the letter does not on its face apply to model access, which is to say to accessing the model through the Anthropic API or through the Anthropic web chat interface. Now, that's important because it confirmed something

that I and another, you know, export control dorks who have been following this have thought, which is that it's not actually clear that the export control laws apply to accessing US software when it's cloud hosted, BIS, the, oh god, I'm so bad at these acne. The Bureau of Industry and Security, which is the course of security. Sorry, the Bureau of Industrial Security, thank you. That ministers the commerce export controls has actually long

maintained, and there are public legal opinions from BIS to this effect, that access to American software as a service is not export controlled. And the house representatives actually earlier this year passed a law that would explicitly expand the scope of export controls to apply to remote

“access to American services. Now, I think it actually makes sense for export control to apply to this.”

I mean, if you're going to have export controls on US technology, I think probably API access should apply to it, but it's notable that the house felt the need and the Senate is now currently considering the need to expand the law because it suggests that the current law does not apply to this. So it's actually quite possible that anthropic is not legally obligated to do what it did, which is to say to legally obligated to block API access to everyone. Now, you know, what's interesting

then is that that tells me that unlike with the supply chain designation, which anthropic is fighting in court and is currently winning-ish in its various litigation, and anthropic decided to not fight this even though it could have, which tells me, I mean, that's not a legal decision. So much is that's a strategic business decision, and this happens all the time, right? A company's routinely will not fight things that they could otherwise fight, but it's notable to me that the letter

does not appear to do what the Commerce Department is saying. It does, and I can't tell if that's a combination of actual legal limitations and the Commerce Department is bluffing or to piggyback on Julia's point from the earlier segment about the hollowing out of the United States National Security bureaucracy, whether the people doing this are just not that good at their jobs,

which is always a plausible possibility with this administration.

experience with this that I think is relevant, although I won't pretend to be a deep export control expert, particularly in the AI space, so some of this may be flushed a little bit.

“But I think you're right. My understanding is that there has been a policy determination from”

the Commerce Department, fairly long standing at this point, that cloud services aren't something that we view as subject to export controls. That's an agency position. It's like a policy guidance. It's something they can change. I don't think it's necessarily prohibitive, although you raise

questions about potentially APA-chans. I'll get to those by those aren't boys available in a second.

In other contexts, the export controls are applied to services that are provided. So if you are a Boeing or Lockheed, and I'm just saying this company is randomly actually don't know what they're subject to. But let's say they were advising a foreign company, a foreign government, or a foreign entity on designing defense tech of some sort, or maintaining defense tech. The export controls can restrict that sort of activity.

I don't know if it's necessary. I don't think that's specifically based on the movement of physical people overseas. I think it also has generally been applied to things like remote service, at this point. That's probably a common a lot of these cases. So I'm not sure that this would be entirely novel, at least outside of the cloud service context.

The real issue of this here is that there's a lot of discretion built around this,

and that the way Congress has designed the ECRA, it really makes it hard to legally challenges, because ECRA strips a bunch of jurisdiction and makes it not the makes different licensing determination not subject to APA challenges as readily. So you have to find that either constitutional hook or ultra-vera's challenge or other sort of like

“higher level challenges, you can't just make as easily a arbitrary depreciation argument I think.”

Is that a dusting right to you Alan or my office? So I'm not sure, and I'm also not at, I was, you know, many years ago when I was a young and innocent DOJ attorney. I was briefly one of part of one of these export control sub IPCs, and I remember being the most complicated thing I have ever experienced in my entire life. But based on that, I will use I will claim stolen valor as an export control expert.

The question of providing services, right, is interesting one. I think the way, the classic way that the government would, what I would try to export control, this if it wanted to, is it would export the actual control technology information that comes out of the model, right? So there is an argument that the government can export control, clinical technology, and technology in the, the status of regulations is defined as including information necessary

to operate other things that are export-controlled. And things that are definitely export-controlled are, for example, cyber intrusion software. So if the government is concerned that, and this does seem to be the nature of the concern, that you can use fable to get information that will log you to do cyber intrusions, what they could have done was export control the output from fable that gets that. But they didn't do that, like what's weird about the letter, right,

is that the letter only export controls the model. And I'm pretty sure that that means the model waits, and it cannot simply mean all access to the model. So I'm not saying the government can't export control these models in a way that would require and drop it to shut them down for everyone, but I'm not sure they have. And again, this is just like a basic component's question. And as to your point, Scott, of the difficulty of challenging this, yes, I agree. It's very

difficult to challenge the determinations themselves, but this would, in fact, be an ultra-virus case, right? Like the, what anthropic would go into court and say is not, hey, we think the commerce department is acting unreasonably or arbitrary or capriciously in export-controlled, our model, but not export-controlled open-AI's model, which has similar capabilities, it's that literally trying to do something that the statute does not allow them to do. I don't see anything

that would prevent anthropic from making that argument. Now, again, whether they want to, right, whether the C-suite has decided they want to do that is a different question, they clearly have decided that they don't at least not want negotiations with DCR on going.

But it's just, again, this is always the problem, right, with Trump stuff, like, you know,

you want to spend the time debating the merits, but then there's like basic housekeeping of like,

“did you even cite the right thing that you end up getting sidetracked into?”

I realize that the crux of this has to do with this flaw in the model that supposedly allows it to be jailbroken, and there's conflicting reports of this, of course, as we've been talking about. But I wanted to back up and talk a bit about the capabilities here, and like the power of the model, which are, I think, very cleverly marketed at, you know, within the names of Fable and Mithos. Like, as a starting point, did anyone here get to use

Fable in the fleeting moment that it was in the hands of the consumer? And if so, whether you would have done things differently had, you know, it would be so similarly ripped from your hands shortly thereafter. Yeah, I used Fable for like the few days that I could, and it was

hacker trying to penetrate, you know, secure systems. So I can't speak to whether Fable is a massive uplift, and I also didn't try, right? But for my, you know, stupid vibe coding projects, and my I occasionally taught, you know, I like to talk to a lot about interesting legal issues, to me Fable seemed a lot smarter, right? It did seem like a step-changing capabilities, and I will say that the, the kind of AI experts that I read who are often very skeptical of

Puffery from the labs also seemed to think that Fable was a substantial step-changing capability.

“So, yeah, I don't think Fable is just marketing nonsense. Like I really think this is”

this is the next frontier, and this is important because, you know, with that getting too much into the weeds of this, what it seems that Fable is is the next size of pre-training run

from anthropic, right? So basically, the way these models are developed is you do a giant pre-training

run, which is basically you take the entire internet, and now it's the entire internet plus lots and lots and lots and lots of data sets, and you train a base model to do a basically next token prediction. And then once you have that, and that takes months and months to run, that's a huge training run. Then, then what you'll do is then you'll do sort of fine tunings of that model or or sort of post-training runs based on other stuff that you want to get. And so what Fable seems to

be is the next step in like you add a zero to the size of the pre-training run, and it's notable that that did lead to a substantial uplift in capability. And the reason for that is that an additional pre-training run, or adding a zero to the pre-training run, does not require any clever architecture, right? It does not require cleverness, it requires just a lot of compute. So what that tells us is that

the scaling laws of capabilities are still alive and well, and if anthropic can do this with Fable,

that means that OpenAI, you know, GPT-6 or whatever they call the next thing is going to be this level of model. XAI is going to get their Google is going to get there with Gemini 3.5 Pro, or Gemini 4, you know, medicine to get there. The Open Source models are going to get there in six to nine months, right? The Chinese Open Source models. So if in fact, Fable is the sort of model that triggers emergency national security freak out. That's not an anthropic only problem. That

means that it's every single model from here on to forever is going to be considered this dangerous. And they get maybe it should be, but that obviously raises kind of, I mean, that just underscores the need for us to do, if we're going to have a licensing system, it's got to be not this, like it's got to be better thought out than whatever this bull is. Talk about clever marketing.

“I see how you slid in the, the name of your other podcasts, scaling laws in there. That's how”

you did there. Yay. Available on a podcast channel, do you have? I mean, I think that gets kind of at the dynamic here. Alan, because that, like, I'm torn on this issue generally. I will say, because like, I think it actually, you know, from a policy perspective, it kind of makes sense that you would want the US government to be able to say, hey, a given company, you've got a model that is doing new things. It's a little premature. We're worried about safety. We need to pull back on that. And

people agree with me, Dario Amodai, right? He says as much in essay, he released, I think just as a week or two, kind of suggesting he's been a big fan of export controls in the chip context and the semiconductor context for reigning in giving democratic countries an edge over China and authoritarian countries in developing AI models, which he thinks is a big challenge of this in this technology field, right? And this could fit into that. You could see a situation where like, yeah,

okay, this isn't going to be a problem. We're all going to do with a nine months, but the damn those nine months make a big difference, because nine more months that we can use mythos to get our system secured. So when, you know, deep secret or something else comes up, we're going to be a much more stable position than we would be otherwise. So even the timing thing, I don't think necessarily wears against this. The problem of this is two things. One, the competence problem,

because if you're concerned, really is that the anthropic hasn't put the guardrail in place, disabling their ability to even use their internal employees to address that quickly,

“seems like a problem. If that's why you're designing the foreign national in the United States”

Elman of the particularly seem problematic, maybe there was some additional license this is they included in this, maybe their intention was, we're going to immediately issue the license

for your employees that are essential to fix this problem. And that's just hasn't been reported.

It's possible. I think it'll be reported if it weren't how to play happening. That just seems like a odd move. And then we're fundamentally, there's just a trust problem. Like, like, we're in the situation where our priors are the Trump administration's got to be found for anthropic, because it clearly does, because we know it's pursuing all sorts of other very legally questionable actions against anthropic in other contexts. That may not be what have led to this. I actually think it,

like, there's real reason to think maybe this was a good faith effort by the Trump administration to take a policy choice, perhaps misguided, perhaps poorly executed, but still acting good faith. But how do you weigh that? How do you know? They were all dealing with these bit lack box information. You need some sort of regular process, governmental regulation, to weigh all this, that's got credibility and neutrality. And you're really hard to get that these days. And we

are questions about safety, because they've been on the head on the safety curve on the rhetoric for a long time, gives them, I think, a lot of credibility with certain audiences. But imagine that's referred to. Imagine this for XAI, in order Elon Musk, like, rushing this model of saying, "We've done this. We've done all these internal testing. We've been doing it for 60 days." Even though, and you know, discretionary process you set up by your EO is supposed to be discretionary.

We've done more than that. We're confident with it. Would you trust Elon Musk the same way you trust anthropic? You know, I would, I would not, because if you know, I would say,

“and I think I have good reasons for that, but that's my own bias. Like, that's my own lens, right?”

I know there are other people who don't agree with me the same way. How you, you know, impose these sorts of frameworks, you need to have some sort of institutional arrangement other than executive discretion if you get there. And I just don't see it, it's usually, you know, Congress taking this on to do this anytime soon. And I don't know what else kind of arrives other than a very messy debate that plays out in politics and policy realms around these issues that's as they can

arise. So I, look, I agree with you 100%. I don't know. I wouldn't actually count Congress out on this one. I think Congress is actually taking these issues around air regulation quite seriously. I mean, I have not dug into this with my understanding is that the current drafts of the NDA, the National Defense Authorization Act, are actually going to try to limit the supply chain risk authority that the government is trying to use against anthropic. Again, I haven't read the

details. I don't know if it's good, et cetera, et cetera, but I actually think that this is something that Congress does care about and should care about. And, you know, maybe if there's a silver lining here, it's that this might actually be the thing that kicks Congress into gear to, you know, put some put some processes around this. But yes, I think it's obviously moving to a licensing regime. We already have a de facto licensing regime. Let's just everyone commit to the bit and start

figuring out, okay, what is going to be the nature of the licensing regime? How can we make it limited? How can we make it, you know, actually expertise based? How do we avoid the first amendment issues that are kind of lurking around? But, yeah, I think it's clear that we have now

entered into the second. I think this applied chain designation was kind of always to me the

sign that we entered into the second phase of AI policy making in this country, which was, okay, we're going to nationalize this to some extent. And I think the export control fight we're having

“now is just clearly like, okay, we're really in this phase. That's always, like that's what we're”

talking about for the next year, everyone. Yeah, and I think part of that is because this strikes me as a much more bigger stuff in that direction, because these are actually much more credible than the supply chain designation. A hundred percent, like, I think there's much more stronger legal ground for the administration doing even if it's unwise. It's just harder to challenge and everybody understands there's some need for some sort of tool here. We don't have it. But yeah,

hopefully, hopefully, this is the thing that maybe gets Congress moving on this particular front. For now, we have to move on to a different topic, because when we're top one to get to today, we saw a dramatic moves by outgoing director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who has been notable. We all know from years and years prior to a seating that office for being somebody who buys into what many of you as conspiracy theories, opportunity regarding U.S. activities

overseas, sometimes with close dovetails, with rhetorical lines advanced by Russian propaganda machines and Russian intelligence and other avenues. And we're seeing that inclination perhaps

“come back to the four in the last few weeks of into office. We have perhaps most notably the repeal”

of a report by the Biden administration. An intelligence assessment that essentially said we do cannot reach the conclusion at this point that Havana syndrome, this phenomenon that's been affecting U.S. diplomats and U.S. intelligence officers overseas, many of them very tragically, having really a lot of life-long political consequences from it, or from whatever the variety of things that might be contributing to it, where many people have said there's reason to think

this is the result of some sort of energy directed energy weapon being implemented by Russia or someone else. The Biden administration or under the Biden administration, I should say the intelligence committee concluded there's not much we can say if we can't affirmably conclude that that's the case in line with our usual standards. And now in the last just day or two, it's not just

that, we've also seen Tulsi Gabbard take a more extreme step releasing a report basically suggesting

the United States was involved in biological weapons labs in the Ukraine. In other places, this is a direct borrow from kind of Russian rhetoric back from when they started this war. Early on, it's been pretty quickly debunked by people, including the lower loomer of all people pointing and suggesting that in fact, this is really channeling some direct talking points Russian intelligence and using open source information. And by the way, a lot of these

are labs to do things like watching for agricultural diseases, passing through agriculture, other sorts of disease things like pandemic, monitoring, and management that are part of what you kind of want to do to prevent something else from another global pandemic, as it happened in COVID. So Julia, I want to come to you on this. Obviously, as our resident intelligence community veteran, let's start with the fitness syndrome. That was what we originally

came to talk about. Then we have this labs issue kind of popped up since we originally set

the agenda. Like talk to us about where these fit into Gabbards kind of, well, first,

the impact she's had on the intelligence community and her time in this office. Yeah, so first, I want to reiterate my disclaimer that I do not speak for the United States government

on upon this issue and actually never worked on this issue with CIA. So my views on this are

“entirely based on the open source on classified record. So I think the first thing that we should”

talk about is that this is a really a tragic human story. US personnel, including fellow CIA officers, and their families experience something horrifying that has resisted satisfying explanation for about a decade. Across the US government, I think that the total number of cases was 1500 reported. Many of the people who were involved were Russia focused officers. And many of the victim community have been publicly unhappy with the findings that the intelligence community put out in

2023 and 25 that a foreign actor was very unlikely to have caused the incidents. And I will just say that from knowing people who have written on the subject or some of the best analysts that I've met in the business, very few judgments have caused more anguish than the AI issue. And we've spent nearly a decade of looking for answers on this that have all come up short. Medical imaging has not found a consistent biomarker. A consistent finding has been that no single mechanism can account

for all of the reported symptoms that people have experienced. But what makes this particularly agonizing is that it's possible that when this larger set of naturally occurring environmentally caused incidents, there could be a subset of foreign attacks that is causing permanent harm that could be hiding within that broader population of people who have been affected. And so this has been an agonizing problem for the intelligence community for the beginning. And it is

particularly important that the analysis be allowed to proceed without politicization, which is

“the next thing we should talk about. Yeah, so it is this difficult issue, I think, where you”

are in a situation where when you're accusing a foreign government of doing something like attacking your personnel, which can be taken as an, you know, of war in other contexts. I would say international law that's debatable. But generally, I would say there's plenty of countries going to see as begging and demanding and extremely strong response. It's something you wouldn't undertake

likely. You would set a high bar for reaching that conclusion. And that's always been part of my

operation of assumption and reading this issue is, but when you look back at the binary assessments, it was that, look, to reach this conclusion, we got to be pretty damn sure. And while there's a lot of problematic information here, we don't reach that sort of threshold. So what does it mean when you see that rescinded along with some of the rhetoric that Gabbard has made over the years, and I think reiterated in recent days about criticizing the Biden administration, suggesting that

there was some sort of cover up here. Where does that fit in this politicization element? And how does it align with these other steps that Gabbard's taken as she kind of exited the intelligence community? Yeah, so first I want to weigh the decision on its merits. She'll be taken seriously. In directing the Nick to rescind its products, the DNI outlined five alleged shortfalls with the prior assessments. It said that there was a selective exclusion of contrary information.

It mischaracterized the underlying raw reporting to suppress alternate conclusions and omitted information on source quality. There was all in a memo that had been sent to Congress earlier this week.

The first three critiques go to the heart of what intelligence analysis dragcraft is.

And if there were specific evidence behind them, there would be a serious problem here. But the public resision that was issued at least that we can see offers no evidence of why the prior assessments fell short against those standards. Earlier this year, the DNI actually released a new intelligence community directive that laid out a new set of analytic standards. But it's called ICD203. But while it's unclassified, it does not been made public.

And so they're judging the prior assessments against a document that we can't see. The final two charges, the DNI issued claimed that the assessments relied on ethically flawed medical studies and on limited collection that protected the existing analytic line that the absence of evidence ruled out of foreign involvement. These charges also may be valid or not, but the evidence behind them was not presented and could be presumably classified.

“Finally, I think that an important part of this is that after faulting these prior assessments”

without providing evidence for ruling out the foreign actor, the recall also fails to name one. In this case, it doesn't contend with a potentially obvious culprit who has the motive, the placement, the access, and possibly the technology to attack our officers. And so I guess I would in summarize this all as this was a recall, not a replacement. The DNI didn't show her work. She judged the prior assessments by a standard that no one can actually look at. And finally,

of what actually happened. And so that's why this is particularly difficult because the victims

of this phenomena deserve a relentless search for the truth and not to be dragged into another partisan score settling by a DNI who is now repeatedly politicized intelligence. And I think that

“that's how we should see this decision. Yeah, that's really helpful. This decision,”

coupled with, of course, the DNI, DNI Gabbard's past statements and actions, coupled with this biolab story, which I would characterize as, as she was sort of making hay over something that's already been out in the public and is was a legal program. So I definitely see the politicization motivation here and the political points that she would win among her base and

her Republicans. But as many, many, many people have pointed out this also, many of her actions and

narratives just perfectly track with Russian information operations. And I have to say, you know, there are a lot of accusations that she's a Russian asset. But she, if that's true, she has to be the worst Russian asset of all time because everyone is suspecting her to be so. I'm curious what what people make of the person nominated to succeed her and whether we will see this continued dual

“track of, you know, politicized intelligence and actions that seem to at the very least,”

be things that the Russians would not object to if anyone has any kind of predictions of whether, you know, this nominal pass J. Clayton and, you know, how he will compare to his predecessor.

I don't claim to know anything about J. Clayton. I know that it looked like he was on the fast

track for being confirmed, just based on the alternative of Bill Pulti who had been put forward. This is the person who had used mortgage fraud investigations to go after the president's political enemies. So a serious person with a serious background who does not show much evidence that he's going to be used as a weapon to go after political rivals would seem to be an improvement. I want to step back just to put a capstone on Tulsi's tenure as DNI and this does set a pretty

low bar that it would be easy to step over for the follow-in DNI. Probably the latest example of it is where the DNI has cloaked what is obviously an effort to bring down assessments that the administration disagrees with in the language of integrity, of counter corruption and attempting to root out politicization and weaponization while doing precisely that to the intelligence product. This reminds me a lot of President Xi Jinping launching an anti-corruption campaign

that just happens to only target his own potential rivals. So we've seen this repeatedly in the IC that the DNI is overseen. We saw this with Rackliffe with the recision of the 2016 election assessment. We're calling 16 CIA products going back a decade and now we're seeing it with the DNI going after a product that will win political points with the president's base. And it's quite a fitting end to Tulsi's tenure as probably the worst DNI in the office's 20-year

history and has led many people to question whether the DNI position should be abolished or fundamentally reformed given the danger that the DNI seems to pose to the nonpartisan nature of the intelligence community. Well folks, that is unfortunate all the time we have today for this

“set of topics. But this would not be rational secret if we did not leave you with some object”

lessons to ponder over in the week to come until we are back in your pod catcher. Tyler, what are you doing for us this week? I'm back on a podcast recommending a podcast. But if there's no other podcast, I'm going to be particularly furious. No, no, I will say it is it may be odd to hear, but I've been in a bit of a podcast of rent in terms of narrative series, but last week I was at Tribeka Audio, which is sort of the

audio arm of the film festival, and was just pretty blown away by the slate. So I encourage everyone to go look at the selections, both the showcase and the official selections of Tribeka Audio. I'll just shout out one in particular that I just started. It's phenomenal. It's called a whole other country. It's hosted by a reporter named Zoe Curland. It's from Marfa Public Radio. It's about this guy in Texas in the 90s who wanted to essentially succeed and create a

reconstitute the Republic of Texas. It's unfortunately very relevant today. I was just listening the news about all of these referenda and Illinois to break away from Chicago. So I highly recommend a whole other country and all the podcasts that were on display at Tribeka Audio. Wonderful.

travel with the with lots of podcasts, opportunities, and usually present themselves. Alan, what do you

“have for us this week? I have barbecue technology. So I still have my lane. I like it. I have as my”

main grill the master built gravity charcoal series. It's basically it's like a pellet

smoker, but instead of pellets, it's actual charcoal. It's just fantastic. And having owned enough for a couple of years, I decided to upgrade the temperature controller to the fireboard brand, which is this like aftermarket much better upgrade. And it's amazing. Like the I am such a 40 year old geek dad because now I can sit in my house on my phone and control my my pit with actual good Wi-Fi. Don't even have to go outside. It's so it's so it's like the temperatures are

so incredibly stable. It's just it's really improving my life. It's really good. I love it. I love it. This is my object lesson last week if you may have heard was my fancy new outdoor gas fired pizza oven. So we're in a similar way. Which one did you put in your dad technology? I went with the Gosney Ark XL. Okay. I highly recommend the dome I thought about. It's kind of wood fired too. But I was like one of my, I'm not going to use that, but maybe one day I'll upgrade the dome of the

Ark. I got to say it's pretty amazing. I'm not, you know, for like 90 second the Apollot and Cooks

and even like three four minute New York style Cooks, I'm not sure the wood does anything. Right? Like that's not it. You're just not going to make bread maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But who knows our smoke maybe? I don't know. It might be over and feed me pizza. Well, hey, we may, we may do that. We're back in the pizza having game. We have to have another law for Cook out of my house some time. I'd like, but not today. Today I'm going to bring you a very boring object lesson because I am

in fact somebody who's job title is in some circles scholar. I mean, I'm a really boring person. It has really boring habits. And I got really titulated by something that is really boring that I'm going to share with all of you, but maybe some of you will appreciate it. And that is that there is kind of a saucy fight on the Supreme Court last week in a case that nobody paid any

attention to, which is fun. If you are somebody who's interested in saturation interpretation,

which is a topic that I am interested in and read it up on on occasion. And this is the case F.S. Credit Opportunities Corps of V. Saba Capital Master Fund Limited. Yes, a title that lights the heart on fire with its specificity of these corporate entities doing each other over the investment company act. But it got into a really interesting debate between Justice Barrett wrote the 63 majority and Justice Jackson wrote kind of the lead descent or at least the

part of the sentence that's mostly directly responding to Barrett in this sort of exchange is only joined by Justice sort of Mayor of Justice Kay and kind of stepped aside and said, "Uh, I kind of buy it, maybe I'm not so much. I'm not going to lead on it here." And then join that part of the opinion. But it's all about the use of legislative history and how Justice Jackson argues that we should be able to use legislative history and lead on this

particular case to reach a country conclusion of which he argues is a fairly ambiguous statute. Barrett says, "No, there's a lot of going back and forth and it kind of gets at that question of, well, if you're a textualist and you don't like statutory interpretation based on legislative history and the statutory context, then how is it and why is it? You can use all of this material in terms of constitutional interpretation and that we can take the definition of what is a case

or a controversy and look at huge swaths of historical tradition and practice and pretend

“like that is less prone to cherry picking than a defined legislative record. I think a fairly”

compelling critique that I don't get brought to the fore that often any more but Justice Jackson at least nods at in this consent descent. So, if you are interested in statutory interpretation, I think it's a great, I think it's a great little teaching tool. Honestly, if you're a, uh, somebody teaching legislation or maybe even Kala or a couple other topics that might be relevant to. So worth checking out, it's just one, it's a relatively short opinion

of writing that 40 pages in this honestly, just like a three part section, three, four paragraph section of or page section of Justice Barrett's opinion and I think about the same, just Jackson's descent, maybe a little bit less. So worth checking out and nods to the advisory opinion podcast that tip me off to this particularly interesting read as they dug into it. I think last week one of their episodes. So worth a read if you are of that particular type of nerd. And with that

Julia, I really thrown you a softball. I've given you the opposite of a dog act to follow. So,

“go ahead, give us your inaugural object lesson. What do you have to share with us this week?”

Well, I've been waiting for this for almost 10 years. So, let me let me give it to you. Back in 2017 to 2019, I was a PDB briefer working in the Trump White House in the middle of the rest of the investigation. And every day after a good 12-hour days, I would come home exhausted, I would curl up on my couch and I would bring up my mug and I would listen to rational security talk about the days affairs. And it was like the deep state therapy hour that I really needed.

And so, because this pride month and I proud of myself and proud of my people in the CIA, I'm proud of the intelligence community, I'm proud of everyone who speaks truth to power. I just wanted it to show you my mug and tell you how grateful I am now to get the chance to work

life to. And it's really been a pleasure to get to meet all of you. Well, we are incredibly

“excited to have you for those who cannot see the video. That is a mug that has in the Ohio”

States or in the model, real twist to the knife to you, JDV. And I suppose it was a deep state

logo, which I want one of these mugs wherever they may be in your career. They're about to get

a run on there, whatever their sales may be. Borgas, we are thrilled to have you Julia with us now here at law fair and excited to have you here on Russia's Security for this episode. And

“no doubt some more episodes to come until then, though, we are out of time. Remember that”

rational security is a production of law fair. So be sure to visit lawfirmedia.org for our show page for links to pass episodes for a written work and the written work of other law fair contributors and for information on law fairs, other phenomenal podcast series. While you're at it,

“be sure to follow law fair on social media, wherever you socialize your media, be sure to leave a”

rating or review where you might be listening and sign up to become a material supporter of law fair on Patreon for an ad free version of this podcast among other special benefits. For more information visit lawfirmedia.org/support. Our audio engineer producer this week was

an old band of goat rodeo and our music has always performed by Sophia Yan and we were once again

ended by the wonderful Jen Patcha. On behalf of my guest, Julia Tyler, Ari and Alan, I am Scott our Anderson and we will talk to you next week. Until then, goodbye. Rechte Apple Pay in secunden ein, noch vor dem Anstoß. Gön dir neustriko, Hutsnex in der Halbzeit, übernimmt die Rechnung und feier den Sieg. Einfach dein iPhone dran halten und fertig. Apple Pay kannst du überall nutzen, wo Kontaktloses bezahlen acceptiert wird.

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