Accountability for Pentagon Leadership

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Left, right, and center. Available everywhere you get podcasts. Welcome back to Pod Save the World I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. Uh Ben this morning I saw a bunch of coverage of Jeff Bezos kind of buying the Met Gala . And then I read a story about the family that owned Samsung paying an $8 billion inheritance tax bill. And I thought, we could do that. Maybe the Koreans know something we don't. Not that I I don't know. Not that the back gala is always my jam, but there's something kinda gross about it. Yeah, you know, it's a little uh late-stage capitalism, you know, whatever. It's very like uh collapsing Roman Empire vibes. Caligula. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh anyway, but yeah, it did make me think like, oh yeah, we remember all that ranting and raving about the death tax and how it'll hurt farmers and all this bullshit and that's just protecting billionaires who pay. Well he didn't invite any of the good parties in high school, so now he has to buy the biggest party in the world for his wife. It's fun. Aaron Powell I'd like to I just want to note, because there's a lot of uh uh my algorithm has trained me for Nick's Twitter and absolutely pasted the Sixers yesterday, getting revenge for you. Um Celtics just but a there hu'ges uh divide because Ben Stiller, Nick's superfan, went to the Met Gala. Okay. He's getting dragged pretty hard. Why? Uh I I I give him a pass. He's always there. I'm not mad at Ben Stiller. I will note that Timmy Chalamet went to the game. Oh, I see, instead of going to the game. Yeah. Did you also I also love when Ben Stiller tweeted, Well, we got that done clearly about the Knicks and people thought it was about the correspondence center assassination itself. This is really fun. So I have a NYX text thread with my best friends from high school, and it's the funniest thread because it's literally like we know we're watching the game, so we'll just be like, oh gee. Cat. Right. Got it. No content. And Ben Stiller literally tweets like he's on our thread. You have no idea what he's talking about. It's just like we got it. Oh, we almost had it. And then then these MAGA people are like, I can't believe you can believe we almost got Trump. Everything is politics. Even for us. Right. Even for us. Even us. We like sports. Even these nerds, agree. Uh, we got a great show today. We're gonna cover all the latest from Iran, from Trump's plan to guide ships through the Straito Hormuz and why the administration is insisting that the U.S. and Iran f literally firing at each other. They sank a bunch of boats. Apparently that's not a ceasefire violation. Interesting. Uh and then we'll talk about some newly leaked intelligence about the impact of the US and Israeli bombing campaign on Iran's nuclear infrastructure or lack thereof. Uh and whether there's any semblance of a plan or an end game for negotiations. We'll dig into the politics back home, uh some polling data from the post over the weekend, uh, and then we'll uh tell you guys what we've heard from people on the ground in Iran. We'll also cover how this is impacting Trump's upcoming trip to China, the latest from Lebanon, and the truly hellish situation on the ground for people in Gaza and the lack of any reconstruction efforts. Then we're gonna do an update on the war between Russia and Ukraine, uh the political situation in Russia, and then we'll have a little fun at the end at the expense of a US ambassador. Ben hasn't seen any of the things. I don't know what this is. I Michael has a sense of humor that's a usually lands. This will be fun. Trusting Michael Uh trust. Trust the plan. And then you'll hear my interview with Congressman Jason Crow from Colorado, uh, who you know well, Ben. We talked about Iran, uh efforts by Congress to force an authorization of the war. His grilling of Pete Heggseth last week, he took an interesting tack focused on this one really shady staffer at the Pentagon and made some interesting news. Can I just say because we kick around Democrats as they need to be Yeah. And and like just and like gets it and is taking on Trump on the war in the right ways, is leading the uh D triple C the Congressional Campaign Committee candidate recruitment. Anyway, every now and then we need to point out that there's some good Democrats out there. Yeah, there's some great Democrats out there. It's um it's easier to be mean than nice, but you're right. It's good to see. Well, unfortunately, the Democratic Party gives us a lot of reasons to be mean. A lot of reasons to be mean. Um uh and by the way, Ben is actually doing today's episode topless to help us get more views on the Pod Save the World YouTube page. Thank you for your service, Ben. You're looking great. You've been working out. Um, that's probably a joke, but you're gonna have to subscribe to find out. Uh but please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube to ensure you don't miss any pop tops, any bonus episodes we do there about breaking news. Also, you help us display Spen Shapiro out of the YouTube algorithm and five. You may need to come up with someone other than Ben Shapiro because I noticed the Daily Wire numbers are Tankin'. Tankin' tough. Tough, tough. It turns out just being died in the world and then Yahweh supporters not. Yeah, it turns out uh being just pro-war neoconnor propaganda isn't as profitable as saying uh Emmanuel Macron's wife has a dick. And we got Pablo Torre winning a Pulitzer for sports reporting. I don't know we land somewhere in the middle. No, Pablo's the best. Uh Adam Potts of America a while back. Uh also prize winner. Yeah, Pulitzer Prize winner. If you like the work Crooked Media is doing, by the way, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. At Crooked.com slash friends, you get ad-free episodes of this show, add-free episodes of PodSafe America. You get great bonus content from PodSafe America. You get Dan Pfeiffer diving deep into polling. Uh, and it's really the single best thing you can do to help us grow as a progressive independent media company. Also, subscribers get early access and discounted tickets to CrookedCon. Another CrookedCon perks, TBD, maybe more topless Ben at CrookedCon. Oh possible. It's the first time you're hearing about this, but there is a there's a movement. Me and Hassan Piker will go to us together and we'll we'll see you as a better body. I think it's probably not better. I think I know who it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not you, Hassan. Uh cricket con. You know that Jordan and our team works out in Hassan's house in West Hollywood. Oh, really? Crush and Burpees and stuff. Yeah. Socialist burpees. It's pretty cool. Um, CrookedCon happening November 5th through 7th in DC. Go to crookedcon .com for more info. Should we talk about it, Ron? I think we should. I think we should . Because somebody has to uh you know wade into the cesspool of lies that emanates from our government. Yeah. Straight of bullshit. So the big news this week is this Pentagon plan to quote unquote guide ships through the straight of four moves, not escort and defend guide. It's called Project Freedom. I guess to your freedom the freedom to get shot. I it's still ongoing. It's paused. Trump was so happy about that name. Yeah he, did really love that name, Project Freedom . Uh again, Hegzeth says this is a distinct mission from Epic Fury. It's not a naval escort mission. He and Trump also insist that Iran firing at US Navy ships in the Strait of Homo , firing at targets in the UAE and Oman at a South Korean ship, the list goes on. It's not a breach of the ceasefire. Uh and CENCOM also says that uh US helicopters sinking six Iranian boats, also not a breach of the ceasefire. Um I guess that probably tells you everything you need to do. They're giving the Iranians, I guess, the same treatment they give the Israelis, which they can bomb Gaza and Lebanon with impunity and still say there's a case. It also probably tells you that Trump does not want to go back to war. Anyway, um, here is Heg Seth talking about this new mission This operation is separate and distinct from Operation Epic Fury. Project Freedom is defensive in nature, focused in scope, and temporary in duration , with one mission: protecting innocent commercial shipping from Iranian aggression. American forces won't need to enter Iranian waters or airspace, it's not necessary. We're not looking for a fight. But Iran also cannot be allowed to block innocent countries and their goods from an international waterway . Iran is the clear aggressor. As a direct gift for the United States to the world, we have established a powerful red, white and blue dome over the street. Once again, America is using its strength to lift up others. Iran is trying to subjugate the world. To our partner partners, allies, and the rest of the world, this is a temporary mission for us. As I've said before, the world needs this waterway a lot more than we do . We're stabilizing the situation so commerce can flow again, but we expect the world to step up. At the appropriate time and soon we will hand responsibility back to you. Giving the world a double. Is it like world beefy? Remember that basketball player? He talks about the world like it's a guy. Like some some guy named World to step up. Something about the way he talks just annoys the shit out of you. Everything? It's his cat in the hat, war crime, beat poetry, not it just drives me nuts. So CENCOM says project freedom uh will involve guided missile destroyers, over a hundred land and sea aircraft, and fifteen thousand service members. They're also like very clearly eager to hand this mess off to other countries soon, Ben. So I imagine they'll be cutting and running. Sure, there are a lot of takers. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of so Ben, like I'm genuinely confused by the end game here for Trump. Like there's no chance this half-ass planta, like quote unquote guide ships is going to get traffic through the strait back to pre-war levels. I guess we can hand it off to other countries like you you said, but like no one has our naval capacity. Um so I I guess you know maybe everybody just ends up paying a toll or the strait remains remains partially closed and it just crushes the global economy. I don't know. So I like I'm trying to charitable here. I'm trying to genuinely understand the strategy for the straight before we get into the nuclear stuff. D do you have any like sense of what they're doing? I think that the fact that we're sitting here, you know, two months into this war and we a war that was started again to change the regime and and the nuclear program and usher and freedom in Iran has led to Project Freedom to be a GPS service for uh ships that are already stuck in the Straight or Moose. You know, it just shows you the catastrophic error again. There are a number of things that jumped out to me. They they are worried about the absence of legal basis. So the reason I think that they're going to these great lengths to call it a project freedom and say it's distinct from um Epic Fury is because under the War Powers Act, which they have ignored, that's the the act that says Congress must uh you know uh authorize uh a war , you can kind of get a sixty day period where you're allowed to um engage in military action uh before you really get in trouble, you know. Um if you're responding to an imminent threat, which Jason Crow kept uh correcting me on because th there was no imminent threat. Because there's no imminent threat. But clear because there he said when he was on the hill that there there it was over because of the ceasefire. So they have to make this seem different. It's interesting that he seems to care about that. That just shows you that the the he doesn't care about Democrats. That shows you that even Republicans are feeling humiliated as they should by the absence of any congressional authorization. The second thing is there i i I cannot possibly overstate how insulting their tone towards the rest of the world is, you know. Um you've done a very good job week after week at detailing these massive shortages that are crippling the economies of countries around the world, leading to severe shortages, making life hell for like probably untold millions of people around the world. And so for him to kind of smarmally say, you know, like some tra der who just did a line of coke in the bathroom before he wanders out to the floor. You know, well, you guys, you know, we you we don't need this as bad as you do, and you better come in here. Like like w what is that for? Like who who is that for? Like who is the audience for that? Because if it's the quote unquote friends and allies he's talking about th he they have no friends anymore. They lost them. And and that that's not gonna make them wanna step up, you know. Right. And and then the last thing is they just fundamentally because they did such piss-poor planning about this whole thing and didn't even anticipate that they closed the straight of four moves they don't anti they don't even understand that the problem is not that the there's a lack of guidance for the ships. Um it's that their minds in the Strait of Hormuz, that the Iranians are firing at tankers, that that there's a fear factor that no amount of guidance uh is going to solve. And similarly, if the United States Navy, which is the strongest in the world, can't reopen the Strait, which it has not, no matter what they say. They don't control the strait. If they control the Strait, all the ships would get out. Um it's not like some pickup team of other countries can do it either. So he like it's just this kind of weird mix of defense and offensive political messaging with no strategy attached to it. Yeah, and there are there's twenty nearly twenty-three thousand sailors on fifteen hundred or more vessels that are just trapped in the Gulf, like trying to get out. And that that is that's what's at stake right now. And Rubio also did a briefing at the White House today. There did this full court press. There was this bizarre event this morning where Trump was um uh bringing back like the national fitness award that thing we did as kids Noah Sindergaard uh ex-Met pitcher was there was that it was always sad to see it's always sad when the athletes you like turn out to be MAGA some shredded MAGA guy yeah he was there. But Trump's like talking about like blowing up Iranians in front of all these children. So there was that. Then Hegseth and uh Kane did their briefing and then Rubio went to the White House briefing room today and was just like a pig and shit, like so happy to be there, so excited about what he thinks is his future job. But anyway, Rubio said the blockade is costing Iran five hundred million uh dollars a day. And Trump did this interview with um his staffer, Hugh Hewitt, on his radio show earlier this week about like oil and gas infrastructure in Iran and said uh and they say that in two weeks, you know, when they talk about time, in two weeks they're going to have a natural explosion of their oil that's going to make it impossible for them to really recover from. So Trump seems to think that if the blockade goes on, it will permanently blow up the Iranian oil and gas infrastructure, and maybe that's his plan to bring them to the table. But again, the Iranians are like, they're not even willing to negotiate about nuclear issues right now. Their offer is uh a ceasefire from the U.S. and Israel, so also in Lebanon. They want uh sanctions relief, they want other financial benefits, and then they're willing to talk about the uh nuclear issues once the war is basically over . And then um Trump won't even specify what a uh a ceasefire violation would look like. And like I don't know if you watch the Cain and Hegzeth briefing, but the reporters using like mine carrying dolphins to attack ships. Or like kamikaze dolphins. So that's where we're at in terms of the reporting on this. Yeah. I I I think first of all , um they have no plan and they because it when you go to war not knowing why you're going to war, other than the Bibi Nan Yao convince you to do it, you don't even really know what you're trying to get in the negotiation. And then they're trying to spin their way out of this, but the reality doesn't allow them to spin it. My own my only observation I add out to this, and it's it deals with the military. You know, we always have to do a lot, you know, this is kind of throat clearing about how great the military is, and it is. Like the people in it, you know, a lot of them are wonderful people. Dan Kane has been really disappointing to me. I mean I I texted you, I watched that. He's not as bad as Hexeth, so you're watching and you're like, Oh, this guy seems better than Hex eth. But he's gilding the lily, you know. It's more factual in nature, but yeah. It's more factual in nature. It's it there's some tether to the truth, but he gives you kind of a blizzard of very tactical details that add up to no strategy. Um and and so i i he but by standing there next to Hegseth and trying to make the military operation seem like remarkably competent, um he's kind of putting, you know, he's putting lipstick on this pig. Look, it's always hard to play the game of what does Trump actually believe, because everything out of his mouth about this war is a lie or a half-truth. But I I do think that they're brief ing him. Like the blockade's going great, sir, you know. Yeah. Um this blockade is never in the history of blockades has there been a blockade like this blockade and Iran is losing five hundred million dollars a day, sir, and the the oil you know things will blow up in two weeks, which I think they said that two weeks ago by the way. That that's what I think too. Like quite literally. And and and I think that they're doing a grave disservice to the country and the world if they're doing that. know that for a fact, but it seems like that. Because Trump like just likes to be told how well everything's going. And then he goes out and he repeats it in a dumber version and he and he amps it up. But it I can kind of feel that happening here. And look just, because you can like position ships somewhere doesn't mean you have a good strategy. It doesn't mean that what you're doing is working. And good military advice is going to the president of the United States and saying, this is not working. We cannot solve this problem militarily like Yeah, I mean while the Pentagon press corps is like, uh do you have suicide bomber dolphins swimming around the Strait of Romans? Okay, Ben, as has become our tradition, uh immediately after we wrapped the show, Donald Trump sent a tweet that I actually I don't know the implications of this one. Well the war's ended like several times right after we take the million ceasefire. Everything's better. So here's what he truthed on Truth Social. Uh based on the request of Pakistan and other countries, the tremendous military success that we've had campaign against our country of Iran. And additionally, the fact that great progress has been made toward a complete and final agreement with representatives of Iran, we've mutually agreed that while the blockade will remain in full force and effect, project freedom, the movement of ships through the Strait of Hormuz will be paused for a short period of time to see whether or not the agreement can be finalized and signed uh from President Donald J. Trump. I have no fucking clue what that means. I mean it means we won Tommy. I think it sort of means maybe that this whole plan wasn't working for all the reasons we just discussed and were skeptical of . And now they're gonna pretend that they're close to signing some sort of real agreement to reopen the circuit? Yeah, I mean uh not to be cynical. Uh I'm g I'm coming from a cynical. But perhaps Project Freedom Freedom did not succeed in lowering the oil prices as he might have wanted. Um and so now we're trying a different tack, because all he really cares about is the markets. Yeah, but he's he's seeming to suggest that they're close to a final agreement. But as we discussed, I mean the Iranian position was like full ceasefire There's an agreement for him to have that involves Sanctions relief. Iran, you know, getting a lot and return for little. And so at some point one of these will be true. Right. And there'll be a deal in which the IRGC is still in charge of Iran and they get a bunch of money from either sanctions relief for tolling the straight or unfrozen assets in return for some pretty cosmetic nuclear concessions, or maybe some medium-sized ones like the JCPOA. And and maybe this will be the time, or maybe this is just another effort to try to lower gas prices. But I don't know, Tommy. Um would you put Project Freedom up there with Operation Overlord, the uh Normandy invasion? I mean, yeah, it's up there. Uh it's just a remarkable success for Secretary Heggseth and one of the greatest bloggers. Here's your map, Operation Freedom. Okay. Well, we wanted to cop and just tell you guys that this true social post was sent. The story of this war is Trump uh just kicking the can down the road per every twenty four hour news cycle and market moving events just to kind of keep the m stock market on sides. Yeah, I wonder what trades will learn took place right before. Yeah, I'm sure Don Jr. has a bunch of futures at bay. But uh okay, we're gonna go back to the regular show and we're gonna talk about the big picture issues, the nuclear stuff, the things that really matter. But uh another truth social post. Diplom diplomacy by social media, going great. Podsate the world is brought to you by Acorns. There are a million reasons why people talk themselves out of investing. It can feel like they don't have enough money to do it. They don't know enough information. Maybe they don't know how. 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We hit all new highs, and I said we have to take care of business because we can't let that happen. So we did a little detour , and it's working out very nicely. Our country's booming now, despite the fact that we're in a I call it a mini war. I did a poll on the war with Iran and they said only thirty two percent of the people like it. Well I don't like it and I don't like war at all. It's a golden age for America. You know, we had it all-time high stock market today, despite that we're in a little skirmish, military. I call it a skirmish, because Iran has no chance. So to summarize, it's a mini war or a skirmish, the polls are fake, uh, but the stock market is up, so who cares? So more importantly, Ben, um there was a report from Reuters on the impact of Epic Fury, the most recent round of fighting, on Iran's nuclear program. Reuters reported that US intelligence believes that the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer uh when analysts determined that the previous strikes, Operation Midnight Hammer, had set them back, uh it basically pushed the timeline back to a year. So in other words, like the latest round of fighting has not set Iran's nuclear timeline back any further. Before the war in June, US intelligence said Iran was three to six months away from having a high enough highly enriched uranium to build a nuke after the 12-day war. They said it was nine to twelve months away, and now they're still about a year away. So it's not clear that this has done anything on the nuclear front. Um, of course, we've taken out the US and Israel have taken out a lot of conventional military capacity, killed a lot of Iran's leaders, but um that's not this what this was supposed to be about. So I mean Ben, the w again, we're not having nuclear talks that we know of the US and Iran, but the state of positions remain very par far apart. Again, earlier this week, Trump talked to uh neocon fanboy Hugh Hewitt. He told him he wanted all of Iran's highly enriched uranium out of the country. Iran refuses to do that. Trump has said repeatedly that Iran can't do any nuclear enrichment. Iran repeatedly has asserted its right to enrich. U Trhump wants to cap their missile program. He wants to end their support for proxies. Seems unlikely that the IRGC is gonna be down with that. Um so again, I'm trying to figure out an end game, a path forward, some like common ground in these talks, but I'm just I I'm struggling to see it. I think that the the fundamental problem here is we had this debate back in uh twenty fifteen, uh when the Iran nuclear deal went into effect. And uh having looked at the problem for years , um, and having gotten the same presentation uh a version of it that Netanyahu gave Trump uh to to When we looked at that, you know, and we we also looked at what was possible at the negotiating table, you know, what became very clear is number one, you cannot destroy a nuclear program by bombing it. You you just can't. They know how to do this. They know how to do the nuclear fuel cycle. They have uranium. They have the capacity to build centrifuges that can enrich that uranium. They have the capacity to stockpile it. You can bomb buildings where that takes place You could invade the country and fully occupy it and hunt down every last scientist and you know piece of the uh the the program, but we're obviously not gonna do that either. So therefore you can only resolve this issue diplomatically. If you resolve it diplomatically, there is absolutely no way that the Iranian government will ever agree that they do not have the capacity to enrich uranium. That they're going to abandon that in perpetuity. They're just not going to do that. Like it's we'd like that to happen. They're not going to do that. And so therefore, all you can do is negotiate some restrictions on their program where they're shipping the nuclear material that they produce out of the country, they're operating less centrifuges, and there are inspections. That's the Iran nuclear deal. That's the JCPOA. The only thing available to Trump as an off-ramp to this war, potentially, because I don't know if the Iranians are even in the mood to do it, is basically the deal that Obama had that he tore up. Right. And and agreeing to that would reveal the absolute fucking insanity of not just Trump, but the entire Iran and Iran war industrial complex, you know, all the Lindsey Graham's, obviously the Israelis, obviously the hack , you know, shit posters online who work at you know think tanks that have had no purpose for existing other than to cheerlead for a war with Iran. They they they those people cannot admit that they were wrong. And the only way out of this war is for them to, if not admit that they're wrong, tacitly admit they're wrong by essentially trying to pursue a version of what Obama's nuclear deal was. I mean, honestly I, think that's where it is. And Trump, you know, they've tried all these other metrics, like we blew up some of their conventional military, we killed these leaders, and and and everybody can see with their own eyes that the IRGC took our best punch and is still standing, that they control the Strait of Formuz, and that they actually have more enriched uranium in a stockpile than they had the day Trump pulled out of that nuclear deal. And what was this all for not just this war, this whole last decade, what was it for? I i i the insanity of it i i is just apparent and Trump doesn't understand these things. But the I think the the core point here is absent something like that, this war like literally there's accomplished precisely nothing and at unbelievable cost. Yeah, according to US intelligence, it's just nothing They'll find a way to do it. So like this is completely insane that this happened. Aaron Powell and by the way, that event with the kids , um Trump talked about the power of nuclear weapons, he talked about killing Iranians, he did his whole riff about like trans athletes, and then he said to them, Barack Hussein Obama, have you heard of him? Uh again to a bunch of kids. Do you think that uh set a remar ks is gonna wind up in your forthcoming book about great speeches? I will say having spent four years writing a book to try to tell the history of the United States through fifteen uh consequential speeches. That's gotta make it in there. Including speeches I don't agree with. You know, the vice president of the Confederacy is in there, Reagan's in there. Um the the the degree to which the bar has lowered here uh in Trump. I will say to people though, book is out three weeks from today. Okay. So now's we're in that sweet pre-order winning. If you are planning to buy the book, buying it now helps a lot because if you get some pre-orders, they ship more books to the bookstores and it all works out better. Um get them on that list. Yeah. Where do they go? Just go to the MC. Wait, wait, give them a give them a way to buy it. I mean you can go to Amazon, you go to bookshop. Oh uh I gotta I refine my plug. Always say the battle for American identity. Uh And actually don't go to Amazon, go to bookshop because of the Met Gala. Uh go to Bookshop. That's supports independent bookstores. Uh and then I'm gonna be hitting the road. I'll be on a book tour. Um, I'm gonna be going to like, I don't know, 15 places. So uh we'll make that available. I I will have to say to the San Francisco World O's too, uh in particular though, because tickets are on sale now, I'll be at City Arts Arts and Lectures uh on June 9th uh with Jelani Cobb. I'm excited about that event. I know we got some San Francisco listeners. Got a lot of sub-listeners. Great city. Um okay, so the politics of this are uh becoming quite clear. I mean, it's a political disaster for Trump. The Washington Post had a poll out over the weekend. Uh some numbers for you, Ben. You tell me these are good. Uh overall approval rating for Trump is thirty-seven percent. Approval of handling of Iran is thirty three percent, sixty-six percent disapproved. Approval on inflation is twenty seven percent. Obviously that's getting worse every day because of oil and gas prices. Cost of living , 23 percent approval. Uh sixty-one percent think going to war with Iran was a mistake. Sixty-five percent aren't confident that will prevent Iran from getting a nuke. Twenty-two percent think that Trump's actions against Iran are consistent with his prom ises in the twenty twenty four election. So I mean look, all these numbers suggest that they want to run screaming from this thing. I think it was the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump keeps like kind of toggling between wanting to severely punish Iran for not doing what he said, but also worrying about getting pulled deeper into the conflict. I think anyone who's gotten in one of these regime change wars over the last couple decades could have told him that military action was not gonna drive political change in Iran, but here we are. Good luck getting yourself out of this one, big guy. He can't get out of it and and you cause you can't change prices, you can't change how people are feeling and what they're seeing. I think the other thing from all these clips uh that stands out to me is that there's a convergence of the extent to which he's out of touch that I think is important. And you're seeing some people on the MAGA right pick up on this, uh including people like Tucker Carlson, um, which is that you know he now is pivoting to the stock market. You know, uh well, you know, the war is you know we had to do this detour. It used to be an excursion, now it's a detour. But the stock market's at an all-time high. I think actually that is the precisely wrong message because people are beginning to get, you know, wise to the fact that the stock market is completely fucking juiced by an AI bubble. Oh yeah. And so basically Trump is up there boasting about the fact that a very small number of people are making a bunch of money on an AI bubble creating technologies that are going to come for your jobs while he's fighting a war that does nothing for you and makes your gas prices higher and it's gonna start to affect things like fertilizer and all these other things that people uh really depend upon in this country. Um and and so i in a way the war itself, you know, it's pulled back the curtain that the emperor has no clothes, he has no idea what he's doing. He's broken his promises. He never probably believed them in the first place. But also like even his way to spin himself out of it Because telling people that they shouldn't be upset about high gas prices or a war or the Democrats. Oh absolutely. Especially yeah, you barely own stocks. I mean most rich people own the stocks. Um but speaking of we've also been trying to figure out what's going on in Iran band. I mean our our producers have been trying really hard to get in touch with people on the ground. Obviously that's very hard. There's an internet blackout, there's all these threats from the regime. Um but just to give you a sense of what kind of conditions people are living under. So one contact we did get in touch with through an intermediary received this text afterward. This is verbatim. Dear citizen, following a review of actions carried out in cyberspace and pursuant to articles of the Islamic penal code, your act of approving and publishing criminal content in cyberspace is currently under investigation by the cyber police. Obviously, that person didn't want to talk further. We were finally able to connect with another civilian in Iran, uh, a teacher. We decided not to play the audio of that message because we just didn't want to create any risk for this person. We wanted to share some of what was said. Um they said their ability to teach has been severely disrupted by the ongoing blackout on internet access. They said even with the expensive uh VPN services, internet access is limited and unstable, and that people have to spend a large part of their income just to stay connected. There's a type of government provided internet, often referred to the national restricted internet, that gives you some basic access, but it comes with control and monitoring and all sorts of restrictions. Um and because of that, people don't feel comfortable using it. And overall just getting online is no longer simple. It's expensive. It's unstable. And it comes with a bunch of trade-offs between access, quality, and privacy. And then they on terms of fear of the government, quote, we do not have freedom, we do not have freedom of expression, even basic forms of dissent can lead to serious, serious consequences. People can be detained or face severe accusations. In my own experience, I've received threatening messages simply for liking a few posts on Instagram. It's not normal that a simple action like liking a post on Instagram can lead to intimidation and make you feel like your own safety could be at risk. So Trump occasionally now we'll mention the protesters killed earlier this year. He did some weird thing today where he said that forty thousand people were killed by five snipers, which uh doesn't make a lot of sense. Um, but it's worth noting that he's almost exclusively made their lives worse and and deepen the repression that they face from the regime. Trevor Burrus Yeah. I talked to someone I know here, a friend of mine whose family's uh Iranian and they were describing the you know the the circuitous way they have to get news. Like they can't really be I'm I I I I'm just gonna say something to kind of introduce a new idea here, Tommy, which is uh in the regime is nothing to do with the IRGC, the Iranian regime, and how repressive they are. We we have a deeply fucked up foreign policy because of how routinely we ignore the human cost of all the things that we're do around the world. And this war is case in point. The girls school we bombed on the first day is case in point. The other thing I would say though is that, you know, somebody asked me recently, well, what what do you regret about the Iran deal? You know, and and usually they that's like, you know, they want me to say like this sunset clauses should have been 12 years instead of ten or something. I actually regret when I when I think and if I were to make a recommendation for what Trump should do, not that he'd listen to me, let's lift the sanctions on Iran. Uh and I know the whatever intern listens to this podcast from Maybe not everything. But like, is this helping them? We've had the we've been sanctioning the shit out of this country for twenty years, that teacher's life is far more miserable because of it. Yeah. And she's getting repressed more because of our sanctions. Our sanctions empower the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Do not listen any longer to these hawks who tell you that the way that you care about human rights is by sanctioning countries and cutting off basic goods and collapsing currencies. You know what? If you lifted Cuba. Yeah . If you lifted sanctions like and you know, try to get something, try to get the nuclear program d do bigger sanctions relief. Yeah, yeah. Because um seriously try to so incremental and limited. Because you know what? That that teacher and all these people in Iran like are are uh might still be dealing with uh like an intolerable amount of repression, but their lives would be better. And if we think that sanctioning this country or sanctioning this regime is somehow changing it, it is entrenched the the worst people in Iran deeper in power. And so this is a bigger conversation we can have going forward. But one idea for Democrats looking for new ideas is, and by the way, because what up sanctions are hurting people, they're also gonna shoot us in the face because the Chinese are going around the world saying this is why you got to get off the dollar is the world's reserve currency. And so what are we doing here? We're acting against human human interest and we're acting against America's long-term interests by pursuing these insane sanctions policies on Iran, on Cuba, and all these countries, that things just get worse in those countries. Minister is there this week to get ahead of that visit. Uh listeners probably remember that this China trip was supposed to happen in late March, early April, but Trump delayed it to deal with the Iran War. I'm sure this conversation you were just talking about about how the Chinese can help Iran and other countries get around U.S. sanctions is front and center in that conversation. But despite the delay, I mean Trump was like, Oh, look, we have to delay this trip because then the war will be over and then we could focus on the real things. Like no, the the the China the Iran war has totally overtaken the trip. Trump kind of tried to low key it today, talk about how nice China has been to him during the war, how they haven't challenged us. Um but uh Treasury Secretary Scott Besson had a slightly different take earlier this week on I think he was on Fox News or Fox Business. Let's watch. Let's see if you know China China, let's let's see them step up with some diplomacy and get the Iranians to open the street. And China has been buying ninety percent of their energy, so they are funding the largest state sponsor of terrorism. That's quite a broadside in advance of Trump's trip. Not quite on a message there, Scotty. Right. So why does China have to open it? I don't know. I mean, first of all, there's a cognitive dissonance. And and and and second of all, these guys talk like it's, I don't know, nineteen ninety-two or something? Like China, do you think China gives two shits what Scott Besson says? Like that like he can order around Xi Jinping? Um I mean we we're just living in uh there there's a reality in the world and then there's like the Trump reality and and and increasingly people aren't even trying to kind of play along with it like they were at the beginning when they were a little afraid of tariffs and things like that. Look, Trump is is intimidated by Xi Jinping. You can tell. Yeah. You know, he's always praising him. Doesn't want to piss him off. He's afraid he got his ass handed to him in a trade war. Um and and now he's created a huge problem for the Chinese and everybody else 'cause they were you know have supply lines that uh and and and and energy needs that like run into Iran. Uh but like just hectoring them. I mean if they were doing smart diplomacy, it's kind of like what I say, just so we can be constructive here. Look a smart diplomatic effort would be like, look, we fucked up, let's try to solve this problem comprehensively. You c you know, you work on the Iranians to kind of open up the strait. We will lift some of these sanctions so that you can buy the oil more easily. And in return, though, you got to get this stockpile of the nuclear material out. Right. And you got to convince them to have the IE in. This is what diplomacy would be. Like and they're incapable of doing that. But instead, what's happening is the Wall Street Journal reported that China's commerce ministry told companies just not to comply with U.S. sanctions over the purchase of Iranian oil. They're actively telling their companies to ignore us. There have been reports that China may be selling Iran weapons or other dual-use materials. I'm sure they are. And like in you know, like Aldi Vez, uh, who's an Iran expert who we've talked to on the show a bunch of times. Said he's seeing people affili ated with the IRGC saying that Iran has been way too shy about aligning itself with China and Russia, so that's, you know, likely to come. Uh we remember the Chinese facilitated this opening between Iran and Saudi Arabia in 2023. They're also getting very active with Pakistan on the diplomatic efforts to try to end this war currently. So there the Chinese are like attempting to fill the void in some way. And it's just again like if this war wasn't happening, I'm sure the agenda would be trade deal, Taiwan, artificial intelligence, like all these big things. Yeah. Instead, it's just gonna be and the Chinese, by the way, you know, th they see us like confirming all the arguments they've been making around the world forever. Right. That the Americans are reckless, that they can't be trusted, that they overuse sanctions, that they're militaristic. Like Trump is proving every Chinese argument that has been made in i two months. And so they're gonna reap a lot of geopolitical gains from this, although they also have like economic concerns about uh, you know, the potential global recession that this war could bring about. Interestingly, you know, they have a stockpile of oil that that can they can ride out for I think something like six months or maybe nine months. Um they do have LNG issues. And so the Qatar uh cutoff of LNG, like is that gas field is shut down because the Iranians bombed it, is a problem for them. But it's a problem with the solution, which is in the long term, they're gonna want to pull Qatar and some of those Gulf states into their orbit. Right. And I I would be shocked if that's not one of the consequences of this war is that the Gulf states that n usually looked in the direction of the US are gonna be much more open to look, the Chinese deal's reliable. The terms are you know, Beijing favored, but we know what the terms are. Yeah. Whereas the Americans, we have no idea what the fuck they're gonna do day to day. Right, exactly. So the other front in this uh in this war is in uh in Lebanon, and that fighting is just raging between the Israelis and Hezbollah. The Lebanese head uh health ministry said 17 More and more videos of these FPV drone attacks by Hezbollah on like Israeli tanks and stuff. They're basically taking all the technology we saw in Ukraine with um uh like fiber optic drones that can evade electronic warfare defenses and using those in southern Lebanon to pretty devastating effect. The New York Times did like a pretty big deep dive on satellite imagery from Southern Lebanon. They found, quote, widespread demolitions have flattened expanses of at least two dozen towns and villages near the bord er, with damage to government offices as well as civilian infrastructure, including schools, hospitals, and mosques. Israel's defense minister Israel Katz explicitly said this pattern of destruction is following the uh the m Gaza models basically. And Trump is pushing for talks and ceasefire plans, but neither side seems particularly interested at this point. So not a ton to say new about Lebanon right now, except for it's like incredibly grim and just kind of I don't know they're calling it a ceasefire, but it's just an ongoing thing. And it's insane that that Western outlets like, you know, talk about fragile ceasefires and things like this. I I I uh the other thing that j did you see Smotrich, you know, the finance minister say that um you know he promised his son that he wouldn't destroy all of Lebanon so that his son and his generation could I mean this is really psychotic stuff. And and look we, uh uh when I remember they started carpet bombing stuff in Lebanon, if you posted like which I did, you know, they're gonna do the Gaza model in Lebanon, people would be like, Oh you Israel hater, like uh how dare you, you know and and now they the Israeli government says we're gonna do in southern Lebanon what we did in Gaza. Make it in uninhabitable. That cause what they're doing, just so people understand, is they're literally making it that they're not just destroying these villages, they're so comprehensive This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Life is a lot sometimes. 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Speaking of Gaza, we should touch base on all things Gaza. Um, because you know, last October everybody celebrated the ceasefire deal uh brokered by the administration, but unfortunately it's really been a ceasefire and name only for people who live in Gaza and life in Gaza is hell on earth. So some numbers for you guys. The Palestinian Health Ministry says that since the feast ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, 8 23 people have been killed and 2300 have been wounded . Uh four Israeli soldiers have been killed since the ceasefire began. Only two hundred and fifty of the promised six hundred trucks of aid per day are getting into Gaza. Partly that was the result of the one of the two crossing crossings being closed for a long time due to the Iran War. Uh the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that rodents are swarming 80 percent of the camps for displaced people, and the World Health Organization reports that there have been over 1 10,000 cases of disease or infestation due to external parasites. Ben, I was talking I was texting with um Faroz Sidwa earlier this week. He was for listeners, he was this heroic doctor who came on the show after he had volunteered in Gaza during the confli ct. And he said that like the the society and the health infrastructure in Gaza is just so thoroughly destroyed that rat attacks on infants are now a major source of morbidity. So kids are getting sick and dying because they're getting attacked by rats. Just imagine your baby getting attacked by rats. Um the only power comes from generators, there's no grid left. Um and the reconstruction cost is estimated at 70 billion. And a third of that is needed like upfront in the first year and a half just to do basic infrastructure and essential services. So basically the the long story short is the place is in this nightmarish limbo. Uh Hamas is not disarmed. They refuse to disarm until Israel withdraws and Trump promises them a Palestinian state. Israel is occupying pretty much half the Gaza Strip. It refuses to let in items that are essential for reconstruction. All the people chapped by the Trump administration, this like group of you know experts and technocrats to just sitting on their ass. Yeah, they're sitting in Egypt at a resort doing nothing. Some of them want to be doing more, but they there's just no funding. There's no way to do anything. The civil police force that they kept talking about, none of them have been trained. And it's just it it was so obvious then at the time and even clearer now that Trump and Jared Kushner and Steve Whitkopf, they only gave a shit about getting the Israeli hostages out. And once that happened , they were like, you know, jobs done. They don't care about people in Gaza. And, you know, the Israelis and Hamas both seem kind of fine with the status quo because it keeps them in charge for the Israel. It deals with their kind of security concerns. And the Palestinian people just suffer immensely in in in you know in the meantime. So that that's the latest. I mean it just sort of couldn't really be worse. Yeah, I I I think I mean a couple of things I point out here. Um first of all, the uh the ceasefire violations that tend to get highlighted are the the attacks, the bombing of Gaza and the killing of civilians uh with violence. But another piece of this is that Israel has just fundamentally refused to let in the aid that it promised to do under the under the terms of the ceasefire. And so the reason the conditions are so squalid, the reason that life continues to, you know, just be a un just hell on earth for civilians there is at least in part, in large part , that you know, look if i if if if Israel wanted to let the system , you wouldn't have uh infants getting attacked by rats, you wouldn't have people suffering malnutrition, you wouldn't have preventable deaths. Like this is a genocidal policy , like that is continuing. And just because they're not bombing uh at the same pace that they were before, it doesn't mean that they're just not squeezing and squeezing and squeezing with complete disregard to the loss of civilian civilian life. Right. And we, you know, we were calibrated at the time, but this is like the worst case scenario in a lot of ways. I mean I guess it could be worse. They could just start bombing indiscriminately at the pace that they were before, but nothing, not a finger is being lifted to help these people. Right. And there's still drone strikes regularly. Yeah. The fear that that engenders in children is unimaginable to me. And and and it just shows you that Trump and Netanyahu, they wanted the hostages out, and they kind of just wanted it to be downgraded on the every assignment editor's desk around the world. Like the media, it's off the television screens, a little less social media attention on it We'll pretend we both pull together this board a piece Gaza reconstruction effort. In fact, nothing will come of that, but Jared Kushner will get to hit up the Saudis on the margins for his investment fund. Steve Witkoff can talk to the Pakistanis about buying hotels in New York and the crypto deal he made with the Trump family crypto business, right? The president of Indonesia, as we talked about last week, can ask for Eric or Don Jr. cell's phone number to figure out the golf course deal back home that he's using the grease Trump. But it's just like it's grift on the side. Yeah, and that's the last thing I was gonna say is like the the Jared Kushner presentation at Davos that we spent some time on with this kind of Jetsons , Dubai data. Data centers. Yeah. Data centers and high-rises. How about tents? And and and commercial real estate. And and and it it it was grotesque at the time , but uh again to be constructive, uh um why why let him make that presentation at that ? Like stop humoring these people. Like i i there's a kind of you know deference uh Jared's here, we have to sit atten tively while he you know gives us the Jetsons version of Gaza. Like it it's time for people to start saying no to these people, to start calling bullshit on these people, to stop. I mean, if you're the Saudis or Emiratis or whomever is like invested in Jurd, how you feeling about that investment now with the war in Iran fucking up your economy. Like you don't need to pay this guy. Like like there's not a requirement that you pay him. Like I know that you know you're doing it to get Trump off your back, but is it working? No. No, it's not. And uh it is not working diplomatically either. I mean, the next topic for us is uh Russia and Ukraine, another conflict Trump said he's gonna solve in twenty four hours, that Jared Kushner and Witkoff are on the case. They've got ten literally nothing done. Uh, so later this week, Ben, the Russians are gonna hold their annual victory day commemoration that celebrates the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. It usually entails this huge military parade of tanks and other weapons, but this year Putin is not going to be displaying kind of major military hardware. It could be because you know drone strikes could reach that hardware and hit the parade. It could be because then I think Zelensky was speculating that the Russian military just doesn't have enough kit to show off this year, so not gonna try. Um Putin proposed a ceasefire for the day of the parade itself, that's obviously uh a bit cynical uh and self serving. In response, Zelen sky proposed a long term ceasefire and like a lasting peace deal. Don't hold your breath on that getting done. But the the casualties estimates are just staggering. So there's a CSIS report from January, from like five months ago, that estimated Russia had one point two million casualties from the start of the war through the end of 2025. Ukraine's casualty estimate was about half of that. But again, that was five months ago, and every week, advances in drone technology make life at the front lines more deadly and hellish. So I'm sure the numbers have increased. Uh Ukraine has been able to hit targets deeper into Russia than ever before. And there's been some really interesting reporting about dissent in Russia and security issues in Russia itself. So in mid-April, there was this blogger named uh Victoria Banya. She posted this eight minute, eighteen minute Instagram video outlining a bunch of concerns and anger uh problems in Russia itself. And she directed it at Putin and it went super viral. So the the Guardian said it got twenty six million views in four days, which is surprising since Instagram is uh technically banned in Russia. As is criticism of Putin really. Um but Banya she complained about flooding, oil pollution along the Black Sea, uh this massive call of livestock in Siberia, which really angered people, internet restrictions, and the government was forced to respond in a real way because she was seen as actually a defender of Putin. Then there was this fascinating report in the Financial Times about how Putin is increasingly paranoid and worried about getting killed or assassinated. They say he's spending more time in bunkers underground. Security around him is tighter. People aren't allowed to have phones or internet connected devices near him. Uh some of his staff had security systems installed in their own homes, which that sucks.. It's great Uh the Pooz the Peace also said Putin is almost entirely focused on the war in foreign affairs and just kinda lets domestic stuff languish. Um so Ben, I think, you know, we wanted to raise this 'cause it's been a while. I don't know, I personally like feel guilty every week. We don't talk about Ukraine more 'cause the stakes are just as h igh. The death toll is just as horrific. Um, but over time there's always just like a new nightmare that we're covering like Gaza or Iran. But also there's kind of like an undertone in these reports that maybe Putin is losing his grip on Russian society, the polling is going down. Um, we're sitting in LA, I have no idea how strong or weak Putin's grip on power is, but um I don't know, maybe it's wish casting, but maybe there is a sense that the Russian economy can't just sustain this level of fighting and casual ties for this long. But I don't know what do you make of these these reports? I think they're really interesting. And we should just say, I mean, for the Ukrainians, it sucks. They're just this grinding uh frontline and this casualty um levels uh i is just uh beyond the immediate human toll like the how that country gets out of this situation and is viable in terms of rebuilding gets harder with each passing month or year. On the Putin piece, you know , he's never as weak as the wish casting uh sometimes suggests. Right. So back in, you know, 20 23 when it was like, oh, Putin's gonna fall and the Ukrainians are counteroffensive is gonna be victory and they're gonna take back Crimea, like that was serious wish casting. Um but at the same time uh a lot of the issues in this war are are ones that are gonna get worse with time for putin. So for instance, like people from the front like going I mean if you look at the Soviet war , like the the in Afghanistan, it took years for that war to start to eat away at like Russian society because guys are coming home, they're disabled, their the alcoholism rates are going up, like it's you know, this PTSD people are you know, the like the literally the workforce is being harm so if you look at Russia today for instance,ike y yes, they they've been able to create a war economy that can employ people and artificially, you know, boost growth rates and they can manipulate oil prices, they benefit from the war because the price of oil goes up so, they get a little more revenue. But at the end of the day, they're spending extraordinary money on this. They're losing extraordinary amount of people. The people that are coming out of this war and going home are probably not, you know, okay. Um so towns, small cities are starting to probably feel, you know, it takes two, three, four, five years. That's how long this war has been, by the way. The Ukrainian strategy of striking these targets like deep into Russia is pretty smart. Uh because it's bringing the war home to certain places. It may actually be causing like you know demonstrable damage. Trevor Burrus And they're hitting energy infrastructure and like sources of revenue. And the repression, you know, i like we make a mistake sometimes of it's like uh and maybe we should know because now we live in a version of authoritarianism that like it's a spectrum. So just because Putin's always been repressive doesn't mean it can't get worse. Right. And it's clearly gotten worse. I mean Alone's point out to us repeatedly that like these internet restrictions, like that fucks up people's lives. Yeah, you can't call people. People want to be online, people want to be in touch with their family. People wanna be in touch with so many Russians are out of the country and they can't be in touch with their family. Businesses rely on the internet. So I do think that they're they're, you know, the th Putin is not as strong as some people project or as weak, but they're these cracks are starting to show. And it might take time, but at a certain point the bill's going to come due for this war. Yeah, and there's been some interesting reporting about Putin like trying to erase even Soviet history. You know, that doesn't strike me as a particularly I mean it's an authoritarian move. It's not the strongest move. Um there's also been a bunch of reporting about Russian entities, these like kind of fake businesses that get set up, uh recruiting men from Africa and telling them they can come work at some private security job and sending these Kenyan men to the front lines just to be cannon fodder. I mean, it's horrible stuff. Um also though, just back on the negotiating front, I mean I think the last trilateral talks were in February. Um and I saw I think I read somewhere that Wickhoff and Jared Kushner, they've been to Russia a bunch of times, right? They'll meet with Putin whenever they can. I don't think they've ever been to Ukraine. And the question is why? You wouldn't go one time to meet with the people to see the place to understand the issues? So uh first of all, two things. Noticeably that meeting was before the war in Iran. So another casualty of this war is that there's just no attention on Ukraine. Um I don't have inside information. I had to do all the caveats that we don't know for sure. They want to do real estate deals or mineral deals in Russia. That's why they're there. They don't care a shit about the Ukrainians. They they see a bonanza on the back end of this war being solved. Uh Jared and Whitkoff, I think, want to do deals in Russia. I don't why why might I surmise that? One, the guy that Putin started sending the talks is the head of the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Yeah, that's big segment. He's not from the foreign ministry, he's from the Sovereign Wealth Fund. Two, and a lot of He's in Miami like jet skiing with them all the time. Yeah. Dicking around. Yeah, dicking around. Two, in Alaska, um, Putin brought all these people from like these various you know, mini we're gonna do mineral deals and all this stuff. That they they clearly want to skip ahead to that step. The problem is that the war's gonna end first. And three, to your point, why would you not go to the country that's been invaded? You know? Jared and Whitcoff's interest in this, I think, had nothing to do with peace and have anything to do with making a buck in Russia. And that's fucking disgusting. Yes. Yes it is. And there's a great piece, I think, in the New York Times magazine this week about kind of the privatization of diplomacy and the way that those two are fusing profit. You know, for example, the Pakistanis did this big crypto deal with the Trump family company. And now what do you know? Well like you and I have laughed on this show about how Trump is always shouting out like the field marshal general in Pakistan is probably like a human rights violator. Probably pretty safe bet. Yeah, pretty safe bet. And uh calling him by his honor of field marshal, you know, it's except field marshal. Uh field marshal. Okay. So final topic. This one comes courtesy of uh Michael and our team. So uh enjoy Ben. It's a quiz for you. Pop quiz. Oh no, this is not like a Tim Miller pop quiz. No, no, no, no. First of all, who was do you know who our current ambassador to both Switzerland and Liechtenstein is? I have no idea, but if I I'm gonna guess uh like is is it a is it a Kushner or Whitkoff relative? Let's roll the tape. I'm Callista George, United States Ambassador to Switzerland at Liechtenstein. And I'm delighted to celebrate National Apprenticeship Week . As US ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, I've seen first hand the power of apprenticeships. So here's I just had one comment first. I know there's maybe uh the the years or decades could go by and and Callista Gingrich would look exactly precisely the same. Brother that's a little bit more like whatever they shot into that face like like we will be dead, you and I and, there will be a video of her uh in some Republican administration in twenty seventy five as ambass ador to you know uh Luxembourg or some, you know, fancy European place d looking exactly the same. Yeah, the she she facetunes with a belt sander. That by the way, that was Callista Gingrich, uh former ambassador to the Vatican under Trump 1.0, wife of former speaker Newt Gingrich. So Callista is now representing our interest in Bern. Remember she is Newt's third wife. So we met his first wife when he was a teenager. I didn't know this when she was his high school geometry teacher. It's very kind of crone-esque, yeah. Candace on that case. Was she a Rothschild? We'll find out . Uh that marriage ended in divorce after his affair with Marianne, who became his second wife. This is Newt. Newt then had an affair with Callista for six years while he was still married, uh, and he asked his second wife for a divorce shortly after she was diagnosed with MS. So again, good guy. Classic. Glitz, I think he's 20 years, 23 years younger than Newt, about the same age as his daughter. And again, we cannot point out enough that Newt was having this affair while constantly attacking Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky stuff. So Newt married Callista in 2000, converted to her faith, Catholicism in 2009. So Ben, uh to honor her. On this uh on this uh yeah uh a little quiz for you. Okay. One first question. Like Cash Patel, Calista Gingrich is a noted children's book author. In her seven bo ok series What animal quote travels through time to discover the pivotal moments that have shaped American history? Is it A Ellis the Elephant? B Newt the Narwhal C Donald the Dalmatian. D liberty the Lynx . This is this is actually just as good as Cash the Wizard. What was A again? Ellis the Elephant. I'm gonna go with the elephant. I'm gonna go with the Elephant. You nailed it. Yeah.. You absolutely nailed it These are actually Republicans before they are Donald. I'm it wasn't the narwhal. Uh so the books are apparently written in rhymes like after winning the war, Washington would not become a king. He became our first president and that's a better thing. Could we please get a dramatic reading of these books by Pete Hegsaf? Oh, that's a good idea. Uh uh question two. Newt Gingrich owed as much as five hundred thousand dollars to which retailer in the mid-2000s? Was it A Vineyard Vines? B Tiffany and Co. C. Radio Shack D Rolex . Five hundred thousand? Five hundred . Because I I I would say Nude has a uh a taste for the vineyard vines, but I'm gonna go Rolex. Yeah. Uh so it was B Tiffany. Tiffany, okay. Uh hard to spend five hundred grand at at Viney's very, very hard. That's a lot of white pants, yeah. I haven't seen this. Doesn't that whole thing strike you as stupid? I mean if you're y you know these these are stores. These are stores that have a wide range of of things you can buy. She has girlfriends with birthdays. What? Is that him defending himself in two thousand? Just a quick swerve here, like I the fact that this guy was held up as like some intellectual has always bothered me. Like the the bar for these Republicans is so low. Yeah. Yeah. This is our moral leader and our intellectual. So this Tiffany thing came up in his uh his ill-fated presidential campaign in twenty twelve for the nomination. He also got flacked for suspending his campaign to go on a Greek cruise. Do you remember he was like the front runner for I mean that was a crazy field that was like Romney sent Rick Centorum at a moment there? Thinking back, I can see why Trump mopped the fucking floor with these guys. Because he came in, he was like, I have a personality and a sense of humor, and I'm not a loser like these idiots. Uh last question when leaving a second wife, Marianne , Newt compared Marianne to Callista saying, I can't handle a insert luxury consumer good right here. Right now, all I want is a less expensive good. You got the formatting here? So I can't handle this luxury thing. I need a less expensive thing. Was it, I can't handle a Charmin Ultrasoft right now, all I want is a Scott Oneply. Was it B, I can't handle a Gray Poupon right now, all I want is French's. Was it C, I can't handle espresso right now, all I want is instant. Was it D, I can 't handle a Jaguar. All I want is a Chevrolet. One of those is actually true? Yep. Uh I I mean I guess I'm gonna go D because anyone else is like Dude, you crush this quiz. D. Yeah. Chevrolet. I uh yeah, yeah. I mean went a Chevy. That's a bad thing to say to a human being. I mean he 's marrying Newt's been in plenty of back seats over the years. I mean uh like I like I So is Callista well I backseat, windows up . This is yeah. Uh that was great quiz. Thank you, Michael, for that. That's what happens when you give this guy an hour of free time on a show day. All of a sudden we're doing it. No, that was good. It was a pretty like dark, angry, you know, uh run, so we needed that. We needed that. It's important to have a little fun at the end here. Okay, we're gonna take a quick break. That's so by the way, isn't better than the bull Tim Miller when he's like, you know, asking you the name of the foreign minister of Liechtenstein. Yeah. Tim thinks there's people who seem to think that working in foreign policy meant you worked in geography. No, it's funny, the reason he does it is because George Bush like got asked the name of the head pac leader of Pakistan as Mesharov. And Tim thought that that was like a dumb liberal gotcha thing. But actually, like I'm not sure that was a dumb question because Pakistan ended up being like the most important country after 9-11. So yeah look I think asking by the way I think people running for president asking them basic civics question is a good idea. Like I think you know if you ask Donald Trump, like how many branches of government are they? Like he would just flunk a lot of these basic questions and it would have been useful along the way. Um, but yeah, Tim likes to just torture us when we go on a show. Yeah, he does. Uh we're gonna take a break, we come back, you're gonna hear my conversation with Jason Crow about Iran, about his grilling of Pete Heggs , about Trump moving troops out of Germany, so stick around for that. 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No waiting around for a technician to show up. The app guided installation walks you through the process. You can get your system armed in less than an hour. Well, it was like, wait, no drilling. No drilling. That's promised drilling. Simply Safe is backed by 24-7 professional monitoring agents who dispatch emergency help when you need it. Over five million people value and trust Simply Safe with their home security every day. Right now, our listeners will get fifty percent off a new system when you sign up for professional monitoring, and your first month is free by visiting SimplySafe.com slash crooked world. That's half off. It'sy Simpl Safe.comslash Crooked World. There's no safe like Simply Safe. My guest today represents Colorado's sixth congressional Driistct and he serves on the House Armed Services Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, uh, and many other August committees. Uh Jason Crow, great to see you again. Tommy, thanks for having me back. So um the the war powers resolution , the the law establishes this sixty day deadline after which a president has to stop the use of armed forces in a conflict or else get congressional approval. Trump's war with Iran hit that sixty day deadline last week, last Friday. But the defense secretary, Pete Heggseth, he argued in a Senate hearing that because of the ceasefire, the clock stopped, the you know, sixty days is not up and they don't need Congress to act. Uh we should all just note that since that spin, uh the US and Iran have been shooting at each other in the Strait of Hormuz, with the US sinking a number of Iranian boats earlier this week with uh helicopters, I believe. What did you make of Hegzeth's claim? Well, can can we actually just uh there's an important step missing here. The 60 day clock is determined on the War Powers Act, which is determined on there being an imminent threat. Right. But there has to be an imminent threat. And then under an imminent threat, then they have 60 days, and then there's an additional 30 days to conduct the troop withdrawal beyond the 60 days. But they never showed the imminent threat. Right. So all this uh ado about uh much to do about the sixty day thing, we never met the initial threshold, right? Which requires there either be there's only two ways a president can can take our troops to war. One is if there's an imminent threat, in which case they have the 60 days, which they never showed, or there's an AUMF by Congress. Neither of those things are true. So this whole thing from the beginning has been unlawful and without authorization, but more importantly , without actually the the consent of the American people, which is really what this is all about. Aaron Powell So you're you're right about that that context is important. But you know, I I guess associated with that, like wouldn't this new military operation, this like uh guide mission for boats in the Strait or Hamu is Project Freedom, would that also require congressional authorization? Yeah, it would. Well, uh, there are so many things going on here. One one is the initial uh attack on Iran, right, which required imminent threat, or a congressional uh AUMF of some sort. Uh, the second is an ongoing naval blockade. I mean, international law and the law of war is very, very clear. Uh, a naval blockade and stopping ships from coming in and out of ports is a very clear act of war. Right. And then you add on top of it, Heg Seth's claim that somehow a ceasefire tolls this 60 days . There's zero precedent for that assertion, not to mention the fact that there actually is conflict going on right now. You know, in the last twenty four hours, there have been numerous exchanges of fire between the United States and Iranian forces or proxy forces. So the whole thing is a mess. It's convoluted. They keep on evolving and changing their definitions, their legal basis for it, which of course is uh just par for the course of this administration, much like the operations going on in the Caribbean, which use circular legal reasoning to justify, right? They always say that there isn't an armed conflict. It falls just short of an armed conflict level, but they have to use the military because it is an international armed conflict. So they want to have their cake and eat it too. So what does Congress do about it? That's the big question here. Like, how can you guys exert some pressure on the administration to change course, to follow the law, to follow the Constitution, whatever. Yeah. But Congress has the power. matter. And I'm always really clear that this isn't just something that Donald Trump has abused. This has been abused by by multiple presidents, Democrat and Republican, and multiple Congresses have allowed it, Democrat and Republican. This is a 20-year problem in the making. And Congress tomorrow could fix it. We have the authority, constitutional authority, and we could walk in to the House floor, we could take a vote and take that power back tomorrow.. Right So that's what this is about. This is about Congress giving up its power and ceding its constitutional authority, but more importantly, it's constitutional duty. This is more about duty than it is about authority. It's our job for God's sakes to actually take these votes and to be held accountable and to appropriate the money or not appropriate the money for all of these things. Because the framers knew that presidents will take all the power they're given and use all the power they're given. That the accountability loop is in members of Congress that have to go home to their districts every weekend, every week, uh and stand up in front of their constituents and be held accountable for it. So that's ultimately the fix. And this should be the most bipartisan thing in America right now is Congress because it's been abused by both sides over the years. Uh, and because Americans of all stripes, Democrat, Republican, and Independent, want it over. They they want no part in this. Yeah. And they want it to be ended. The other sort of way you guys can get some accountability or oversight is through hearings. Uh there were some hearings last week. You had this extended exchange with Pete Hexeth about a guy named Tim Parlatori who is Pete Hexeth's um private attorney. He was then appointed to a Pentagon job. You pressed uh pistol Pete on uh parlory security clearance. You asked him about his foreign clients, he's still in uh private law practice. Can you explain why you were so focused on this one individual and and what you learned in that exchange and like how we act on it? Yeah, my singular goal right now is to get Pete Heggseth fired. Right. He is such an extreme danger to our service members, the men and women who are who I love, who I've served with, who I have a deep affection that come from my district, come from districts around this country. They're, you know, people's sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, right? And he is putting these folks at such extreme risk because of his not just his incompetence, but his cavalier attitude and his unwillingness to to actually do the right thing uh and to run the the department of defense the way that it needs to be run. So I want this guy gone, which is why I chose a very different approach than I've ever chosen before. I was speaking largely to Donald Trump into the White House when I was questioning. And I was pointing out that in Pete Heggsh, you have a man who publicly professes unfaltering loyalty to the president , you know, kisses his ring, kisses his ass every chance he gets. And yet behind the scenes, he's hiring people who Donald Trump despises, who Donald Trump has called a liar a lawyer who has fired from his legal team and um you know basically building a fiefdom with these hegseth loyalists and and at the same time uh the uh the corruption just the extreme corruption of Pete Hag Seth putting all these people in place who are making money off of their positions very, very um purposefully and intention intentionally. So that's what I was drawing attention to. There's also been there's been some reporting that Heggseth is increasingly isolated, that he's paranoid about getting fired, that he brings his wife to official meetings, that his closest advisors are this little circle like Tim Parlatori, uh Pete Hexeth's brother, this guy Ricky Burria, who is like a military aide under Biden who stayed on, who's sort of I think risen to much higher heights. Um, and that Hegzeth is preoccupied with stuff like the Pentagon's chaplain services and not managing the massive workforce. I mean, are are you hearing similar things from contacts you talk to within the Department of Defense? Yeah, absolutely. I'm hearing a variety of different things. One one strand of things I'm hearing is about the culture of fear and intimidation and retribution. That if you're a senior military officer, you can't give your honest advice to uh the civilian leadership. Yeah, you you have to show loyalty. Now, how dangerous is that? Right? We're conducting military operations in dozens of places around the world. And our senior military officers don't feel empowered to say if there's something wrong or to dissent. I mean that is so deeply dangerous. That kind of proves my earlier point. So I'm hearing that. Uh we're hearing rumors that um, you know, this parliamentary has to be hired by senior officers to get promoted, uh that, you know, they they have to basically pay this guy, which is, you know, part of my questioning. So we need to drill down into that. Yeah, that's what we're hearing and that's why uh I I questioned uh Heg Seth about Parlatori. I mean those are the those are the rumors that we're hearing from a lot of different places. And then and what's crazy is that that wouldn't actually surprise me if it were true. Yeah. That uh I mean that's part and parcel to this administration. It's happening uh administration wide in so many different ways. You know, this pay-to-play politics and it's seeped into well actually seeping isn't wrong wrong word because that's passive. It's been implemented by Pete Pegseth. Yeah. To put it in terms, uh Pete might understand. Uh he shotgunned it. So it's uh down the hatch. Um he would understand that. He would understand that, yeah, I bet he he funneled it. Um the administration uh said the cost of Operation Epic Fury, the war with Iran, is twenty five billion dollars. I've seen news outlets uh estimate that it's much higher. I think CNN said forty to fifty, C B S said closer to fifty billion. Uh what do you think? Did you buy that twenty-five billion dollar number? Yeah, there's no way that's true. There's there's no well, first of all, even if that's true, that's a lot of frickin' money. Yeah. Right. We have uh we have you know people losing health care by the millions. I was just in a roundtable yesterday with uh some young folks in my district and and and it was all about healthcare. They're they're like, you know, my healthcare has gone up, they're now paying $2,000 a month for premiums with a six thousand dollar deductible and a twenty percent copay, right? And they're like, we can't afford that, right? So even if it's twenty-five billion dollars, which it's not, right? It's it's a multiple of that, two times, three times, maybe four times, it's much higher than that. That is a lot of money, right? We have expended vast , vast amounts of our most exquisite high-end munitions in our stockpiles. There's been tremendous damage done to our infrastructure throughout the Middle East. Let's not forget that a lot of these drones, a lot of these missiles actually have hit infrastructure, defense infrastructure in our bases that's going to have to be rebuilt. So it's cost a lot of money and it continues to cost a lot of money. This blockade is not cheap either. So um that's that's kind of the the biggest point here. Not only is our our service members at great risk and we've lost thirteen of them, over three hundred have been wounded, but Americans are paying tens of billions of dollars for a war that's gonna end poorly, yet again, without achieving a strategic goal, and they're fed up with it. And they should be. And like obviously they're trying to claim that this new uh guiding operation through the Strait of Humus is actually a separate thing with a different name, but it's obviously, you know, it's all just part and parcel of the Iran war. How would you uh designate the cost of that to the war effort? I mean, I I think they said like a bunch of guided missile destroyers are gonna stay in the region, over a hundred air assets, fifteen thousand troops. Presumably that is an enormous cost, like keeping all those individuals in theater that would continue to add up everyy da, right? Yeah, this is this is a kind of smoke and mirrors budgeting tactic that they have been using where they say it's really not costing us extra. Well, and and the and their rationale is it goes something like this that hey we have these ships anyhow and hey they have to be somewhere doing something anyway. Right. Oh and we're paying these service members uh every every month anyway so let's just take all those normal it's called O and M funding operations and maintenance and we'll just move that money over into this contingency operation, this planning, and we'll call it a wash. It doesn't work that way. Actually doing this comes at some cost. So instead of training, instead of being back with their and their families, instead of that maintenance that has to be done, instead of the modernization that has to be done, and instead of all the the multilateral training exercises that we would normally be doing with our with our allies uh in other places in the world. We're doing this, right? There's an opportunity cost to it. And our point is tell us what that is costing, right? And it's costing extra, because you know, like I said earlier, if you're shooting off munition s uh in a stockpile uh and if you're taking damage, uh that actually is a fixed capital cost. So I'm I'm kind of done, and and frankly, we did this under Iraq and Afghanistan too for decades. They did the same thing, other administrations and take the O M and they count it as part of the contingency. So I've been battling that for a long time now. Uh and Americans and taxpayers deserve to know what these operations are really costing uh and and how much more it's costing. So, you know, that's what we're trying to drill down on. Yeah, seems like the bare minimum uh information they should owe us. Uh finally, president Trump is planning to pull 5,000 troops out of Germany. This is in response to criticism of the war in Iran from uh Chancellor Mertz, uh, the leader of Germany. What do you think the impact of that move is uh or will be? And are you concerned about it? Yeah, I I am concerned about it and I'm not presumptively against troop movements, right? A com a commander in chief should have flexibility to move troops around, uh to to respond to to needs, to respond to crises. You know, that is that is kind of part of uh the the um uh um you know authorization that a commander in chief inherently has when it becomes our business is when the commander -iefin-ch is doing it out of uh an emotional meltdown or to um uh enact some kind of retribution or vengeance on a political opponent or a foreign leader because he's upset. Then it becomes my business. Right. Right. Because he's abusing our military and their families that need to have some sense for how to live their life. He's use he's he's using taxpayer dollars to do that. Right. So that is the important distinction . The reason why uh becomes important, because if it becomes a reason that's not acceptable and not in a normal course of being the commander in chief, then it's Congress's job to say, o kay, this is a problem, and we're not going to use taxpayer dollars to do it. We're not going to mess around with our military and our military families' time and money. And we also have to make sure it's in the best interest of our national security because there is the largest land war in Europe happening right now between Russia and Ukraine, and having a troop presence there is really important to make sure that we're sending the right message against Putin that we are affirming our commitment to NATO. So that that's why we're trying to invoke a legal provision that we actually put into the defense bill on a bipartisan basis last year that says you can't move troops beyond a threshold level un,less you have met certain criteria to do so. Trevor Burrus, and so in this case, we're talking about Trump trying to move troops from Germany because of specific comments, but he's also threatened to punish NATO in other ways like pull troops or even be bases out of Spain because they won't participate in the war. Is he any close to actually taking those steps? Because, you know, my understanding is we don't have troops in Spain just for the hell of it. It's because you know that geography provides some important, you know, capability to United States military. I mean, I remember talking about uh basing and troops and airplanes and air assets in Spain and Italy a lot during the Benghazi attacks and the and the follow-up from that, because that would have been you know sort of the closest team to get to that site uh on September 11th and actually try to rescue those individuals. But um so just move it's not like you can just move them around like chess pieces. You can't just move a bunch of troops from Spain to like Eastern Europe and not have uh an impact on your ability to fight wars. But is that even being discussed with Congress or is is this stuff gonna happen? Yeah, well it,'s not being discussed with Congress in the way that it should. I mean, this administration is violating a bunch of laws or potentially violating a bunch of laws in the case of the troop levels. Like, for example, like they they haven't provided there's a there's a statutory provision in the defense bill that says they have to provide what's called an XORD, an execution order, which is the order that starts contingency operations. They have to legally provide every ex ord to the armed services committee and they have it, right, for a year, right? So they're violating that. Uh but the the troop movement thing is an important point. I had an exchange with one of the senior deputy uh defense secretaries um a couple of months ago, where he was trying to justify the movement of troops out of Europe. And what they said was, we're gonna take troops out of Europe and we're gonna move them back to the United States so that we can train more. We can actually train better. Uh and I'm like, well, let me understand this. You're gonna actually take troops away from the places where we actually have training grounds, uh, some of the best training grounds in the world in Europe, where they actually train with our allies, they're co-cause they're co-located with them, where we can conduct exercises and we train moving troops around Europe, because move movement of forces on rail lines, on highways, and learning how to do that throughout Europe is essential. You're gonna take them away from there, we're gonna move them back to the United States and then to to actually train them, we're gonna have to we're gonna have to temporarily ship them back there. And and actually do the same training that they normally do, but now we're gonna have to move them back to Europe and incur that additional cost. And he's like, Yeah, that's that's our plan. So the whole thing makes no sense. It's more expensive, it's less efficient. It's actually worse training. And all being footed by the American taxpayer. And the commonality to all of this, all because of Donald Trump wanting to send a message, and he's pissed at NATO or certain leaders. I mean, that is the reason behind so much of what's going on. Aaron Powell Well, that seems very stupid. Um well, look, Congressman Crow, thank you very much for joining the show today and trying to hold these goobers accountable. Uh and uh if you learn more about whatever Tim Par latori is doing or tagseth or anybody else, please come back and fill us in because uh it's a bit of a mystery over here and we'd love to get more information. Yeah, thanks for having me back. Thanks again to Congressman Crow for doing the show and uh prepare our own quiz for Tim Miller next week. Talk to you soon Potsable world is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Alona Minkowski, Michael Goldsmith, and Nanisha Bonnerjee. Our team includes Matt DeGrote, Ben Hethcote, Jordan Cantor, Kenny Moffitt, David Tolles, and Ryan Young. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America E ast