Russian Interference Won’t Stop After Election Day

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
I'm Ben Rhodes. Anything new?

I don't know, man.

It's election day. It's election day.
Here in Murica. You are hearing this after election day, but it is currently election day.
And we

polls have not closed. It's 2.10 p.m.
Eastern, so we have. 5.10 p.m.
Eastern. Sorry, 5.10 p.m.
Eastern, 2.10 p.m. Pacific.
We have no data. We saw the first wave of exit polls.
Totally useless.

Utterly useless. Josh Ernest, who we used to work with, said looking at exit polls is like hooking up with your ex-girlfriends.
You know you shouldn't do it. It feels good in the moment.

Then you hate yourself later.

So

that's where I am.

That's where we are.

We're going to talk about election interference, Chinese hacking, threats of election violence, and then we're going to grade some foreign policy election messaging that's been happening on the trail recently, Ben.

Then we're going to talk about a big shake-up in the Israeli government, a scandal engulfing Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Nyahoo about a leak of classified information, the latest from Gaza.

Then we're going to talk about allegations that Russia plotted to send incendiary devices on planes to North America, the results of elections in Moldova and Botswana, and then some lighter stories by way of North Korea, New Zealand, and Russia.

No guests today, because we just need to freak out about the election. Yeah, yeah.
We don't need to be around strangers today. No, what a time cancel, I guess.
Yeah.

Just so anxious.

Okay, so it's obviously Election Day, Ben.

There's a lot of fascinating things happening in the world. We hope to get to all of them, but it's just really hard to think of anything else.
But so the world is watching this election.

Many are anxious.

Many are terrified, like people in Ukraine, for example.

Some just think we're nuts. Yes.
Here's an example. This is a fair determination.
Here's an example of the latter.

The U.S. dumpster fire of an election is appropriately ending with a debate over which side is calling each other garbage.

To recap, a comedian at Trump's rally called Puerto Rico garbage, resulting in Joe Biden appearing to refer to Trump supporters as garbage, leading to Donald Trump then dressing up as a garbage man and riding around in a garbage truck.

Are we sure we want to buy submarines off these people? Okay.

On one of his final campaign stops, Donald Trump declared this week that he will protect women. And if that didn't sound ominous enough, he added, I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not.

Trump there demonstrating his ongoing commitment to doing things to women without their consent. Meanwhile, Trump's running mate J.D.

Vance, a name you'll hear either every day for the next four years or never again, steadied the ship with some more typical political rhetoric, declaring that he and Trump can win, quote, the normal gay guy vote.

For all their vitriol towards immigrants who don't speak English, it's astonishing how much of what they say sounds like it was put through Google Translate.

I think sometimes it's helpful to hear about your own elections from an outside person. I mean, when you put it that way, right? That was an Australian comedian named Mark Humphreys.

That was hilarious.

Yeah, if you were in Australia right now, you would maybe be questioning whether to have sunk tens of billions of dollars into American military technology. Yeah, great AUKUS joke.
Great slip.

Great world, though, AUKUS joke. I really appreciate putting that in.

Okay, so we needed that laugh.

But Ben, you know, speaking of outsiders watching our elections, there is a serious point to be made here about election interference.

So the director of national intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, they put out a joint statement that said in part, quote, the IC has been observing foreign adversaries, particularly Russia, conducting additional influence operations intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S.

elections and stoke divisions among Americans.

The IC expects these activities will intensify through Election Day and in the coming weeks, and that foreign influence narratives will focus on swing states.

So, interesting that this statement went out, was that last night? I think Monday night.

They single out Russia as, quote, the most active threat. They're making fake news content.

They're making crap designed to scare people and just otherwise undermine the legitimacy of the election process. There was a fake video alleging voter fraud in Arizona that was false.

The Arizona Secretary of State came out and said so, and I think pointed the finger at Russia. There's a bunch more examples.

Ben, I just, we want to start with this because it is worth pointing out, I think, how brazen Russia is with this stuff now. In 2016, they tried to hide it.

I remember talking to Jake Sullivan right after that election. He's a national security advisor now, but he was a Hillary advisor then.

And he said that, you know, when they would suggest that there was foreign interference, people looked at the Clinton campaign staff like they were wearing tinfoil hats.

Now this is just like an every year, every election, all-the-time thing.

Yeah, I remember on the other side of that being in the Obama White House, and there was a similar statement, albeit not as specific,

from the DNI, from the director of natural intelligence in the fall. Actually, we thought it was going to be this huge deal when it came out.
We weren't allowed to edit it.

You know, it was like, oh, we can't have any political

hands on this. And so it was this kind of carefully worded statement from the DNI with all the other intelligence chiefs kind of backing it up.

That was the same day that the Axis Hollywood sex tape or Billy Bush tape came out. So it didn't

press release. It wasn't quite the earthquake we thought it would be.
But I make that point because it was obviously hugely

consequential and controversial

to not only have Russia interfering like that, but also, should the the U.S. government say anything? Trump called that election interference.

And it just shows you how much like Trump, Trumpism, MAGAism, whatever we want to call it, has kind of moved the goalpost in American and global politics.

And eight years later, it's like, oh, yeah, sure, the Russians are interfering all over the place. Yeah, they will.
Sure. The night before the election, the U.S.

intelligence community is putting out a statement. I guarantee, well, probably most of the people, if not 90%...

plus percent of the people listening to this podcast had no idea that statement even went out. It just shows you how much normalization has taken place around election interference, about the U.S.

government calling out election interference, about

the manipulation of social media, about conspiracy theory. It's just kind of part of what we deal with now.
Yeah.

And, you know, while we're talking about election interference, I mean, we did want to update you on this China hacking story that we've talked about now a couple of times on the show.

The gist is that China hacked a bunch of major telecom companies in the U.S., and they even managed to infiltrate them to the point where they had the same level of access as senior engineers.

And then managed to target the system through which U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies request wiretaps of suspects.
So, very big deal, very bad.

The Washington Post reported, I think we talked about this last week, that the Chinese had collected audio and text messages and that they had targeted top

Trump campaign officials like J.D. Vance, et cetera.

But what is still not really clear is how many people were impacted.

Initially, there was a suggestion that it had been a small group of targets because the Chinese didn't want to tip off that they have this access.

But Josh Rogan of the Washington Post reported that millions of Americans could be vulnerable to Chinese surveillance now because of this hack and the ongoing nature of it.

And the question is basically, what should the U.S. government say and when? Because it does sound like internally this is a five-alarm fire.

Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, quote, it is one of the most serious breaches in my time on the intelligence committee. Like full stop.
So, not an alarming.

He's been there for some shit. He's been there for some shit.
And, you know, again, like

another point I think you and I were talking about, like, 20 years ago, China having access to the phone calls of like millions of Americans was a big deal, but in a sense, kind of useless because you couldn't ever listen to all of that audio and do anything with it or make sense of it.

Now, artificial intelligence has completely changed that dynamic, and you certainly could do a bunch of bulk collection and then make use of it.

And then, second, I mean, one of the hacking victims who had been briefed by the FBI told Josh Rogan, quote, right now, China has the ability to listen to any phone call in the United States, whether you were the president or a regular Joe, it makes no difference.

If that's the case, like, do you think the U.S. government has an obligation to maybe do a little more to notify us?

I mean, we are in a new world in which the sophistication of these cyber intrusions and the pace of them is just kind of ever-present.

I mean, to connect it to the Russia story, one way to think about this, first of all, is that we're not kind of in siloed political experiences.

Like, there's kind of one competition happening globally.

You know, our election is an event in which Russia is a participant, in which, you know, China could be a participant in terms of influence or information gathering.

And, you know, the world is flat and not the good way that Tom Friedman once thought it would be. Not your cabinet.

But also to the AI point, you're right. I mean, it'd be one thing if they could vacuum up everybody's email or text messages

20 years ago. And it's not like, you know, spooks or analysts could sit there and read everything.
What AI can do is it can sift through vast troves of data and then do different things with it.

It can kind of search for certain topics, but it could also

tailor influence operations to target people based on what you learn about them. So if China wants to influence

you and like

someone who has a platform in this country, they can find ways to do that based on what you're doing and saying to people in private.

So I think

we are heading into a world in which people have to recognize that digital privacy doesn't really exist.

Probably need to have some degree of skepticism about information you're consuming if it's not from a source that you really know where it comes from.

Because there's no reason to think that this will go back into the box.

This is the future. This is the future.
Yeah, apparently Trump, Vance, Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, and two other Trump campaign officials were told they'd been surveilled.

There were no, these were like real-time interceptions, too.

And also, you know, Ben, a few years ago, even during the Obama era, there was always a big fight between the government and technology companies about the demand by the government to build back doors into communications tools.

And the government was upset about end-to-end encryption, which would make it impossible for them to intercept messages from bad guys.

This is just the latest example that if you build a back door for the US government, the bad guys are going to find it too. We're going to come in through the back door.
Bad idea.

Horrible, horrible idea.

The other big national security concern around this election, though, is the potential for election day or month violence.

There's been a bunch of stories about right-wing, fascist, racist groups like the Proud Boys organizing their members on Telegram, in particular to tell them to be poll watchers.

A lot of people are very worried about this. The Associated Press found that four in 10 registered voters are extremely or very worried about violent attempts to overturn the results.

There was a report from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism that found a sharp rise in violent rhetoric online, including, quote, in October, violent rhetoric related to election denialism increased by 317% on Telegram and 105% on Gab.

So those are two

services with big right-wing audiences. In Fulton County, Georgia, a bunch of polling places were temporarily closed today because of threats.

The Georgia Attorney General has claimed those threats came from Russia. Axios talked to a number of members of Congress who had been beefing up security at their election night events in preparation.

The Washington Post said the Pentagon is doing some sort of contingency planning.

Again, Ben, this is new. You know, like our elections

didn't used to be this way. It's like 2020, there was this ridiculous debate about whether Trump's rhetoric was responsible for violence in any way.
Obviously, that was the case on January 6th.

And it's obviously the case now that what he's doing is inspiring these people. Like, I was just reading before we came in.

Steve Bandon was in prison for a while for, I think, was, what, what he just

contemptible. Yeah, contempt.
He didn't show up for his January 6th subpoena. So now he's out.

Not only has he not learned his lesson from January 6th, I just read that he is going to be back at the Willard Hotel, which is where the Stop the Steel assholes coordinated their little coup work back in 2020.

So they're just like repeating it all in our faces. Not exactly rehabilitated there.
No.

I think think to kind of carry the thread of interconnection that we've had today,

I mean, the first thing that's notable here is that we've talked so much about Telegram in the context of its role in the war in Ukraine, its

peculiarity as this, you know, tech company, social media platform created by a Russian that evades government intrusion and becomes this dark underworld.

And now, you know, it's a feature in this increasingly violent far-right kind of militia movement in this country, the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers.

The two things that I think I'd point to from a national security perspective as a former national security official, strange as that seems to say now,

is first of all,

how do you separate out

what crazy individuals might do, right? Somebody's just sitting at home, they're radicalized online, they want to go do something. That's alarming enough.

But I think what is in this story that was also clearly manifest on January 6th is that there are organized extremist groups in this country that if we were looking at them like we look at foreign violent extremist groups, we would think are a big fucking problem.

They're Muslim. Yeah, exactly.
That's exactly right.

If ISIS, when we were worried about homegrown quote-unquote radicalization in the later Obama years, if ISIS had cells with thousands of people people who were heavily armed and trained and had coherent ideology that was anti-government and violent around the country,

we would be, from a national security perspective, really going after those groups. I think that there's this reticence to do that, even under the Biden administration, because it's seen as political.

It's seen as kind of playing into a conspiracy theory about the federal government coming to take your guns or coming to target their political enemies.

But the reality is that one of the things that should be concerning is there's been this steady radicalization over four years.

Just because we think the stop the steal stuff was crazy doesn't mean that there aren't people that deeply still believe that the election was stolen and will believe it again.

And they are armed people with an ideology and an organization that has been around a while now. Like a lot of these groups were founded kind of in the late Obama years.

Now they've been around for a decade.

The second thing to connect it back to something we talked about earlier, though, we know from, you know, and I've talked to some people who are real experts and have, you know, kind of intelligence units and not in the U.S.

government that monitor Russian disinformation campaigns. The way that the Russians do this now in recent years is they start on Telegram, and we've talked about this a bit.

They'll start some conspiracy theory on Telegram and they'll see where it gets traction and it'll kind of migrate from Telegram out to their platforms.

What I worry about is if Russia wants to activate the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers, I'm sure they have social media personas or whatever that are in those networks. No doubt.

And so if you're Russia and you want to sow maximum chaos in the U.S., and maybe if you're pissed if Kamal Harris wins, knock on wood,

I would be looking out for Russian interference in the form of incitement and Russia trying to stir things up. And we already see this with the potential bomb threats in Georgia today.

This could be a very real part. I mean, because what is Russia's incentive to

hold back here? You know, they think that they're at war with us, literally. And so I think we should be not to,

in the best case scenario of a Kamiris win, we could still be living with this kind of incitement from not just inside this country, but from Russia. Yeah, and you see this kind of stuff in

autocracies where you don't have to stuff a bunch of envelopes into a ballot box to steal an election. You can just scare enough people out of voting.
to tip the scales.

It happens all the time, one. And two,

you're right that this, I think the Proud Boys and these organizations, these names are new. The organizing tools are new.

But the reality is the United States has this long history of like right-wing, paranoid, anti-government violence, right? I mean, look at like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 of Timothy McVay.

He was inspired or angered by the government's handling of Waco and Ruby Ridge.

I mean, this kind of like paranoid right-wing fringe has been beneath the surface since really like the inception of this country.

And what happens in any democracy is leaders can kind of inflame those people or not.

And Trump is clearly inflaming the passions of these violent kind of fascist organizations.

Yeah. And there's a classic cycle of radicalization that takes place.
We looked at radicalization a lot, again, around ISIS, which was not nearly as large a footprint

as these groups. And, you know, it starts maybe online and you start to, you know,

kind of live in a certain poisoned well of content, and that leads to conspiracy theory.

The moment in which radicalization becomes more concerning is then when you literally join up with like-minded other humans. So it's not just online, you're not just watching videos.

It's when you join the group, you know, because then that kind of creates a permission structure for everybody to believe the same thing and to reinforce one another's beliefs and to kind of fortify one another, maybe to take risks.

And that's clearly happened over the course of the last eight years of Trump being in our lives like this. So it's something to bear in mind.
By the way, even if Kamala Harris loses,

which we obviously don't believe will happen,

but could, the Russians could, mere image, you know, try to gin stuff up

to... just to sow chaos of conspiracy theories targeted at the left.

The difference is that there's just not the same evolved, it's not a both sides thing.

There's not the same evolved, there's not a bunch of left-wing militias in this country, like you said, with like a deep history of the paranoid style of American politics and stockpiling guns.

Antifa is not that. No, it's a bunch of

Red Rose Twitter accounts saying scathing things.

So that's an uplifting chapter of our election coverage. The last piece on the election is, you know, one of the most important states we're watching tonight is Michigan.

We will probably have results out of Michigan by the time you hear this podcast because they count pretty quickly.

We've talked a lot of times about the large number of Arab American and Muslim American voters in Michigan and the concern that Gaza, the war in Gaza, and now Lebanon might lead those voters to stay home or vote Trump or vote third party, like for Jill Stein.

Last week, Bill Clinton was in Michigan. He took this issue on directly during a campaign stop.
Here's a little sample of what was about an eight-minute answer about Gaza. I understand why

young

Palestinian and Arab Americans in Michigan

think too many people have died. I get that.

But if you lived in one of those kibbutz, what would you do if it was your family and you hadn't done anything but support a homeland for the Palestinians and one day they come for you

and

slaughter the people in your village. You would say, well,

you'll have to forgive me. I'm not keeping score that way.

It isn't how many we've had to kill.

Because Hamas make sure

that

they're shielded by civilians. They'll force you to kill civilians if you

want to defend yourself.

I heard an excerpt of that answer online. I was like, ah, the full context has got to be better.
So I watched the full eight-minute thing. It was actually worse.

I just cannot overstate how bad that answer was. Like, I get, I respect Bill Clinton and what he did to really push forward the Middle East peace process.
He tried really hard to get to a deal.

But I don't think that American elected officials understand how an answer like that sounds to the Palestinian ear.

It seems like you're justifying this ongoing slaughter in Gaza of Palestinian people. And also,

He's just factually wrong. Yeah.

You know, the very progressive people that lived on the kibbutzes who were killed, it is is true that those were the people most committed to peace, but those are now, they're not the people out defending the war.

They're the people protesting, demanding that the hostages come home in a ceasefire deal. You know, I mean, I just think, I don't know where he's coming from on this.

Yeah, I mean, it's bad politics, too, because

what is... being accomplished in that answer.
It's antagonizing. Because it sounded like it was meant to be a message to reach out to

Arab American or Muslim American voters or just voters who are concerned about Gaza. And there's not a single one of those voters that's going to find that message appealing.

It speaks to how far the Democratic Party needs to move in order for its leadership to reflect what we see in the data and the polling and from voters.

You know, just to kind of pick apart pieces of that answer,

I don't think that people from the kibbutzim

believe that they need to kill tens of thousands of children.

The simplicity of saying, well, you too would want to kill everybody in Gaza, I actually, I would hope to think that that's not the case, you know?

And the, you know, the constant refrain that basically every civilian casualty is Hamas's fault, there's just so much evidence that that's not the case. That is sometimes the case.

But there's also cases of just dropping 2,000-pound bombs on buildings that they know have like an enormous amount of civilians in them or targeting of health infrastructure, as we've talked about.

Or, I mean, we could go on on, you know, the mistreatment or really torture of people in detentions, stuff that goes well beyond just this kind of overly simplified, they're defending themselves, you would do the same thing.

And if innocent people are killed, it's Hamas's fault.

And I just think that part of the task, no matter what happens in this election, obviously it's most relevant if Kamala Harris wins. But the Democratic Party, it does feel like

this has been more complicated to deal with in an election year. Let's just name that.
I think Democrats have not wanted to stir the pot. There are donors,

there's voters that are very pro-Israel, and there's habits of being a certain way in election cycles. And so I think there's been a bit of a paralysis in the party.

And I would expect that no matter what happens in the election,

one of the areas, particularly in foreign policy, where there's going to be some kind of reckoning

in the party is going to be on this. Because

that answer, and we should be honest, like our boss, former boss, Barack Obama, I think gave a better answer than that, but it wasn't anywhere near what the uncommitted movement wanted to hear too recently.

You know, I think that we have to realize that the old talking points just don't work anymore. And the old talking points are Israel's right to defend itself,

we're for a two-state solution, this all started on October 7th. Like, none of that, you know, even if you believe all those things to be true, by the way, it still doesn't apply.

Right now, nobody knows what the future of Gaza is. Nobody knows what the future of Lebanon is.
Nobody knows where this is going with the Iranians. So we're going to have to refresh the approach here.

Yeah, again, I think we've given Kamala Harris some time and space on this issue because Joe Biden is still the president. She's been a candidate for 100 days.

By the time you hear this, the election is over, no matter who wins, it's time to drastically ramp up pressure on Biden to cut off military support to this war and end it.

It's just an atrocity at this point.

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Well, let's talk about some big news out of Israel, Ben. So, the first is that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu finally fired Yoav Galant, the Israeli defense minister, saying,

In the midst of a war, more than ever, full trust is required between the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense.

Unfortunately, although in the first months of the campaign there was very fruitful work, during the last months, this trust cracked between me and the Minister of Defense.

So, Galant is a relative moderate in Netanyahu's administration. I say relative because that's as compared to some of the right-wing fringe freaks that he's put in his cabinet.

In recent days, there was particular tension between Netanyahu and Galant over whether to exempt ultra-Orthodox students from the draft.

So that is a really important issue for Netanyahu because it is key to holding together his government coalition,

keeping himself in power and out of jail. So Bibi made a move to fire Galant in March 2023.
He reversed that decision after mass protests.

It sounds like there's demonstrations for revan up as we speak.

So Galant is supposed to be replaced by a guy named Israel Katz, who's the current foreign minister and kind of like a no-name as far as we can. And very little experience in security issues.

Yeah, and kind of a right-wing nut, according to his Twitter feed.

So, Ben, you know, there's a lot of

members of Congress I talk to, elected officials, who would cite Gallant's presence

as why they supported the Israeli military effort, even though they hate Netanyahu. Gallant was the primary interlocutor with the Biden White House.

He was the primary point of contact for the Defense Department. Now he's gone.
It's not clear like what that channel will be. Now, you know, obviously Biden to Bibi Netyahoo, but

on a staff level, are they going to talk to Ron Dermer, who's this kind of like right-wing Republican political hack who's been around Netanyahu his whole life?

So I'm going to sign, and clearly he dumped this news out on election day

for a reason. Yes.
Yeah. You know? Yeah.
This is something that's been brewing for a while. It does speak to some pretty critical issues.
You mentioned the ultra-Orthodox thing.

This is BB saying, I'm siding with the ultra-Orthodox members of my coalition, even though this is hugely unpopular in large swaths of Israeli society, in the IDF, that you have these exceptions for this growing share of the population that doesn't have to bear the burden.

By the way, so you've got some ultra-Orthodox who support these really hawkish policies in terms of the war in Gaza and Lebanon and then don't fight in it.

And you can imagine what that triggers for people. But also, Galant, Gallant, importantly, was the leading voice in every report for a ceasefire.

He came out after this happened and said, we could have had a deal to get the hostages back.

So Gallant was the kind of person that wanted to do a ceasefire for hostages deal, and Bibi clearly is not.

And so this does suggest that any sense of an end to the war in Gaza or some negotiated ceasefire is even less likely than it was yesterday. By the the way, Tony Blinken also called Gallant yesterday.

So as usual,

Tony Blinken is getting the rug pulled out from under him for what number of time has happened.

And the other thing I'd say, Tommy, is that early in the war, there was a sense, and we said this, that Netanyahu was at heightened maximum political vulnerability.

Solidified. Yeah, exactly.
This is a sign of a guy who is confident that he's in charge.

In those early days, he was kind of hugging people like Gallant and bringing Benny Gantz into this unity cabinet, this war cabinet.

Remember, all these Israeli guys wearing like black shirts together, I mean, which was kind of a strange color choice.

But that's gone. Like Benny Gantz, Gallant, those guys are no longer useful to Bibi.
I mean, again, it just also shows that Bibi ends up fucking every one of these people, right?

We've seen Ehud Barak come to his government, Gallant, Benny Gantz, Zippy Livny back in the day, right?

If you become a minister because it sounds like a good idea that you're going to somehow moderate BB or you're going to advance your politics, this happened to Lapid,

you always end up getting fired by this guy, you know? And so I hope the lesson to these really anybody in the opposition, even

the more right-wing opposition, which is what Gantz and Gallant would be,

this is how it's always going to end. Always going to end this way.
But here's...

maybe a sign of trouble for Netanyahu. Here's like a backstory here.
So there's a growing scandal about the leak of classified information.

So the backstory, Ben, is we discussed this a bunch of times.

Like Netanyahu was in these negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage release deal, and then he kept introducing new demands that made the negotiations harder and blew them up.

He, of course, would blame Hamas, but it was clear that he was introducing new things that were problematic, including that Israel retained control of the Philadelphia corridor, which is that buffer zone between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.

I think Netanyahu initially denied that he had included the Philadelphia corridor in his list of demands.

But then on September 1st, Israel recovered the bodies of six hostages who had been executed by Hamas in a tunnel in Gaza.

That led to widespread anger and demands that he cut a deal and get the rest of the hostages home.

So the next day, Netanyahu goes out, does a press conference where he defended putting in place these new conditions by claiming that Hamas could smuggle hostages out of Gaza into Egypt and then to like Iran or Yemen or something where they could never be recovered.

And he also held up a document that he said was from Hamas and had instructions about dragging out the war to like undercut the IDF narrative and wage psychological warfare on the Israeli public.

So this is what he said publicly at this press conference.

A couple of days later, on September 5th, this London-based outlet called the Jewish Chronicle published a piece by a freelancer that said Yahya Sinwar was planning to flee Gaza via the Philadelphia corridor to Iran with some hostages.

So basically exactly what Netanyahu just said. Cited intelligence based on interrogations of Hamas officials and some other documents.
The IDF was asked about this afterwards.

They said they were unaware of this intel or planning, and the story was actually retracted.

Then the next day, a German outlet called Bild ran a piece supposedly based on Hamas documents about a plan from Hamas to drag out the talks and wage psychological warfare on the Israeli public.

The IDF was asked about this again. They said the intel was overstated, but this was actually kind of a real troubling leak.

So basically, Netanyahu does this press conference, and then you have these two leaks to foreign publications that are obviously designed to back up his claims.

So fast forward to last week, we learned that there's three suspects in custody, in Israeli custody, for these leaks of classified information, not just leaking this stuff, but also allegedly manipulating and editing the documents in ways to further buttress Netanyahu's position.

One of the one name has been released by the courts. It's the guy, it's a guy named Eli Feldstein, who's a spokesman in the prime minister's office.

He had previously worked for Itzmar Ben-Gavir, who's the most right-wing nutjob security minister in the cabinet.

And this guy, Eli Feldstein, reportedly failed a background check for a security clearance when he got the job.

So when Netanyahu's team was asked about this leak investigation, they initially said, oh, no one in our office has been contacted. Then a day later, they said, oh, actually.

you know, this guy Feldstein might have been a part of it, but he didn't have a clearance. He wasn't part of these debates, et cetera.
So a lot of backstory there.

But, you know, Ben, I know Netanyahu survived countless scandals, corruption, you name it.

But if he actually had a staffer manipulate and leak classified information to screw up the hostage release talks, that seems like as bad as it gets politically. Yeah, but there seems to be no,

you know,

part of what's frustrating is, yes, I mean, this is pure self-interested autocracy, right?

I will not only leak classified information, I will edit the classified information to back up my narrative for why I'm continuing this war in perpetuity because that serves my political interest.

And if hostages die because of that, I don't care. You know, like I can't imagine something that says something worse about the character of a politician.

And yet, it just doesn't feel like there's enough pushback from people with real power, either in the U.S. government or the Israeli political establishment.

There are very many brave brave Israelis who are protesting. They're protesting right now, this kind of stuff,

among the public. But among these people we've talked about, Benny Gantz and Lapid and

Gallant, they don't really seem to have any...

strategy for how to deal with how much the guardrails have fallen off around BB.

And the US, which has all this leverage because we've given tens of billions of dollars in military assistance to BB,

don't use that leverage either.

And so he's just kind of feeling now like he has all this running room. Yeah, there'll be, it's like Trump.
There's scandal after scandal mushrooms. And

if nobody's really willing to hold him to account,

then he's just going to continue. Yeah, he's just waiting on a Trump victory, which who knows at this point.

But again, just out of Gaza itself, I mean, on Monday, the IDF repeatedly bombed a hospital in northern Gaza, the Jabalia area. It injured medical staff and patients.

I bring this up because, you know, it's horrific.

And I was just reminded of the kind of early days of the the war when people were outraged if you suggested the IDF would ever bomb a medical facility. And now it just happens all the time.

Kathy Russell, who we know well, the executive director of UNICEF, said that, quote, the entire Palestinian population in North Gaza, especially children, is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine, and the ongoing bombardments.

They've just been cut off and starved to death for weeks and weeks now.

And then finally, Ben, I mean, the Washington Post reported that the Biden administration is sitting on about 500 reports detailing instances where U.S.-made weapons were used to kill civilians in Gaza.

The U.S. has taken no action based on those reports.
So, again,

election is now over when you're hearing this. It is time to ramp back up political pressure.

And this would be the thing I would focus on, that last item, because we are in violation of our own laws, and there are potentially hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of reports of the U.S.

violating its own laws by continuing to provide this military assistance.

I would be saying an incoming Harris administration, knock on wood, must follow the law and should immediately accelerate a review of how we enforce those laws.

This is the vehicle to change policy because it is on the books already. You don't have to change law.
It's on the books already that we don't provide this assistance.

And if Trump wins, then we're obviously in an even more dire circumstance. God only knows.

Okay, well, enough about Ghost Brad.

Let's turn to Russia Bet. So here's a scary story.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Western intelligence officials believe that Russia covertly shipped two incendiary devices on DHL cargo planes as part of a covert plan where they ultimately wanted to mess with the US and allies in Europe through terrorism, basically.

These devices caught fire at a DHL logistics hub in Germany and the other in the UK. It was believed to have been a test run as part of a plan to ship these kinds of devices to North America.

They were disguised as like sex toys or just like massagers or something, but something in the battery lit on fire and the water wouldn't put it out.

So it either would have down to the plane or forced a landing. Poland has arrested four people in connection with this plot.
They're looking for two more.

The head of Poland's foreign intelligence agency said that Russian spies were to blame, specifically the GRU, the Russian military intelligence.

Obviously, Russia has denied this, but European countries have been warning for months now that the Russians were carrying out these arson attacks across Europe and also in the Baltics.

So, Ben, I realize that the US and Russia have been engaged in a proxy war for many years now in Ukraine. But if the Russians really went all like al-Qaeda on a U.S.

passenger plane, can you just imagine what the political pressure would be to, I don't know, wage a full-on military response, a direct one, or send more weapons to Ukraine or get rid of all restraints on the use of U.S.

weapons? Like, I just, I don't get why Putin would do this given how overwhelming the U.S. response would likely be, unless Trump is president.

I mean, one possible scenario is that this is a probing exercise, and that this is the kind of tactic he may want to have in reserve,

I don't know to respond to the U.S., if the U.S. lifted all those restrictions on Ukrainian weapons being fired against Russian targets inside of Russia, maybe he'd do something like this in response.

And so

it just, it's a reminder of how tenuous this all is. Like, we are so focused on the election.

Whoever wins, this is going to be the situation with the Russians.

By the way, that BRICS summit that we talked about, Putin advanced the ball a bit on kind of creating parallel alternatives to payments to avoid sanctions and having a lot of the global economy there.

He's feeling pretty emboldened on the battlefield. You know, they're making gains there.

And so he may feel like now's his time to press, you know, his advantage. He's got the North Koreans there.
And then you've got this war in the Middle East where Bibi's feeling emboldened.

I mean, it is, you know, not the

cleanest inheritance for whoever the next president is. No, big time.
A little kind of good news from the region.

So a couple of weeks ago, we talked about these Moldova elections where there was a referendum to enshrine a path to joining the EU that just kind of barely squeaked by.

Also up for a vote was the presidential race where there was a pro-Western candidate, Maya Sandhu,

who got the most votes, but not enough to avoid a runoff against a pro-Russian opponent. The runoff happened Sunday.
Sandu won with 55% of the vote to her rivals 45%.

So good news. I mean there was a messed up process.
There was lots of accusations of vote rigging, election interference by the Russians itself, but you know, good that she won.

And pretty clear results. You know, and if you look at the Georgian election, you know, went a different way, and there's obviously questions about whether there were irregularities here.

Sandhu also overcame that flood of cameo that we talked about. Right.
Resigned Sandhu or whatever it was from Lindsey Lohan and everybody else. Like exhibit.

But you know, Moldova is the thing to watch, right? If you've got this spectrum and Ukraine, there's a war, Belarus has kind of been swallowed up by the Russians.

Georgia is kind of right in the crosshairs. And then there's Moldova.
Those four countries are obviously the

different levels of Russian invasion and interference. And Moldova is thus far showing itself to be the one that is resisting through whatever antibodies it has, this kind of Russian encroachment.

Yeah. Switching continents for a minute, Ben.
Let's talk about Botswana. Yes, let's talk about Botswana.
Our first Botswana discussion on the show.

The Botswanan Democratic Party, the ruling party in Botswana since independence in 1966, lost an election to this progressive Umbrella for Democratic Change party led by someone named Duma Boko.

This was Boko's third time running for office, but this time his coalition won an outright majority in parliament. The transition is going really well.

The outgoing president conceded promptly and said, quote, you can count on me to always be there to provide whatever guidance you might want.

So it's like surprisingly better than our transition to power. So what you ask might ask leads to this kind of massive sea chains in an election.
It was the economy, stupid.

Specifically, the diamond market. So Botswana is the second largest producer of diamonds behind Russia.
There was a huge downturn in the market.

That led to a collapse in economic growth in Botswana and a spike in unemployment to nearly 30%.

So obviously very tough to run run as an incumbent with numbers like that. Obviously, a huge moment for Botswana itself, Ben.

But part of an interesting trend that we've started to cover where you've seen parties that have been in power for generations, really decades, like the ANC in South Africa, take a big hit in elections.

And then there's an election coming up in Namibia

where the party there, the Southwest Africa's People's Organization Party, or SWAPO, has won every election since independence.

So you can see, you know, a series of kind of like dynastic parties maybe going down. Yeah, I think across southern Africa, you've had these institutional parties.

Botswana has generally been a democratic bright spot

in the region.

But I mean, what I take away from this is, yes, there's like an anti-incumbency, anti-sense of corruption or kind of sclerosis in these parties that is opening the door to some opposition movements.

But also

the peaceful transition to power part, you know,

that's notable. Um i it it's it's certainly not been the norm in all parts of the African continent for people to accept election results like that.
And it's a reminder too, on our election day,

uh, that there's this quote-unquote year of elections and it's a very mixed picture so far.

Um you have some bright spots and I think these two elections, Moldova and Botswana in very different parts of the world, uh offer some bright spots in terms of small D democracy.

The US election will be a part of that and and And it just shows you how contested democracy it is

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Let's laugh at some dumb stuff to end the show, shall we?

Last week we talked about these scary reports that there's like maybe 10,000, maybe 19,000 North Korean soldiers who have been sent to Russia to fight against Ukraine, including some of their elite special forces.

It's obviously a big deal.

It's a scary like tangling of alliance that has some real World War I or maybe three vibes.

On Tuesday, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said that Ukrainian troops had fought with North Korean soldiers for the first time. So they're actually engaging.

Saw a photo on Twitter of a man who is believed to be the first North Korean soldier killed. It's pretty dark.

But again, we need to laugh today, which is why I wanted to read you this tweet from Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times.

He tweeted, quote, a usually reliable source tells me that the North Korean soldiers who have been deployed to Russia have never had unfettered access to the internet before.

As a result, they are gorging on pornography. End of tweet.
So, I don't know, maybe we get some creative adult film stars to

convince them to defect somehow? I mean, the South Korean intelligence service is sometimes fairly aggressive, like the U.S.

intelligence community, in releasing information that it thinks, I don't know, maybe embarrasses the North Koreans. I'd love to know the search terms.
Good call.

Because these North Koreans, they've probably not had any internet access.

Can I go on a limb and suggest that they probably haven't had much access to pornography generally?

Can you imagine all of a sudden, you know,

there's somebody in the unit who figured out there's something called pornhub? And can you imagine what the search items are? Like,

I feel like the South Koreans need to tell us, because this is probably not hard to monitor either.

This is open internet, you know, like these dudes are just hammering away on their little old background device. This is like me in eighth grade getting AOL doing like sex Google search.

Yeah, exactly. So I just, I don't want to posit my own theories as to what they are,

but I'd really like to know. I think we could learn a lot about the North Korean psyche, which has been a bit of a, you know, black box to outsiders by the search terms that they're using.

Yeah, this honey trap writes itself.

Just get these guys,

lure these guys over. Well, or the old school trick of like, I'm a real life life person.
I'm your girlfriend. Just take a picture of where you are and send it to me.
Yeah.

All these North Korean soldiers need a girlfriend in Lviv. Yeah, yeah.
Our next story, Ben.

So airport authorities in New Zealand apparently want to rob screenwriters of one of their favorite clichés by placing time limits on airport hugs.

This is news comes from the Dunadin Airport in New Zealand, which now is a three-minute time limit for hugs in their drop-off area.

So London's Heathrow, they decided to troll them by posting signs that say max hug time,

unlimited. See what they did there.
But the New Zealand airport chief pointed to studies saying that a 20-second hug is enough to release oxytocin and serotonin, to which we say, shut up, nerd.

But so what do you think, Ben? Well, I think Love Actually would exist as a film if this

rule were in place. We're getting ready for that time of year where I will be watching Love Actually.
Yeah, Christmas time is coming. November 5th today.

When are you going to start?

The window starts for me after Thanksgiving. Yeah, Hannah's going to make us get a tree the day after.
Yeah, it starts after Thanksgiving. The music comes on.
You start working through the movies.

Love actually is on there. I will say, to take a political angle here, because that's what we do on the show, you know, Jacinda Ardern

got some shit when she was prime minister for she was a real hugger, right?

And she was, but like, in a wonderful way, she comforted people after the Christ church shooting. But there was this some, you know, gross, misogynist pushback of like, why did she hug people so much?

I don't know if this new right-wing government there, if this is part of like Jacinda, is this Jacinda erasure that's happening at the airport? I don't know because

if you want to hug somebody for a couple of minutes, I don't know why that's their fucking problem. Yeah, I feel like this is a bizarre rule.
Like, who the f is hugging for three minutes?

Now, to be fair, I mean, yeah, I guess I don't think I've ever really hugged anybody for three minutes, but

if there's somebody that would like to do that,

you're offering

a book of it. Well, if after this election, I may need somebody to come hug me for three minutes.
In about two hours, I may need a three-minute hug. A three-hour hug is more like it.

I may actually, you know what? To just, again, merge threads here, if Trump wins, I may have to move to New Zealand and be hugged for three minutes when I arrive there.

So if there are any Kiwis listening, one, if you've got an extra bedroom and two,

you know, just group hug. We'll group hug it out, just to be clear.
I do want to put it out there that if you're in a friendly foreign country and Trump wins, consider us

when you're thinking of who to allow to have dual citizenship. Yes, just

call it a lot. We'll add that.
Slide into the DMs here. We'll pay taxes.
Yeah. We'll be specifically on the title.
I'm a tax-abiding, law-abiding citizen. Hey, Gavin.
Citizen of the world.

All the time.

Finally, Ben, we talk a lot of shit about Putin's Russia on this show, but when it comes to trolling, you really do have to hand it to them sometimes.

So here's the context. Google has refused to pay fines that Russia levied on them for blocking Russian state media on YouTube.

So the fines just keep doubling and doubling and doubling every single week to the point where Google now owes Russia two

undecipian rubles,

which is the number two, followed by 36 zeros.

And I believe is larger than the GDP of the entire world.

I guess so. Good luck to Google for good luck sorting out a payment plan.

Sundarba Chai. Google Pay.
Just another one on Google Pay. That's really funny.

That's funny. I'd like to know whose job it was to kind of come up with the number for the payment.
Just to keep it running.

That's some A-plus trolling. I mean, if you can't laugh at some of this stuff, what are we doing here?

Yeah, hopefully maybe they'll get that debt forgiven Bernie Sanders style if there's a new leader over there. Oh, God.

Before we go, Ben, so just a reminder this week, Crooked is going to bring you daily election coverage as long as the race isn't called.

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This ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Well, that's it for us.

Boy, you and I are on a couple text chains together where we both have about 7,000 messages about exit polls. God.

It's important to remember that first wave exit polls are garbage. First wave exit polls are absolute garbage.

I remember in, you know, when we were gorging these in the 2008 campaign, because however many primaries there were, there was always an exit poll.

They were almost always wrong.

2004, John Kerry was winning by a landslide. Yeah, so just let's not.
The last thing I trust,

and Ann Seltzer, I trust more than the exit polls. Come on, come on in.
Kia Iowa pollster. Okay, Okay, well, that's it for us for today.
Thank you for listening.

Thank you for downloading this little time capsule of a show. Next time, you know, we'll know a lot more about this.

I will say, Tommy, one thing that's kind of interesting, I was thinking about this, I've been in a reflective mood because it's been eight years of Trump casting this dark shadow over our lives.

And this whole podcast is kind of, even in the Biden years, it still was there, right?

One way or another, we will know next time we talk whether we are finished with Trump in an entirely new kind of era with all the same problems, but not with Trump

or, you know, the alternative. So that does feel

momentous. Yeah.
Yeah, pretty momentous.

It

sucks. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But it could be great. It could be great.
Could be great. It could be great.
Let's hope it's great. I think it's going to be great.
I think it's going to be great, too.

Cautiously optimistic. But talk to you guys on Tuesday.

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