Is Pete Hegseth a War Criminal?

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Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
I'm Ben Rhodes. Welcome back, buddy.

Of course, every single thing that we focus on and record and talk about here at Pod Save the World is exploding over the Thanksgiving holiday. I know.

It was like one battle after another over Thanksgiving. It's like World of City.
You can keep up with the content. My mom, you know, Hannah's like, could you please put your phone down? No, I'm sorry.

I'm reading about Steve Wickoff. It's very important.
I'm working. I'm working.
I'm tweeting. I'm working and eating over here.
I'm tweeting over here. And I can't eat as much as I used to.

I mean, I have this recollection of being able to eat like portion after portion, and now I just kind of run out of room at a certain point. I don't stop.

The thing that is crazy to me is that we all used to go out as hard as humanly possible Wednesday night. That was the big night.
Before the biggest eating day of the year. Yeah.
Why?

Made a lot of sense at the time. Didn't we get hungover?

We did, and you know, but you used to be able to eat a lot when you're hungover, and now you just lie in a prone position and just sit there and shake an edible and wait.

You know, think about your life, think about your parenting decisions. Wonder why you're up at 5.30.
Wonder why your child broke you up at 5.30 and wants to make a puzzle.

James loves to be up even before, even when the clock is in the 4 a.m. hour.
He likes to just sort of chirp. Yeah.
Let me know what's going on. Anyway, it's great to be back.

It's great to see you in person. We have a wild show, a lot to cover today.
Big show. We're going to talk about the scandal engulfing Secretary of War.

I hate saying that, Pete Hegseth, and reports that he personally ordered an airstrike that is about as clear-cut an example of a war crime as you can get.

We're also going to update you on the latest Trump on-again, off-again regime change war with Venezuela, his shocking pardon of the former president of Honduras, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring with drug traffickers, including El Chapo himself.

Not like the low-level. No, no, like that.
Not the no-name. Former Sean Penn interviewer.
A-list.

A-list narco-terrorists. Narcoterists.
We're going to fill you. in on the latest Russia-Ukraine peace talks and how corruption allegations in the U.S.

and Ukraine are impacting these talks in a big way.

We're also going to detail the fallout from this horrible shooting of two National Guard members in D.C., specifically how it's being used to cut off legal immigration to the United States and to punish basically anyone from Afghanistan.

And we'll explain the background of the shooter who fought alongside U.S. personnel against the Taliban, these so-called zero units.

And then we got some really fascinating stories out of South Africa. And then we're going to end with our bestest boy, Cash Patel.

Our bestest, bestest. Our bestest.
Our bestest boy. I'm torn between whether I want him to be fired or whether we need him for content.
For content purposes.

I think it would probably be good for the country to have a competent leader in that place.

Also, at the very end of the show, we're going to take some questions from Discord from our Friends of the Pod subscribers. And then, Ben, you did our interview today.
I did. Fascinating interview.

I talked to Julia Lochdev, who's the director of My Undesirable Friends, which is a new. My Friends from High School.
Yeah.

The ones you saw over, they seem very clean. I'm just kidding.
My friends from high school are great.

It's a great title, actually. I thought it was a great title.

What Julia did is she basically embedded with a number of independent Russian journalists in the lead-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And it's filmed with an iPhone.
It's very intimate.

You see them kind of going about their lives, going about their work at the same time that there's this massive crackdown where they're being labeled foreign agents.

And in addition to being joined by Julia, I was really lucky to be joined by Kasenya Mirinova, who is one of the journalists, who's got a really harrowing story that is shown in the film.

Her partner, her fiancé, was detained and essentially disappeared. He's also a journalist, and he's serving a 22-year sentence in Russia right now.
Kassenia is now in the United States.

And we just talk about the challenges of being a journalist, obviously, in Russia. I can't even imagine.
Why Putin did this crackdown?

lessons there are in it for the United States, given where we are on the authoritarian spectrum over here. So really, really fascinating.
We are pretty far along. What's on your thumb?

Do you vote in the Iraqi parliamentary elections? What happens? What's going on there? So

for the YouTube viewers, I cut my finger today, and the only band-aids we have are child's band-aids. Instead of a bluey band-aids.
So I have a Halloween band-aid of some sort.

This is a kind of starter. I can't tell if it's like a spider web with stars on it.

So yes, this is why you should subscribe to the Pod Save the World YouTube channel. This is the good shit.
This is the kind of content you get. My child's band-aid on my little cut finger.

I do want to thank the several thousand people that subscribe to the Pod Save the World YouTube. We are cranking out lots of bonus content.

Again, we did did one on Jonathan Pollard, the spy who got a meeting at the U.S. Embassy.
We did one on the

Ukraine peace deal. And when you subscribe or when you like these videos or when you comment, it actually tells the YouTube algorithm to push them to other people to define the show.

Yeah, so thank you for subscribing. We greatly appreciate it.
All right, Ben, should we talk about our boy Pete Hegseth? Yeah, Secretary of West.

Yes.

I can't say Secretary of War. It makes you feel so stupid.

We're living in the stupidest timelines. Yeah, that's right.
Okay, so we have talked a lot on the show about the administration's airstrikes on these both in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean.

So Trump says this is part of a war on drug cartels. He calls them narco-terrorists.
In practice, the U.S. military is just murdering people who the administration claims are drug traffickers.

They don't really know. 83 people in 21 airstrikes, to be exact.

But a new report from the Washington Post now has members of Congress from both parties demanding more detail about this policy and asking whether Pete Hegseth himself is guilty of war crimes.

The specific incident they are focused on was the first one of these counter narcotic strikes that happened on September 2nd. It killed 11 people.

At the time, remember Trump put out this brief clip of the airstrike on Truth Social. He said the people killed were trende Aragua narco-terrorists.

And then a few days later, the Intercept reported a bunch more details about the strike itself, specifically that the boat had spotted the surveillance drones following them, turned back towards shore.

And then the U.S. military hit them anyway with a first drone strike that didn't kill everyone on board.
And then a second strike killed the remaining survivors.

So the Washington Post reported that Admiral Bradley, who at the time was the head of Joint Special Operations Commander JSOC, ordered that second double-tap strike because he had been given a verbal directive from Pete Hegseth to, quote, kill everybody.

So, Ben, just to be clear here, like I believe that these airstrikes are illegal no matter what. So it's like, it's weird that we're kind of debating whether the double tap strike is illegal.

But like even if the whole thing was on the up and up, like ordering a second drone strike to kill defenseless people floating on wreckage is a war crime.

Yeah, it's like it is like it is in fact shooting at defenseless sailors after like a U-boat strike was like the textbook example of a war crime from World War II.

So the law says basically when the when a soldier is hurt or sick or surrenders or is rendered defenseless, it's a war crime to kill them and you have to rescue them.

Initially, the Pentagon denied the story. They called the post story fabricated, inflammatory, interrogatory.
Then on Sunday, Trump got asked about the report. A lot of big words for those guys.

A lot of of big words, a lot of syllables there. And so Trump gets asked Sunday and he's like, I guess I believe Pete, but also I wouldn't have wanted that, not that second strike.

Then Monday, Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, reads this prepared statement that says Hexeth authorized the strikes, but then she pointed her finger down the chain of command at the head of JSOC, Admiral Bradley, and said Bradley was, quote, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed.

And then later on Monday, Hexeth tweeted about Bradley saying, quote, I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made on the September 2nd mission and all other since.

So some very subtle finger-pointing from Pete there. On Tuesday, Ben Trump and Hexeth were asked about the strike at a cabinet meeting.
Here are some of what they said.

President Trump always has our back. We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations, and we do in this case.
Pete didn't know about

second attack having to do with two people.

And

I guess Pete would have to speak to it. I can say this, I want those boats taken out and if we have to we'll attack on land also.
I watched that first strike live.

As you can imagine at the Department of War we got a lot of things to do so I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours whatever where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs so I moved on to my next meeting.

A couple of hours later I learned that that commander had made the which he had the complete authority to do And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision.

I did not personally see survivors, but I stand because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke.
You can't see anything. You got digital.

This is called the fog of war. This is what you and the press don't understand.
I hear Colombia, the country of Colombia, is making cocaine. They have cocaine manufacturing plants, okay?

And then they sell us their cocaine. We appreciate that very much.
But yeah, anybody that's doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack. So not necessarily just Venezuela.

No, not just Venezuela. No, we're taking those son of a bitches out, yeah.

Just learned that Colombia is manufactured cocaine. So just to like try to put a button on this long sorted story.

So previously the administration said the second strike was necessary to get rid of a navigation hazard and sink the boat.

Then they said it was self-defense because I guess these two people floating in the water are going to like take out a Reaper drone or whatever is floating above them.

We should note that the New York Times reported out a slightly different version of events after the post, which is that Hegseth ordered a strike to kill the people on the boat and destroy its cargo, sink the vessel.

But he didn't say, like, if there are survivors, kill them too, which like is an important distinction just in terms of like the criminality here. So let's pause there, Ben.

I mean, how much trouble do you think Hegseth and Bradley are in here? And how subtle did you find his attempt to point the finger at his subordinates?

So that to me is the headline of this whole thing is that they know they got caught committing murder. You know, they are acting like people that are guilty of murder because they are.

And Trump is furiously distancing himself from this. I wouldn't have taken this shot.
I had nothing to do with it.

Hegseth furiously, after posting snuff videos and chest-pounding about these boats, oh, I didn't, you know, the commander did this, but I back up the commander, but I had nothing to do with it.

I walked out the room, I had another meeting. These are people that the whole world is watching video evidence of a war crime.

And it's a sign, too, that even Pete Hegseth, not the, you know, Pistol Pete's, not the sharpest guy that we've had in the job,

is aware that he's going to have a life after Donald Trump is there to protect him.

You know, this is becoming an increasingly common thread with this group, that they're aware that there's some accountability that may be on the horizon for them.

Now, let's just pause and go back to the core issue of why these strikes are wrong. They're illegal, right?

Even if they don't do the double-tap strike, there's no domestic legal authorization for this. We've talked about this.
Manufacturing. There's an act of Congress.

Even if you didn't like the drone strikes, as we've said, there's an act of Congress authorizing use of force against al-Qaeda.

There is no such domestic law authorizing use of force against drug traffickers under international law. There's no imminent threat posed by these boats, right?

Hundreds and hundreds of miles from the United States trafficking maybe cocaine, but they're not providing any evidence of this.

Maybe that could go somewhere else too. It may not even come to the United States.
So this is just, there's no legal basis for any of this.

The reason that the double-tap strike is a particularly egregious war crime is because when people, I mean, I think the people driving the boats to begin with are not exactly posing a threat, but when people are not fighting back and they're,

you know, they're at risk and they're trying to surrender, they're not putting up a fight, you are obligated to capture those people, to help those people even.

And we went through this, by the way, in Gaza, why you can't just blow up whole buildings, right? And for people who don't...

Think those are important.

I just go through the few reasons. Number one, it's wrong to just kill people when you don't need to kill them.

I mean, you know, if you're fighting in a war, if you're on the front line in Ukraine and you're trading fire, that's illegal use of force.

If you're just, there's vulnerable people hanging onto a boat and you kill them, well, you know, that's just wrong. And those people could be innocent too.

But secondly, if you needed another reason, that should be enough. Our troops, U.S.
troops, depend on these laws.

If these laws go away, how would you feel if it was American troops with their hands up

trying to surrender, getting double-tapped and killed instead of being captured and ultimately exchanged or released to their families, right?

So this, our military has traditionally been a huge proponent of following the laws of war, particularly in circumstances when people are trying to surrender, because they know that there have been times and there will be times in the future when those will be Americans.

So this is wrong morally, it's wrong legally. It's also wrong for our national security, for the security of our troops.
If

these laws of war are just out the window, it's going to come back and boomer, the chickens are going to come home to roost, to quote the former pastor of our former boss, you know?

And so it just, to me, so many threads come into this story because there's the abuse of power, then there's the why are we there and the regime change peace in Venezuela that we'll get to.

And then there's also, remember the fact that this is why they're at war with like Mark Kelly.

Because the Democrats in Congress were telling those service members, hey, if you commit an illegal act, if you were ordered to do something illegal, like kill these people in a double-attack strike, you could be held accountable.

You don't have to do that. You follow the Constitution, not an illegal order.
And so a lot of things converge in this story. It's why it's a really big and important story.

It's a big and important story. And clearly, those six members of Congress made that video because they knew about this.

This was the first one of these strikes, remember.

And Hexeth is such a preening fuck that he had to go on, he went on Fox News like the day after, was bragging about how he watched it live and how he was personally engaged and he knew all the intelligence but everyone like i remember talking to people you and i worked with in the obama administration like in the days after that first strike who were selling to me like there were 11 people on that boat why would you have 11 people on a drug runner boat right like there was probably some human trafficking there's probably innocent people who may have been those survivors and like you said like the whole policy is illegal full stop there's probably a legal difference for hegseth in terms of his future uh in culpability between him saying you have the authority to kill everyone on that boat with him being like, kill everyone on that boat or seeing survivors and being like, kill those people.

But again, like this is all greatly complicated by the fact that he watched this live, I guess.

And then just bigger picture, Pete Hegseth is so obviously trying to fuck over his direct reports, the head of JSOC at the time.

And that is just not going to go over well at the Pentagon or really anywhere in the military. Like the buck is supposed to stop with him.
He's the leader. And And this is a common thread.

We'll get to it with Cash Patel, but they are starting. I mean, look, these people, by the way, that guy, I guarantee you, I don't know anything about that guy.
That guy is not a Democrat.

The commander of JSOC.

Just going to go out on a limb.

So

this is going to be a problem for them because, one, those people know that they might face accountability. But two, I mean, you and I were talking offline about this.

Imagine if Barack Obama went out and just blamed

down the chain of command.

They are going to start to run into a challenge. I mean, I remember this, you know, every administration comes in and their highest moment is the first day, right? The half day, dude.

Yeah, that half day of inauguration where everybody's kissing your ass. It seems like you're going to be there forever.
You know, it seems like you can do anything.

Everybody wants a job so they're being really nice to you. And that capital just diminishes throughout the time that you're in office.

Donald Trump is trying to like buck gravity by talking about how he might run for a third term. He's not.
He's the guy's old, right?

We're going to be through this, we might go through some shit here with the midterms and whatever happens. You know, I'm not suggesting it's going to be easy.

Can't stay awake through a cabinet meeting. But the point is that these soldiers and SEALs and special operators and FBI agents know they're going to have to have a life after Trump.

And these fuckers are just. passing the buck for all the crimes that they're committing down the chain.
That is going to create some real tensions inside the military.

And that's why they were so thin-skinned about that video, because people like Jason Crow and Mark Kelly and Alyssa Slotkin, they know that. Yes.
And so that hit the target.

The reason they freaked out like they did and they're trying to court-martial Mark Kelly is because they know that they're speaking directly to people that are listening. Absolutely right.

Yeah, just a few other things. I'm sure like me, you went deep on this, on this policy debate after this, you know, Hexa story posted.

I hadn't realized that the Washington Post reported that the White House initially asked the CIA to conduct these drone strikes on the boats through its covert action authorities, but the CIA's lawyers were like, I don't know that there's any possible self-defense argument, and they didn't want to do it.

And then Stephen Miller wanted to be able to make the snuff films public, which sort of like belies the whole idea that you would do it covertly. So they passed it over to DOD.

And the Post also reported that the deputy director at the CIA had to become the acting general counsel and then be the one who ultimately approved CIA's participation in the policy because the career lawyers were, again, like, this is crazy.

This is just murder. And so, you know, Ben, to your point about Admiral Bradley,

between this strike and today, Admiral Bradley was promoted from the head of JSOC to the head of U.S. Special Operations Command.
So

they're now pointing the finger at him and being like, he is the one to blame. If you're going to, you know, Congress, if you're going to, you know, call someone up to the hill, it's that guy.

But they loved him until like a a couple of days ago when the Post reported this story. And then, you know, we, I think you and I talked about this at the time.

On October 6th, there was another strike that had some survivors. Those survivors were picked up and then returned to their home countries.
They weren't even prosecuted.

So clearly, they were shaken by this first strike. They knew they did the wrong thing and they changed the policy going forward.

And that is also reportedly when Admiral Holsey, who's the head of Southern Command, who's retiring early, got in some big fight with Raisin Kane, Dan Kane, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

I think about this policy, maybe about this question of survivors. And now he is leaving only a year into the job, I think, with the end of December.

There's just like lots of interesting data points in the public domain that have shown like smoke and fire along the way about the problems here. Yeah.

And if you have no, again, credible legal basis, which they have not even presented, you know, domestically or internationally, and then you have a video of

people being killed after the strike had already hit the target. That's why they had all the meetings, because they already knew they were on a shaky legal basis.

You already had lawyers that reportedly had said no to this, right, at multiple agencies, because they also got rid of the JAGs, the lawyers of the defense council, right? Cleaned house there.

So they already knew that they were on pretty tenuous footing. In part because Stephen Miller wanted to make the snuff videos, right? So this is their own hubris coming back on them.

It's always hubris that brings people down.

Clearly, the flurry of this activity, flurry of these meetings, but what they can't change is the fact that they killed those people and that there's video evidence of those people being killed.

And that's never going to go away, no matter what they do. And the rats can scurry off the ship here.

You know, not to be a little too, but like,

we all know what we saw, and we all know that they can't explain why it's legal.

And that's why they say, by the way, the other thing I want to point out in that clip you played, then they pivot to like, those sons of bitches, this kind of dehumanizing bravado bullshit.

When nobody, Donald Trump's not a tough guy, you know, Pete Hegseth, like, give me a break, you know?

They hide behind that because they have no argument to make for why they're blowing up these boats. Yeah.
And I do think in that clip, too, Hegseth kind of showed you who he really is.

I mean, remember, this is a guy who spent a lot of time defending someone named Eddie Gallagher, who was a Navy SEAL who

was accused by his own men of horrific war crimes, just like sniping innocent kids. And Hegseth like put a lot of political capital into defending him.

Also, Ben, I saw Rand Paul, Senator Rand Paul, Republican, posted a letter from the Coast Guard that said between September 1st, 2024 and October 7th, 2025, Coast Guard vessels interdicted 212 suspected drug-smuggling vessels at sea headed towards the U.S.

41% of them had no illicit contraband on board at all. I'm not sure if contraband means drugs or like anything the Coast Guard deemed illegal, but either way, at least 20% of these boats had no drugs.

So if that is the error rate with these drone strikes, that's pretty bad.

We're just murdering, if that's the case, and we don't know because they provide no evidence, we were just killing potentially like fishermen

or people just on a boat. And look, then when you challenge them on that, Trump says, oh, there are not any boats to hit anymore.
Well, guess what there is?

There's still fucking cocaine in the United States.

What did they end drug trafficking? Like these boats are achieving nothing. Nothing.
Other than a big show that Stephen Miller and Pete Heck Zeth liked to put on X, you know, and seem like tough guys.

Yep. So I'm glad Republicans and Democrats in Congress are both outraged.
Hopefully we'll have real hearings,

real investigations. Of course, like Pete Hexeth posts this like Franklin the Turtle meme of like a turtle firing a machine gun.
Like, it's just a moron. I don't know.

Do you think that I wonder if this stuff is starting to wear thin even with some other things?

Because it's the Franklin the Turtle thing, which is just thirsty. That was not a good swing, sir.
No one knows that. But this is why he was the weekend anchor at Fox and Frank.
That's right.

This guy couldn't even carry the fucking weekday. No, he was

too drunk.

Okay, so that disaster we just talked about could just be like a little war crime amuse bouche for the entree that is a regime change war with Venezuela.

Trump has been threatening Venezuela for a while now, as we've discussed. He's put all these naval assets in the region.
There's something like 15,000 troops down there in the Caribbean.

But there is still some hope that Trump is looking for a diplomatic off-ramp.

On November 21st, Trump reportedly spoke with President Maduro in a call that the Miami Herald says was arranged by Brazil, Qatar, and Turkey. Interesting group.
Again, Again, Qatar.

Qatar was at, yeah, they've been involved in Venezuela. They brokered some release of prisoners.

Those guys are negotiators. They're just everywhere.
They're like Whitcoffian, and they're negotiating.

This call was right before the State Department officially labeled Maduro the head of the Cartel de las Sols, which is a group, as we discussed last week, that doesn't actually exist.

It's what Venezuelan journalists call corrupt members of the military.

So according to Reuters, Maduro told Trump he was willing to leave Venezuela if he and his family got full legal amnesty, all sanctions removed, and if the U.S.

stopped the case against Maduro at the ICC, to which we said, sorry, Maduro, we only block ICC justice for Israeli war criminals. Yes, sir.

So Maduro also wanted sanctions removed from more than 100 Venezuelan officials, and he wanted his VP to run Venezuela until there were new elections, which of course would be free and fair, as we know.

So Trump reportedly said, no, actually, you have a week to get the hell out of the country. Best of luck.
Call me back. So that call call didn't go great.

That one-week deadline for Maduro to leave was Friday.

On Saturday, Trump posted this message, which said, quote, to all airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers, they should consider Venezuelan airspace closed.

And then in a call with troops on Thanksgiving, Trump indicated that ground operations in Venezuela could begin, quote, very soon. So happy Thanksgiving, guys.
Happy all day, guys.

Enjoy some turkey and a new war. By the way, what happened to the Thanksgiving deadline and the war in Russia? It feels like that must have worked too.
That one slipped a little bit too.

As we know, we've discussed the Trump administration recently doubled the bounty on Maduro's head to $50 million.

Trump was supposed to have some kind of cabinet-level meeting on Monday to figure out next moves. We don't know what happened there.

Meanwhile, in Caracas, Maduro hosted a rally on Monday where he danced on stage and called for peace, saying,

We do not want a slave's peace nor the peace of colonies. Colony never, slaves never.

The New York Times had this interesting piece, Ben, about how Maduro's upping a security game. He's changing where he sleeps.
He's swapping out cell phones.

He's also leaning very heavily, apparently, on Cuban bodyguards and Cuban intelligence support, which is sort of interesting detail, all while trying to be chill in public.

So I guess we'll continue to hurry up and wait. I mean, at the risk of asking you the same question like six weeks in a row, any signs you're seeing that Trump's leaning one way or the other?

And did you catch the politico story? over the Thanksgiving break about all the Republicans in Miami saying they will never lose Florida again if Trump just deposes Maduro?

I did see that actually as a little bit of a trigger.

You know, a good reason to go to war.

You know, great, great, good reason to invade a country and overthrow its government and put at risk thousands of lives, well, hundreds of thousands of lives in Venezuelan, American Source members, et cetera.

Put aside the kind of crass,

you know, offensive stupidity of that being a reason to go to war. I guess what I'd say is, like, I was interested by and concerned by the flurry of leaks, right, including this phone call.

Because part of what's so strange here is like Trump cannot explain why we might go to war in Venezuela. Like he just cannot.
Like, and we've said this before, but like, it's not drugs.

Like, they're not a major source of drugs coming to the United States. That's a bullshit.
You know, then we'd be invading China, Mexico, and Colombia. You know, like, it's just not about drugs.

It's clearly about. this weird mixture of ideology and far to politics and oil and a lot of things.
And, you know, he wanted him out the first time and couldn't get him out.

Because he can't explain it, like,

I keep thinking, like, is he really going to do this? It'd be pretty insane for all the reasons we've detailed.

But what worries me about this is this almost felt like the kind of thing you do when you're going to go to war. Like, we made one last phone call.
You know, we offered him an alph ramp.

You know, like,

it was kind of, they were leaking, too, that we invited him to the United States for a meeting. Like,

pretty clearly, he was going to be arrested if he came to the United States. Come on, buddy.
Pretty obvious where Murduro is going to end up in the jail cell that the Honduran guy just said.

Come at dinner. Come to Mar-a-Lago.

Have a cake. Yeah.
So that's what made me nervous is like, we're still, we're going through these motions and doing things like ultimatums. Like, this is kind of like felt like before the war in Iraq.

Remember, it was like 48 hours to give up all the weapons of mass destruction that they didn't have. And, you know, so.

And these things take on a momentum and a life of their own, even when the leaders don't want there to be a conflict. And look, we've seen Trump have the ability to just.
ignore his own deadlines.

I mean, we've had five or six to end the war in Ukraine, as I just alluded to. Two weeks for a healthcare plan in 2015.
Yeah, he's got a lot of chips on the table there, too.

Like, he's like, he's promised to get rid of this guy, and he's threatened to bomb them on land multiple times.

And so I just think that they keep believing there's some way to do this on the cheap, that they've got.

Again, I've said this before, but I would imagine there's some special forces guys in the country. They've got some CIA people doing stuff, some sabotage.

They're trying to get the opposition to maybe do it themselves. But Maduro, man,

he's a stubborn guy, you know, and his whole existence is tied up. I mean, if he leaves, he's dead.
What is he? You know, or like a prison, you know? And that's not who he's going to be. I mean,

I don't say this with any admiration. I just say this as a, I remember I met with him once.

I was at the Summit of the Americas in 2015, and

Obama had an interaction with him backstage. We did it somewhere where there were no photographers.

And, you know, part of this was just we had, you know, like, want to just make first contact here and see if we can begin to try to address some of the huge issues.

And I just remember him saying over and over again, I'm a revolutionary.

And I remember like kind of believing it. You know, not in a good, I don't, it doesn't justify as a fucking dictator, you know.
Right. But I think he's an ideologue.

And I think he, like, okay, if he's going to go out in a blaze of glory, like, he'll, he'll be that kind of guy more than the Assad kind of guy. Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe he'll get on a plane and go to Havana or something,

in which case that'll probably be the next target for invasion. Yes, for sure.

But it just, it feels like a lot of momentum. And a lot of, you know, and Trump, by the way, like, I'm not in the distraction crowd, as you know, but like, because I think everything they do matters.

But when you're losing altitude, I mean, if we study the authoritarian playbook, when your numbers are slipping below 40%

and people are stopping following some of your orders and, you know, some Republicans are beginning to jump ship. Like, this is when autocrats like start wars.

Yeah, sometimes you just got to bomb some shit.

Yeah, Maduro was like a bus driver, then he was a union activist, then he was a member of Chavez's party, and he was vice president, and then became president.

I think you're right that he's an ID log. Also, I mean, like, his life has been this project.

He's not done anything else, and he's propped up by corruption and the structure that he built under himself. I don't think he's ever been seen as the brightest bulb or the most confused

person. Um, what was the book that Chavez gave Obama? It was a Noam Chomsky, uh,

it was a Noam Chomsky book, yeah. That's cool, but this is, I mean,

it gives a

subscription to the intercept, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was no dropset yet, yeah.
Sorry, we love you guys. Susan's Descent Magazine.
No, Lego. We're readers.

But no,

it was interesting because

Chavez was compelling, charismatic, smart. Maduro's

none of those things. But what's important about that is

as Maduro has lost the support of the people, he is consolidated and maintained control because of the military.

So he's become far more of a military dictator than Chavez was, which is actually why this will be harder than Trump thinks. Because the military is in on this project.
They're in on the corruption.

They're in on all the things. Yeah.
And Maria Machado will not be keeping them around if she comes in. No.

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Okay, so the other shocking development this past week was Trump's decision to pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez.

We're going to call him JOH for short sometimes because it's just easier.

So Hernandez was convicted in federal court last year of, quote, conspiring to import cocaine into the United States and conspiring to use heavy weapons to facilitate said drug trafficking.

DOJ estimates that Hernandez helped traffic 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. over 20 years.
That got him 45 years in prison. Oh, also, he was accused of murdering a witness in prison.
So, good guy.

So, right as the Trump administration is arguing that the U.S.

needs to invade Venezuela to depose the head of a corrupt narco-state or murder random dudes in boats off the coast of Venezuela, Trump releases a different corrupt cartel-linked president from prison.

Makes a lot of sense. So, JOH was president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022.
I was talking with someone who, you know, sort of worked in and out of the U.S.

government, who worked with JOH during that period, who said, you know, look, he sort of smelled dirty from the very beginning, in part because he had a very corrupt, very stupid brother, Tony Hernandez, who was also prosecuted for drug trafficking.

Tony famously stamped some of the cocaine he manufactured with his initials on it.

Just TH. So shockingly, that guy got arrested in 2018.

And then JOH, also, you know, a better politician, but not the brightest ball because he was photographed at the 2010 World Cup with a known Honduran cartel boss.

So folks knew this guy was a creep, is what I was saying. That said, both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, you know, met with him, worked with him, praised him for reducing migration.

And then the DEA was working closely with the Honduran government to try to stop the same drug traffickers that JOH was protecting. And then in 2017,

when Hernandez blatantly stole an election to stay in power, the Trump administration recognized his victory. They basically strong-armed the OAS to shut up about any irregularities.

And then Trump praised him as late as 2019, which was the year his brother was sentenced to life in prison.

So this is a bad dude whose activities were pretty well known, which is why Hernandez is loathed in Honduras, because he stole from the people he was representing and he facilitated the violence and the narco-terrorism that terrorized so many communities there, which is why, Ben, it seemed so politically crazy for Trump in the same truth social post to pardon JOH, but also endorse the candidate from his political party who was running in last Sunday's election, this guy, Tito Asfora, who is another right-winger.

In fact, the post was literally a threat.

Trump said, quote, if he doesn't win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad because a wrong leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, just like the kind of Argentina model of election interference.

That election is basically tied as of this recording. There were a bunch of other like kind of congressional races and mayoral races, but it's going to take some time to get some final tally.

But, Ben, I think the question is just why on earth would Trump do this? We know that Roger Stone was like a big, you know, supporter of this pardon.

We know that JOH is popular with the crypto crowd because of this insane project he facilitated called Prospera, which is like this libertarian wasteland that like Peter Thiel Thiel and other crypto guys liked.

But it was just like so shockingly corrupt that no one seems to understand it. It was sort of like unbelievable when I read it.

I think, first of all, Trump, and we've talked about this, but Trump likes to be the kind of emperor of the Western Hemisphere and pick the leaders.

And, you know, Millay has to win Argentina or else and maybe I'll bomb Colombia because I don't like Petro and I'm going to depose Maduro and maybe I'll take the Panama Canal.

And this guy who's a drug trafficker, well, because he's friends with some of my friends, he he gets to go out of prison and elect his party.

You know, I actually just think he likes sitting on this like throne in the White House and, you know, feeling like he runs this part of the world.

You know, second, I think, and I don't know, but we, you know, the lots of reports about him having buddies, the JOH having buddies like Roger Stone.

Look, this is just a, you know, what seems inexplicable is actually quite simple.

We are run by an incredibly corrupt autocrat who doesn't really give a fuck about anything other than his own power and his own money and his friends and their power and money.

And this guy had the right friends. He had some guy, I think like an operator in Florida, who's probably, JOH probably had a lot of money stashed away that the feds couldn't get their hands on.

Some of that money probably went to work. Again, just one man's view here, but like, you know, you start paying Trump's associates and then they start lobbying Trump and then you get out of prison.

We've seen this movie before.

All I want to say here is like, this gives up the game, you know, to pardon a massive drug trafficker while you're bombing small boats that carry a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the initial stamped Coke that was ravaging our streets from the H family, okay?

From the Hernandez family. And

I don't know how many MAGA people listen to this podcast. It's got to be one.
But we might have some, but we all have MAGA people in our lives.

Please.

Point to this as the example, if you can, of how fucking stupid Donald Trump thinks you are.

That he thinks that he can stand up and tell you that he's blowing up boats illegally in the Caribbean because he's trying to stop drug trafficking while he's pardoning some rich drug trafficker at the same time.

I mean,

he's ending forever wars while he's starting another one. Like, how many times can this guy lie to you before your own eyes on things you care about? drugs in our communities and forever wars.

These are not like small side issues. These are issues that were core to Trump's politics.
And he's showing these completely full shit on both of them. Yeah.

And you know, know, like, I have some random kind of MAGA world contacts that I talk to about stuff.

And like, sometimes we argue, but when I ask them about this or when I ask them about the Venezuela policy, all of them are like, I don't get it either, man. We think it's crazy, too.

Speaking of which, man, let's watch this totally incoherent answer from Trump when asked about why he pardoned JOH.

president of Honduras and he was released from prison.

He was the president and they had some drugs being sold in their country. And because he was the president, they went after him.

That was a Biden horrible witch hunt, which was, you know, a lot of people in Honduras asked me to do that, and I did it. I feel very good about it.

If you have some drug dealers in your country, and you're the president, you don't necessarily put the president in jail for 45 years. That was a Biden-inspired witch hunt.

Did his letter impact your decision?

Jayowich said he would, quote, stuff the drugs up the gringos' noses, according to a witness. He took a million dollars from El Chapo.

Prosecutors said he was part of a 20-year scheme to bring 500 tons of cocaine to the United States. He was taking bribes from the smugglers to protect them from extradition to the U.S.

Actually, that's a really important piece of this because like

corruption and like kind of these drug cartels are so endemic in parts of Latin America. Sometimes the only

way out of it is seen as like the U.S. justice system and extraditing these corrupt people to the United States.

And for Trump to just pardon this guy and undo years and years of work by like the Southern District of New York and the Department of Justice and U.S.

prosecutor, I think is going to make a lot of people in Latin America think, okay, well, now we have just no recourse, you know, and the Americans are just full of shit.

Like they don't actually care about the rule of law or, you know, interdicting drug shipments. They just care about money and their friends and politics and power.
And guess what it's going to foster?

Drug trafficking. You know, we're basically saying like you can get away with it.

If you can just spread some money around Florida and some Trump associates, you know, you have total impunity down there to do this very drug trafficking that we're apparently blowing up boats and having regime change wars to prevent.

I mean, the message is: if you are in the Western Hemisphere, as long as you're a Trump-friendly right-wing autocrat, like you can do absolutely whatever the fuck you want. Yep.
You know,

and if you're, you know, Petro in Columbia,

whatever you think of him, he's not like a narco-trafficker. But if you're that guy, then we may bomb your country, you know? And I just think

this is not,

I guess they're betting that this is just how the world's going to be for 30 years, but I don't think it is. I think I just, I really think the bill is going to come due for these guys.
And

they, because they're just, they're committing crimes out in the open, left and right. Yeah, look, you're right.
Like. Your best day in office is your first day.
Trump thinks he's riding high.

Ultimately, it's a 50-50 country. And like he is going to be slowly losing political support through this unbelievable corruption and all the things that they're fumbling here.

And the fact they're not making any progress stopping fentanyl because no fentanyl is coming from Venezuela. And I think, you know, deep down, look, Stephen Miller cares.

He's like a white supremacist nationalist who wants to deport people and remake the country into his

image, whatever. Trump and some of these people, the profiteering may be the point.

They like the power and they like, you know, but they may just think we're going to make so much fucking money in the next three years.

We're going to make trillions of dollars, basically, that we'll have impunity because

we'll get to live where we, you know, we'll maybe we'll live in Abu Dhabi. You know,

like seriously, I think that they're just looting the global system. And,

you know, that's, again, return to the, if you're a Navy SEAL or someone being asked to do something on behalf of these people, bear that in mind.

These guys aren't even in on the white nationalist project. Like, some of them are just in it for the buck.
Yep.

We're going to get to Stephen Miller in one second, but first let's talk about these Ukraine talks and dig more into the corruption piece. So there's been a lot of activity since last week.

As we are recording, Trump's golf buddy turned special envoy Steve Witkoff and then his

dipshit corrupt son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are in Moscow meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. I'm glad we sent our toughest.
most intimidating guys to talk to Putin Ben.

So the vibes did not seem great as the talk started. Putin accused Europe of sabotaging the talks by changing the proposal so that it wasn't basically Russia's full wish list.

He also said, quote, we are not planning to fight with Europe, but if Europe suddenly starts a war with us, we are ready right now. So it's not a threat.

Last week, we talked about the emergence of this 28-point so-called peace plan from Witkoff and Kushner that was just entirely tilted towards the Russians.

That plan has since been shrunk down to 20 items, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is saying that the biggest issues, like Ukrainian territory, need to be negotiated directly by the leaders, which could be challenging because Trump is saying basically he wants a deal kind of wrapped up and handed to him before he'll meet with anyone else.

But these talks in Moscow are happening right as Russia claims to have taken control over more territory in Ukraine, specifically the city of Pokhrovsk and the Donetsk province.

And then over in Ukraine, the corruption scandal we talked about last week has just further metastasized. On Friday, investigators raided the home of Andrei Yermak, who is Zelensky's closest aide.

And he's a guy who is so powerful that he was basically considered like the deputy president.

Yermak resigned from his post a few hours after this raid became public.

The scandal involves Ukrainian officials stealing about $100 million from Ukraine's state energy company through kickbacks and other schemes.

But we know there's more investigations in the defense sector happening, so we don't totally know what the raid was about. Yermak was hated by a lot of people.

He was considered egotistical and an asshole and hoarding too much power. I remember there was an entire political story that someone pitched about just like what a dick he was.

But his departure leaves a huge void in Zelensky's political orbit. And Yermak had been the guy leading the peace talks with the Trump administration.

So it's just not clear what Zelensky is going to do here.

Ben, last week we both kind of landed on the side of we didn't think Russia was going to take this deal because Putin has no real incentive to do so. Nothing's changed in my estimation.

In fact, those comments from Putin kind of affirm that take.

But I guess the question is whether Yermak's departure and the sense that Zelensky is kind of being consumed by this corruption scandal might force his hand in some way that we didn't see before.

What do you think? I think that, first of all, you cannot overstate the importance of Yermak.

You know, in talking to Europeans and Biden people, like he was,

if not a co-president, about as close as you get to it. He was the guy that would talk to other national security advisors.
He was the guy who would talk to other political advisors.

He was always in the room with Zelensky. He was a gatekeeper to Zelensky if you wanted to meet with him.
You couldn't get appointed to a ministry without kind of going through Yermak.

Yermak ran this machine.

Zelensky was the guy, and very much his own man. I'm not suggesting Zelensky was a puppet.
I'm saying Zelensky was out there giving speeches and communicating relentlessly and traveling.

But Yermak was the guy running the show, right? And actually, literally, he was a producer

with Zelensky.

They lived in the same bunker together in the presidential palace. He never left.
Yermak had no family, no life, no wife. Like, this is all he did.

I mean, the famous video of Zelensky when he stayed in Kyiv, he's standing next to Yermak, you know,

and so losing him is losing his, like, the levers that he pulled on everything from personnel to foreign relations. I don't know what he does without that.
I don't know how you rebuild that.

It's like losing J.D. Vance.
Yeah.

Loss Marco Rubio. Something you don't even have an archivist.
You see Trump fall asleep when Rubio is talking. Yeah.
It's very good. Sorry to interrupt.
It's very enjoyable.

And so there's not much to say about this deal. Other than fact that clearly Witkoff got worked again.
It's not the first time. It happened before the Alaska summit.

Russians dangled a bunch of business opportunities in front of him, gave him a plan. He translated it into English.
And then lo and behold, of course, nobody wants to take it.

And then they amend the plan, and then Putin won't take it. I mean, we've been here before.

I will say... And so I don't know.
Maybe, yes, maybe Zelensky's so weak that they kind of go back to a version of the Russian plan that gets forced on him.

All I'll say is, I made this point last week that part of what Putin's doing here is he's weakening the U.S. from Europe and he's weakening Zelensky through these talks.

Like he's tactically doing that. I'm sure that these corruption scandals are true.

I'm sure that in Ukraine, I'm sure that, or I'm sure, but I would assume they are. I would also assume that the prosecutors are well-intentioned in fighting corruption.

It is a little conspicuous to me, not to be on a conspiracy theory. We're not on the all-in pot here.

But the Russians are pretty good at making sure that the timing of how corruption scandals come out. I mean, this could not align better for them.

That the plan comes out and then Yermak's the guy, then they take it. I mean, I'm just looking at this.
This could not be orchestrated better.

Like, one mistake you could make when you don't like your adversaries is to think they're dumb. Like, Putin and that crowd is many things.
They're not fucking dumb. No.

And it feels to me like they're running a very clear play here to weaken Zelensky. And, you know, this was their original plan, by the way.

They wanted just their own person in Ukraine, you know? And they have this on every peace plan is there has to be an election right away because they think Zelensky will lose. Right.

And so it just feels to me like they're grinding down the Ukrainians. They're grinding them down on the battlefield.
They're grinding them down diplomatically.

And Europe is going to have to step in and really fortify the Ukrainian state here and Zelensky himself because right now it's a very precarious moment for him.

Yeah, I mean, look, they certainly ran like a long-term game play on Donald Trump in the United States, right? I mean,

the Ukraine envoy is supposed to be Keith Kellogg, who is like more of a hardliner.

Shout out to the Wall Street Journal for doing some like deep dive, excellent reporting into all the corruption and kind of business elements of this peace process.

Highly recommend everyone read it, but it will not be unfamiliar to listeners of this show.

Basically, Putin knows that Trump doesn't give a shit about Ukraine, doesn't give a shit about Europe or values.

He cares about like press releases that show big investment numbers and personally enriching himself and the people around him.

So Putin tapped all his business crony buddies to go make contact with people like Witkoff and Jared Kushner and others and make that kind of the point of contact in the interlocular.

And so now you have

Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia's sovereign wealth fund, like dangling little deal opportunities in front of Witkoff and Kushner. And now those bozos are sitting in Moscow doing the deals.

And like, all of it's happening kind of semi-off the books and outside the traditional government processes that ensure transparency or coordination or the involvement of experts.

And so, like, yeah, like you, I'm very worried about this corruption we're reading about in Ukraine, but it's like we have this other staggering corruption from the Trump administration sitting right in front of our faces.

It's hard to get past it. The corruption is right in your face, right? We're going to do deals in the Arctic and we'll go to Mars together, and Jared's going to be buddies of the Southern Welfare guy.

But again,

I really want the listeners, you do not have to be some expert to see how much the Russians are running fucking circles around the Trump people. Let me just give you one example.

You mentioned Keith Kellogg, right? Keith Kellogg, conventional, hawkish MAGA general, was supposed to be the envoy to Ukraine.

The Russians said, we don't want to deal with that motherfucker, you know, like he's too pro-Ukrainian. They form shopped.
They got Witkoff and Jared. They selected their envoys.

What is the one thing Keith Kellogg has, quote-unquote, accomplished in his role?

He has somehow brought Putin-friendly dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, in from the cold, flew to Belarus, wrapped his arms, you know, metaphorically at least around Lukashenko.

Like

that is some, you know,

I hesitate to make the 5D chess point about fucking Putin, but somehow he engineered a situation where the Ukraine envoy became the Belarus envoy who brought the Belarusian autocrat who's Putin's buddy in from the cold.

This is the caliber of diplomats that we're dealing with in the Trump administration, vis-a-vis the Russians. Did you see the Chinese foreign minister is at these talks in Moscow? It's like,

I could totally see a role for the Chinese in diplomacy, but it was just like, what, why? What is this? Another smart guy, Wang Yi, very smart guy. Wang Yi, definitely there.

Suddenly they're buying the chips from Nvidia.

The Russians and Chinese have had a banner fucking year. Okay.
I got to say, too, just like big picture, I want this war over too. I would love to see a negotiated end to the war that,

of course, as we talked about last week, will involve Ukraine giving up territory.

But no one can explain why the proposal that Kushner and Wetkoff drafted involves Ukraine giving up territory that the Russians aren't currently occupying. You know what I mean?

It's like that's one of those things. No one can explain the Venezuela policy.
No one can explain the JOH part.

No one can explain why you would have to hand over the additional, whatever, 20% of Donetsk

to the Russians. Or what send it for Americans to do some deals in the Arctic with Russians?

And this is where it's so stupid. The U.S.-Russia trading relationship was not that significant before the war.

The idea that a bunch of American businesses are going to get a good deal making partnerships with companies in one of the most corrupt countries on the planet. It's like, give me a fucking business.

We can sell them some heavy machines.

And that's about it. Yeah, we'll send them some caterpillar machines.

Of course, Jared Kushner can get rich. Yeah, like they have billions of dollars to spread around, which is the common thread of this show.
Yeah. Sounds nice.

Okay, a couple more quick things. So I'm sure the listeners saw this horrific news last week about Ramanullah Lachinwal, who is an Afghan man who had fought.

in this CIA-backed and trained military unit in Afghanistan. He shot two National Guard members in D.C., killing one of them.

This was just a horrific tragedy and one that's going to have huge implications both for U.S.

immigration policy, but is also yet another sort of indication of the long and devastating tale of the war in Afghanistan.

So, just first on the immigration part, Ben, the administration has already stopped all visa and immigration processing for anyone from Afghanistan.

They paused asylum cases for basically all nationalities, and they even ordered a review of green card cases from any of the 19 countries subjected to Trump's travel ban, i.e., the policy we all once called a Muslim ban.

And then, on top of that, on Tuesday, CNN reported that Christy Noam, the dog murderer running the Department of Homeland Security, has recommended that Trump expand the travel ban ban to 30 countries total.

So we're just, you know, blowing up

any ability to come here if you're not like a white European from South Africa or whatever.

The incident has also led to more scrutiny of these military units in Afghanistan called Zero Units, which were elite military units that fought alongside and on behalf of the United States and Afghanistan.

They are often described as the CIA's private army or secret army in Afghanistan. The Zero units were trained by U.S.
special forces.

They were tasked with some of the most most sensitive and dangerous missions in the war, like going after al-Qaeda or ISIS leaders.

And the irony of this crackdown ben on asylum applications and this debate about like, was this guy vetted or not, is that zero unit members were basically the most thoroughly vetted people possible.

Like if you think about it, like these guys were trusted to go on night raids every single night. armed alongside U.S.
personnel.

And they never had one of those insider threat, like green on blue incidents. And to get into a zero unit, you had to be recommended by a family member or a friend, like someone had to vouch for you.

So that said, like these zero unit members, they've been accused of some of the worst human rights abuses in the war, executions, torture, civilian casualties, like really awful stuff.

And the zero units were detested in many parts of Afghanistan and accused of turning the population against the coalition forces because of these abuses. But again, they were vetted.

They clearly fought on behalf of the United States. They just, you know.
did some horrible things. Maybe we, you know.
Yeah, well, we have some culpability here.

So in the final days of the war in 2021, as, you know, Kabul was falling, about 10,000 zero unit members and their families were evacuated to the U.S., according to various news reports.

And then the scandal since seems to have been that the U.S. government said to them, like, best of luck fending for yourself in the United States.

A refugee resettlement volunteer told NPR that Lockenwell started out hopeful and outgoing, but by 2023, he couldn't find work. He felt culturally isolated.

He withdrew from his family, started going on these weird, like long drives across the country.

And this person said they tried to get him help, but there was just little infrastructure or support or services.

And then Rolling Stone reported that another guy in Lockenwell's unit says that Lockinwell felt abandoned by the CIA.

And that in June, he asked people at this special CIA program that was supposed to help zero unit members for help. And he just got no response.
Just they didn't reply to him.

So, Ben, I'll stop there, but like, you know. The immigration fallout, like the impact on like the entire country of Afghanistan, the collective punishment, it is, you know, it's devastating.

It's devastating. Look, there's so many dimensions to this.
One thing I want to say is, and it's not just because this is what Republicans would do if it was a Democratic president.

I did not see many people point out. This is a horrible fucking tragedy.

Those National Guard people shouldn't have been there. If Donald Trump didn't deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., Sarah Beckstrom, the woman who was killed, would be alive today.
Full stop.

And we hesitate to make those arguments because we're Democrats and we, you know,

the Red Hen alert that's going off here and civility, but that is the fact. Sarah Bextram should be in West Virginia.

Obviously, the shooter is to blame for pulling the trigger and should be held accountable. But we can also say as a matter of policy, the National Guard never should have been there.

On what happened, it is nothing to do with like the,

as you pointed out,

this is about both the refugee resettlement infrastructure that kind of failed,

but but also

we train these people to do these things. Like, I mean,

I think I mentioned this book. I read Fort Bragg Cartel that came out by, I think, the same Rolling Stone reporter.

But

it details a lot of murders that have happened because of the degree of violence and trauma that our special operators, many of whom were also kicking down doors in Afghanistan, went through for so many years.

If anything,

we created these zero units

and we created this kind of violence machines.

And of course, we're not having a conversation about that because Americans are not self-reflective about these things.

But that's another piece of this story too, right? Is that

when you have 20 years of war, individuals, whether they are white or brown, American or Afghan or whatever they are,

some people are going to react in different ways to that degree of trauma.

The last thing I'd say, the dumbest thing to do would then, I mean, not dumbest, the cruelest thing to do is then just to say, well, we're going to kick out all these Afghans? Really?

I mean, we don't do this. You know, how many white men who are alienated have shot people up in this country? We don't kick out the white men, you know, when

they do it, you know? And so let's see this for what it is, which is they take any pretext they can.

Any high-profile crime committed by any immigrant becomes a basis to collectively punish all immigrants.

And I don't believe that all people of any nationality, background, religion are like, you know, more or collectively guilty for what they're, you know,

I wouldn't think it was fair if like a white guy named Ben committed a crime that all the white Ben's got kicked out of this. But this is a crazy way of thinking.

And it's sad that it's so normal that we just assumed as soon as this happened, oh, of course, now they're going going to come after all the Afghans. But we should be saying that's wrong.

And by the way, we should be willing to stand up and fight for this because we were in that country for 40 years, you know,

starting with the creation of the Mujahideen that became the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the Reagan years, and then 20 years of occupation. I'm sorry, there's such a thing as a debt to some people.

And not just the people that served with us, but the kind of women that were activists who can't go back.

So I hope that there's in communities people that will defend the kind of families that are going to be targeted for this because a lot of them, you know, they're veterans who know them and can vouch for them.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, look, just on the political point, I mean, yes, those National Guard members should never have been deployed to D.C. on this made-up mission.
Also, U.S.

Citizenship and Immigration Services, or U.C.I.S., approved Lockenwall's asylum application in April of 2025. So he was vetted by the Trump administration as well.

So they want to make this all about Biden, but like, that's just bullshit. It's also just, this was not about vetting.

This is a guy who clearly suffered some sort of deep psychological break, possibly

in response to the missions he was able to

do. Because, like, the zero-unit

tempo of operations was like way surpassed even U.S. Special Forces.
These guys were going out on night raids literally every night for like a decade, 15 years.

Which, in its own way, is a dehumanizing thing to do to people. Yeah, it's awful.
To use them like that. But again, it doesn't absolve them of

his responsibility. It really doesn't.
But it does, you know, we have to understand that the war on terror has a very long tail.

Well, also, in the wake of a tragedy, it benefits no one to not name the right problem and to just address the wrong things. Like we already have a

the travel ban has already says there's a near total restriction on the entry of people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

What do they have in common? Partial restrictions on Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela. Laos is my favorite.
I mean, just another country we drop bombs on. You know,

the dangerous Lao are coming here. We're really scared about that.
Right.

This guy, I mean, he's a killer. He will be prosecuted.
He will go to jail. He has five kids.

NBC reported that as of the summer, there's like 3,000 members of these zero units who are just stuck in legal limbo with no work permits. Are we going to send them back to Afghanistan?

Because the Taliban will execute them. Those guys, yeah.

So it's just a horrible situation all around. Or are we going to, yeah, I mean,

what we're doing is not the right way to handle this. No, what we're doing is terrible.
Okay, we are going to take a quick break.

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All right, so two stories out of South Africa that we wanted to flag, Ben. So last week we talked about how the U.S.

boycotted the G20 in South Africa because Trump was mad about a non-existent genocide against white people. Right before that meeting happened, the U.S.

did this kind of like Hail Mary last-minute request to ask the South African government, President Cyril Ramafosa, to allow this low-level U.S.

official to participate in the event because normally there's a formal handoff between the current host country and the next host country. Rama Fosa said no.

So Trump now says that South Africa won't be invited to the G20 next year, which is in the United States.

The funny thing about this is Ramifoso was like, actually, we're going to be there.

Did you see this? He's like, no, we're going to go. So I guess we'll look forward to that, I guess.
Maybe we'll block his entry. Also, Ben.

We had to flag this crazy story about the daughter of the former South African president, Jacob Zuma. She has been accused of tricking men into fighting for the Russian government against Ukraine.

Did you see the story? Yeah. She reportedly told 17 South African men that they're going to go to Russia.
You're going to get some security training for a year. Then you come back home.

You'll get a great job. Instead, these guys got like six weeks of training and then they were handed over to the Wagner group and sent to the front lines in like the Netsk.

And eight of them are members of the Zuma family. So she was doing this to her own family.
The daughter's name is Dudi Zili Zuma Sambudla. She is apparently one of Zuma's 20 kids from from six wives.

Busy dude. Until recently, she was a member of parliament in her dad's political party, but she recently resigned because of this scandal.
It's just like never heard of anything quite like this.

I mean, Zuma, you know, fabulously, famously corrupt

and also, you know, charged with pretty serious sexual assault. You know, so the

not a good guy.

But I mean, again, to the common theme of corruption, I'm sure she, you know, Wagner, she's on some take. You know, I mean, this is this is the common problem everywhere.

You know, like different political systems, different continents, you know,

there's a level of corruption in the world right now that is just gross. And

it's, I, there's, there's got to be global anti-corruption populism here that can link us with the South Africans, with the, you know, with everybody, uh, because this is fucking gross.

That's a fucking terrible story. Terrible story.
Terrible story. Eight members of your own family.
Yeah. All right.
Let's finally end this with talking about America's most insecure man.

We were, of course, talking about FBI director Cash Patel. So longtime listeners know that Cash has his job because he kissed Trump's ass and is willing to do or say anything Trump wants.

Cash literally wrote a children's book where Trump was the king. Then he wrote another book, ostensibly for adults, where Cash laid out Trump's enemies list.

But things have been going very poorly for Cash over at the FBI.

He's been criticized for excessive use of the FBI's personal jets for travel to see his girlfriend, including at a sing at a low-rent wrestling match.

He took the FBI plane to a place literally called the Boondoggle Ranch for quick vacation. Place that actually exists.
Place that actually exists. Shockingly owned by a Trump donor, I think.

And then it gets worse. So the New York Post obtained a report.

that was put together by what they describe as a quote alliance of active duty and retired agents and analysts who talked to like two dozen FBI sources. And it is absolutely brutal.

So I'm going to to just basically read some quotes from the post story. The FBI is wonderful.
Have you had time to read the whole 115-page documentary? No, but

I read a chunk of it. It made me feel better.
I might just go to sleep with that in my little Kindle tonight. So here's some of the stuff it says.
It says Patel is in

over his head and that his deputy Dan Bongino is something of a clown. These are quotes, by the way.
The FBI is described as a rudderless ship and all fucked up.

One person says Patel, quote, has neither the breadth of experience nor the bearing an FBI director needs to be successful. This is a verbatim line from the story, Ben.

Another source, a self-professed Trump supporter, said Patel is not very good, may be insecure, and lacks the requisite experience or the measured self-confidence to be FBI director. Yeah, no shit.

A lot of this is ground we've covered on the show. FBI agents were furious at Patel for tweeting factually wrong things about the investigation into the Charlie Kirk shooting.

They think that Patel and Bongino care too much about social media and their own PR and their own brand. But there's one incredible new anecdote that we have to discuss.

So the day after the Charlie Kirk shooting,

Cash flew to Provo, Utah to be on the ground pretending to manage the investigation. Remember the night before he was at some fancy restaurant like Rouse or something?

To me, that's like a tomato sauce. Rouse, same place? It's no, it's like this famously hard to get into place

up in Harlem in New York that like, you know, Bill, famously, Bill Clinton was there with like Harvey Weinstein, like, you know, like right after Hillary Law. Anyway, it's

a New York institution, but I've not been there. Good time was had by all.
That's where I think

Eric Adams used to go, and he said he's a vegetarian. He'd go and order meat.

There's a lot of stories that lead back to Rouse. I think that guy Bo Deedle is always there.
Oh, yeah. It's that kind of place.
If you know who Bo Deedle is,

that's kind of who's eating at Rouse. Okay, okay.

So I think Rouse is where it was at a Rouse dinner table where Cash Mattell sent the inaccurate tweet about arresting Kirk's killer when they hadn't yet.

So according to this report, though, so Cash Patel flies to Provo, Utah, so he could be on the ground, so he can show up at the press conferences, but he refuses to get off the FBI plane because he doesn't have his special FBI jacket.

Apparently, he forgot his jacket, maybe because he was up in New York at Rouse,

and he wouldn't get off the plane without one. So the FBI had to scramble and try to find one for him, a sized medium jacket.
Sure.

So they were calling like the Salt Lake City field office. Those guys are trying to work this case.
They're searching for a jacket. And now I'm just just going to read to you from the post story, Ben.

When a jacket belonging to a female agent was delivered to Patel on the plane, he complained that two areas on the upper sleeves did not have Velcro patches attached.

Patel would not leave the plane until he had two patches to cover those areas. So members of an FBI SWAT team took patches off their uniforms and ran those patches over to Patel at the airport.

The patches were then attached to the loner FBI raid jacket, and Patel disembarked from the plane. Patel, quote, did not make a positive impression, said Alpha99.

I think Alpha 99 was like the code name for this specific source.

Ben, I want to stop there. First of all, just like, shout out to this leaker for going to the New York Post first with this story because they're going to play it right.

And also, like, you know, Trump is going to read this. Oh, Didle's going to read this.
Yes, yes, yeah.

Well, when the Murdoch O'New York Post is publishing stuff like this, it's like when the music is starting to play you off, you know, like this is not a New York Times thing.

That detail is so good because he's clearly such like a petulant, insecure child.

Diva. Like, I need the patches and I need to, you know, to walk off the plane and look like a tough guy.
It's like me fighting with my daughter to get ready for school. Yeah.
She's almost three.

Well, it's just, it is so unbelievably embarrassing that this person is in charge of the FBI. And I'll say this, like,

I'm not like one of these people that's going to sit here and, you know, make a...

lengthy Atlantic magazine kind of tribute to the deep state and profess the nobility of every person that's ever been like a CIA officer.

We made that mistake a little bit in the first Trump term. I will say this, though.
It's just a fundamental misreading of human psychology.

People that work in the FBI are proud to work at the FBI.

You don't have to think that

they walk on air and committing mistakes.

People that work in the military are proud to be in the military. People who work at the DEA are proud to be at the DEA, right?

When you pardon drug traffickers that it took the DEA and DOJ years to prosecute, probably a bunch of Republicans, you know, hard asses, like they feel humiliated.

When you make some career FBI badass, who's, again, probably Republican, come take off their patches so little cash can have his make-a-wish moment as a director. By the way,

I saw that that was in the document. We've been calling him make-a-wish FBI director here.
So we were ahead of the curve.

But the point I'm making is that they're beginning, the deep staters are gone, right? Like Peter Stroke and Lisa Page are not at the FBI anymore. Like the people they don't like are gone.
And

what they fundamentally don't understand is that people who've dedicated their lives to an institution are actually proud of that institution more than they care about Cash Patel or Donald Trump.

Right. And they care about the mission.

Yeah, even if they're MAGA, like they care more about the mission and the institution than Cash Patel and Donald Trump.

They fundamentally just don't understand that. And this could be the thing that fucks them in the end.
I think so, too. I think it's a big deal.
I really believe. It's humiliating.
Because guess what?

These people know a lot of secrets, you know?

And if they keep treating

a common threat on the show, too, like treating the military like garbage, passing the buck down there, treating the FBI like garbage, like those are not the people you want to treat like garbage.

And so if you're trying to consolidate like authoritarian power, you don't alienate. the very people that you need to accumulate said power.

Yeah, I think the kind of modern description of the deep state is wildly overstated. Yes, it is.
There was a period of time where there was very much a deep state in this country.

There is a permanent national security class of technical criteria. They go to like the Aspen Security Forum and yeah, or even that.
Or they're like, you know, the like, what is it, GS-15?

It's both the kind of revolving door, you know, national security elites crowd. And then there's, yeah, the highest level of civil service.

But we're now talking about agents, you know, special agents at the FBI, operators in the military. Right.
And so I don't think those people are like deep state running the country.

I do think they work in buildings where you end up having a lot of power and a lot of inertia. Right.

And when your leader is not just like, like when you're talking about a hexeth or a cash batel, they're like on paper self-evidently not qualified for the job.

But then when, you know, a year later, they're acting like fucking clowns and they are getting humiliated in the pages of the New York Post and humiliating you, right?

When you're going home to Thanksgiving and everyone is like, what's up with this dipshit you work for? Yeah, who wouldn't put his little FBI patches on and to get off the plane, right?

Like, you don't want to be answering questions about that.

Talking about seeing Charlie Kirk in Valhalla and finding his girlfriend on a private jet, you know, it's embarrassing. Speaking of which, roll the tape.
Lastly,

to my friend Charlie Kirk,

rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I'll see you in Valhalla.

You're not a Viking, sir. You weren't, and you weren't even wearing the coat.
Here's the thing. Where were the patches? The people standing behind him look so uncomfortable.
They're just like,

they just kind of got their heads down. This guy sucks so bad.
This is so embarrassing that we have to sit here.

We've got the watch. What watch?

You're watching out for the fucking patch that you're putting on. You're a Seiko.
What are you talking about, buddy?

And the backup is Bongino. I mean, like, the amazing thing about this whole situation is that the backup, the guy that's going to come in for the bullpen is an even crazier podcaster.

You got this guy whose head looks like Minecraft, just, like, raging in the background, trying to clean up Cash for Tales. Oh, they did insert.
Remember, they installed, like, a

second number two debut to take over. I don't know.
Listen,

part of this desire, I do want him gone. I'm with you on the content.
I do worry that they're listening and rifling through our

spit on like this. But I mean, Bangito and Cash Bay go in there every day and like, who does number two work for?

Well, there's all all this other stuff in there about, like, I think some FBI agents like Quantico were making fun of Cash for wanting a sidearm, and then he was like polygraphing the dudes.

He was making fun of him.

It's not going to work. You're going to lose in the end.
You're not going to beat the FBI, bro. I'm sorry.
They're going to be there after you're gone, buddy. They're going to have the watch.

Ask Cooper. They will have the fucking watch.

Okay, that was necessary and cathartic.

We're going to take a quick break, but when you come back, you're going to hear Ben's interview about what it was like to be a journalist in Russia as the full-scale invasion happened, about getting attacked by Putin and driven out and having your friends and your loved ones targeted and punished.

So stick around for that.

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So, we've talked a lot over the last few years about the crackdown on both journalism and civil society in Russia.

There is a new award-winning documentary that gives audiences a front-row seat to what life was like for independent journalists in Russia in the lead-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and some of the aftermath.

So, I'm very pleased to be joined today by Julia Laktev, who's the director of My Undesirable Friends, which is currently in select theaters.

Look for it in streaming in the months to come, as well as Kasenya Mironova, who's a Russian journalist for TV Rain. Julia, Kasenya, thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you for having us, Ben.

Okay, so Julia, to start here, this is a really long and intimate look.

into the lives of a number of journalists. You shot this on an iPhone, which kind of contributes to the intimacy of

the film.

And it's something you kind of can't look away from. You get inside the lives of these people.

I wanted to ask you, as with any documentary like this, I'm always curious about why you chose to go to Russia and tell this story and

when you knew the kind of story you were trying to tell in filming with your iPhone.

Well, it was...

kind of incredible because I didn't know what the film would turn into when I started filming it.

I should say I'm originally from the Soviet Union. I came to the States as a child at nine.

So I kept up on Russia, but I hadn't lived there since I was nine years old, but obviously kept up on what was happening.

And in the summer of 2021, Russia started declaring journalists as foreign agents.

And I thought this was really strange when, you know, media and also individuals have to put basically a disclaimer saying, this is brought to you by a foreign agent. on everything they do.

Like if we were doing this podcast and you were a foreign agent and you would have to say like, hi, I'm Ben Rhodes and and i'm a foreign agent and this podcast is a foreign agent and if we happen to be a foreign agent foreign agents on your show then you would have to say well this is julia loctov she's a foreign agent and this is kenya varonova she's a foreign agent and but you know this was happening everywhere in russian independent media that you know by New Year's Eve, you know, of 2021, it felt like every other word was who we must say is a foreign agent, because Russia was increasingly targeting civil society, journalists.

So that's what we began making the film with with Anan Yemzer, who was a host at what was Russia's last remaining independent TV channel. We thought when journalists are forced to,

in effect, shame themselves supposedly, you know, and mark themselves as others, not belonging to this society, something is happening.

What we had no idea of, of course, is that this would lead, you know, what that this was leading up to Russia starting a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

And everybody thought that this was kind of leading to an increased crackdown on journalists and an increased internal crackdown.

But no one was expecting the kind of war that Russia has now been waging for four years.

And how did you select the journalists that you were going to profile? And we should say, in addition to being kind of independent journalists, you focus on women journalists.

How did you choose the people that would be kind of our guides through this world?

We didn't actually intend to make it a film about women. It kind of happened that way.
We started out, when we started, there were only 25 individual foreign agents. Some of them weren't journalists.

Some of them worked for Radio Liberty, we thought, fair enough.

And then there were a few very young, vibrant women, because part of how this works is that for Terror to work, they didn't start with the most important journalists when they named, you know, the foreign agents.

In fact, we picked Jeliana Kostychenka, who is Russia's best known long-form writer in the independent journalism world, because we thought she'd be named a foreign agent any moment now.

Well, she just got named a foreign agent two weeks ago, I think.

And part of how terror works is it has to be random. So we started with people who were on the list, you know, who were on the foreign agent list.

And then Anna, who was a co-director, also who was an anchor at TV Reign, and which was a foreign agent. She's still personally not a foreign agent.

And then Xenia, whose partner when she was 22, was arrested, and she can speak to that more and is now a journalist who is sitting in jail in Russia, in prison for 22 years for so-called supposed treason.

I mean,

there's a lot of window into the consequences that people can face, including detention, which we can get to.

Kassenia, I wanted to start by asking you, though, it's been risky to be a journalist, particularly a kind of independent journalist in Russia for a long time now.

There have been journalists who've been murdered, disappeared.

What motivated you to go into journalism in the first place? And how did you think about those risks as you started out in your career?

Oh, this is such a good question because I actually have no idea. I was born in Urals.
It's like near Siberia. No one in my family

ever was a journalist or even worked with journalists.

So I actually don't even know why. I just always loved writing and I always loved telling stories

and

what's I think what's important that

I just I think I just always wanted to be a journalist, but I never expected to be a like political journalist or to write about different social issues. But I just

I

graduated from the high school at a time where it was

already almost impossible to write about something else. So it actually happened very natural.
I just saw what's happening around. I just saw

people protesting. I saw people

being

arrested because of their abuse.

I saw like protests

because of

Yeah, because of different things going on in my city also and in Moscow and it happened really really naturally so

um yeah and I just became a journalist no yeah no you naturally wanted to tell stories yeah I just yeah I just want to say that I've never seen something different I've never seen you know like a beautiful democracy or something I just I wanted to be a journalist and it was like oh a lot a lot

going on around and I can write about it

well you know during this time when you were a journalist at TV Rain when Julie's filming, your fiancé's detained. It's not really an explanation why.

And it's been sentenced to 22 years in prison.

Can you talk a little bit about that case?

What you understand about what happened, why it happened, and what it was like to go through that?

Yes. Well,

we

met when we both worked in this Commerceant newspaper. And at that time, like now,

this is a very controlled media, but at that time it was not like this. I've never faced

some kind of control when I worked there.

And he and I wrote about different social issues and protests and educational system in Russia. And he wrote about the military and how Russia,

what's Russia doing in Syria, about Ukraine

since 2014.

And

he investigated some of these things and as we know from his case FSB followed him and

like for the last almost eight or seven years. So they just followed him, they read all of his articles and they were really really mad.
FSB and I think

yeah, so they were really mad that he wrote about all of these things and

then they had this

great moment to arrest him. I'm not sure if they have like, you know, one

reason. Like it was not like just one article or just one thing that he said.
I think it was a

there were a lot of reasons why

it was good for them to arrest him. And also, I think, because I wrote a lot about all of this governmental treason cases,

I think that this is how they prepared people

and how they prepared this system

for the full-scale invasion in Ukraine. Because they arrested a lot of scientists.

Since, like, Ivan, it's a front of my partner. He was the first case when journalists was arrested, but they also arrested a lot of scientists who worked on different issues connected to war.

Then after Ivan, they arrested a lot of other journalists. They arrested a lot of Ukrainians who lived in Russia.
And I think it was their way to prepare this system to this war.

No, that's interesting. Yeah.
And because I remember them also shutting down, you know,

I knew some people at Memorial, you know, the civil society organization.

It just felt like they were preparing something. Sorry, Julia, you wanted to get in and say something?

No, I think what I wanted to say is one of the things that happens in the film is every other journalist at some point mentions Ivan Safronov,

Xenia's partner, and says, oh, or I could end up like this. And so you don't need to arrest every journalist.
You don't need to arrest every scientist. The way that terror works.

is that you can arrest a couple and then everybody else has that constant fear of there but for the grace of God go I.

And

that's what happened unfortunately with Ivan Safronov And as far as I'm aware, and Xenia, you can correct me, as far as I'm aware, the official reason was the sharing of some information that was actually publicly available in Wikipedia.

I mean, it's something completely like, I mean,

what we think the reason for arresting him is one thing. You know, obviously this was all a build-up to the war.

But what the official reason is the sharing of something that was actually publicly accessible information and that you can Google.

Well, and Julia, I also want to ask you: there's this, you know, you depict, and we're talking now about this, you know, crackdown, this elimination of any potential, not only, I don't want to say opposition, just independent voices,

fact-based, truth-based voices.

Part of what you show is both the dark humor, right, of people who are going through this, and every Russian I know has a capacity for dark humor, but also kind of a sense of

incredulity,

frustration that, you know, you're in Moscow and

some people are being targeted and there's this kind of darkness enveloping them, and yet most people are kind of going around as if nothing is changing, as if

things are fine.

As an outsider, as someone who may have been born in the former Soviet Union but is visiting, what did you make of the juxtaposition of here are these people that are going through the most intense form of repression

who who are essential to a democratic society or any kind of open society, journalists. And then, you know, you walk around the Moscow streets and most people are just acting totally normal.

Absolutely. And this is something I think about now all the time.

You know, I think about this in my daily life, why the fabric and surface of my daily life looks really nice and matcha lattes everywhere.

And meanwhile, you know, there's masked men snatching people into unmarked vans and that the surface of our society right now looks really nice for the most part while awful things are happening.

And there's a moment in the film where actually one of the other characters, Sonia Greuisman, is for their podcast.

She's interviewing an anthropologist who talks about, you know, that this is actually completely normal.

in oppressive societies, that for most people in an authoritarian oppressive society, life looks really nice. Like she says, you know, we think about it as looking like V for Vendetta.

But in fact, you know, she talks about how even under Stalin, you know, the trains were running and, you know, even at the same time, things that are contradictory, like the rights of women were expanding, and yet horrible things are happening.

And this is something I am constantly, constantly coming back to now as, you know, we're living through some pretty horrific things.

When I look at Putin's early years, you know,

he went after

the television stations. He went after the oligarchs.
He went after, you know, the law firms. I mean, like, it's, it's eerily familiar playbook.

And Kassenia, I want to ask you a question that is, I've often thought about.

I've met a lot of journalists over the years, Russian journalists from kind of independent outlets, but I also, when I was in the White House for eight years, you know, interacted a lot with kind of state media type journalists or, you know, more official media like TASS, right?

And, you know, they were nice people, you know, interpersonally. I mean, I interacted with some of these people for eight years.
I saw them change their line.

You know, they went from being pretty open, accessible people that would report pretty straightforwardly on things, albeit with a Russian bent, to by 2016, they were defending the

Crimea invasion and they were talking about, you know, how horrible America was. So I, but interpersonally, they were the same, you know.

And my question for you is: did you interact with some of these, you know, quote-unquote journalists who are more like in the state media line? Like, what would they tell you privately?

Was there any sense of people sharing a profession? And I know this is kind of, I've just always wondered this: like, what is it like if you're an independent journalist?

Did you have any interaction with those kind of state media people that are playing by the Kremlin's rules?

I don't think I communicate with these people a lot now and for this last three, almost four years, but obviously I know some people, and I believe that for

most of them, it's just kind of copying mechanism, like especially people who stayed. I don't think that

all of them believe in what they write or what they film.

I see that for many people is just,

as I said, a copying mechanism, and they

don't really have

I mean that these people just follow the agenda and they don't really have any views which I don't understand how you can be a journalist and don't have your views and your beliefs I also don't understand it because like so-called propaganda stars like Margarita Simonian obviously they got a lot of money for it but a lot of just regular correspondents, they're also underpaid.

So, I don't really understand why

can you

make all this propaganda news

if you even, I don't know,

you even didn't get something from it. I think a lot of people just don't think about it, and I think a lot of people just don't think about journalism as about

such an important thing.

There are a lot of people who just don't care.

And a lot of people who are like, well, I don't, like, I'm not an evil. I'm just doing my job.
And it's such a small job. I just

write some news. It's not so important when I believe it is important.

So, yeah, it's crazy for me, too.

I think that's an important feature. I was going to jump in with a little bit quickly.

I think

actually, it's in part, there is a part two to the the film that I'm editing now in exile.

And one of the characters says something that I think is important, which is that Putin's propaganda for years wasn't really designed to make you believe in something.

It was designed to make you believe in nothing. And because if you believe in nothing, then you do nothing.

And that's largely kind of how it seems to work is that it's not, you know, there are definitely people who are true believers. And I think this is changing now.

But I think for a lot of people, it's kind of like the way that Exenia described it. It's a lack of care.

Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, I remember Alexei Navali telling me once that Putin doesn't need to make you believe that he's not corrupt or that he's not a liar.

He just makes you believe that everybody's corrupt and everybody's a liar and nothing matters. And so you don't even care.
I mean,

I do, I think one of the powerful things, and you mentioned part two, Julia, but I want to ask both of you and Canessia, you can go first.

This question of whether to leave or not,

you know, kind of haunts the

experience that we go through. And you struggle with that idea.
I mean, nobody wants to leave their home. You also are leaving behind a partner, and you're leaving could be used against him.

Ultimately, you made that choice to leave, as did other people in the film, other journalists.

Just tell us a little bit about that decision,

why you decided to leave, how difficult that was.

Well,

as you've seen in the movie, it was such a hard choice. And I never, truly, like, I never thought I can do it.

I believe this is a very personal choice. I think we discuss it a lot with our with Julia with our friends from Iran for example

and I would never judge people who left or people who stayed because people have very very different reasons like people who stayed have

like their families have their like grandparents or

something else. In my case, why I decided to leave, it was just

that

I was like, it's too much to have two political prisoners in your family.

Because it's also like people think, as Julia said, people think about these things like Vis Vendetta, but in reality, like it's very expensive to have a political prisoner in your family.

It's very like hard.

I mean, bureaucracy, lawyers, money.

So for me it was just I don't want to make more problems for my and his families. So it's better to leave and to check what's going on and maybe then at that time I thought that maybe I can return.

But yeah, for me it was a very like vanilla reason. But I think for

for some of our colleagues, it was just so important to stay in the field, to continue their work, and like for me too. And it was only possible

if you are somewhere else, not inside of Russia. Because we tried,

as also as Julia showed in the movie,

we tried to stay.

On TV reign, we tried these first days of the war. We were trying to stay.
We were like, okay, we will try to follow all of these rules. But like a couple of days after,

we realized that it's impossible.

Julia,

you're both showing this incredibly historic moment in time, right? The bridge between the

days leading up to the full-scale invasion and the immediate aftermath.

But you're also making a film that

Americans are going to watch. I don't want to...
You know, there are all these parallels that we can see.

I don't want to overstate them because it's not like journalists here are being disappeared yet.

But what was it like to edit this film and release it in a year during which the President of the United States routinely calls journalists the enemy of the people?

They've kicked out the Pentagon Press Corps and have basically a state media of kind of far-right influencers that are now at the Pentagon.

They've sued media organizations, so they've started down the path.

They have their own friendly oligarchs who are buying up the media. And we should call it that.
We should talk about the U.S. like we talk about Russia.

Like, you know, the regime-friendly oligarchs are, you know, essentially taking over the media.

How do you think about the parallels?

Well, you're right that I did end up kind of capturing. unwittingly, I have to say, this historic moment because, you know, a million people left.

And the only reason I ended up capturing all of this live, like through these people, we live through them, is that I started by not ignoring the warning signs.

Now, of course, there were even earlier warning signs. And if you look at Russia, they didn't start by arresting journalists.

They started by suing journalists, you know, libel, all those things that are, you know, lawsuits, looking into people's taxes, looking into every

and this, not just journalists, but you know, civil society. If you look at, like, even if you look at how they say that Navane was originally arrested, it's always on some bureaucratic thing.
It's

one of the characters, Anya, in the film, says, you know, Putin's favorite phrase is, you know, it's all within the framework of the law. You You know, like

the mortgage, like, you know, going after

the James of Romania. Absolutely.
As this mortgage stuff.

So I finished the film. It premiered at the New York Film Festival a year ago.

So it's not so much what happened in the editing, but what's happened to the film and how it's played in our heads as Americans, you know. And I'm very much like an inside-outside person in this film.

I mean, I'm an American citizen. I know Russia very well, kind of having been born there, especially, but I'm American.

So many things that just, you know, were little throwaways in the film, whether it's like at some point someone's like, oh, the end of comedy shows, you know, the comedy show gets shut down.

Or there's a mention, you know, of a university rector being arrested. Or there's

when you mentioned Memorial, Memorial gets shut down under the pretext of, you know, why must we talk about our un we won World War II. Why must we talk about like our unpleasant history?

Can't we just talk about the nice things? And I look at Trump and the Smithsonian. And there's so many things that, you know, I edited just thinking it was a film about Russia.

I wasn't thinking of all the parallels. You know, the parallels kind of sadly came after.

And it keeps like, it feels like, you know, there's different details. I don't know what Easter egg will be in the film for us tomorrow, you know, that will resonate.

But it really wasn't, they weren't resonating as much when I was editing it as it's just happened since. And I'd rather they didn't.

Well, it's

yet another reason why people should see this

because it's both a window into Russia and maybe a window into ourselves. Canesi, I wanted to ask you one last question, which is, you know, I often check myself, right?

I think it's wrong to

demonize a whole people because of what its government is doing, even though I do think, you know, people bear some responsibility. And frankly, in this country, we bear plenty of responsibility.

We've elected Donald Trump twice. But as someone who's

outside of Russia now in this kind of exile community, how do you and your friends or your colleagues think about the future of Russia?

Do you find anything for hope? Or

what would you like to project to the world about the fact that Russia is not just Putin?

Well, about future, I just have to say we don't think about it at all. I mean, maybe some people do, but me and my friends and my colleagues, we just don't.
I think we just

are very focused on what's going on right now. And I think this is the only way to survive

because you can just go crazy if you think about future. Like, I mean, how can I think about the future of Russia when I'm Gen Z? I was born like with Putin.
I live my whole life with him.

I don't believe that like,

you know, tomorrow something happens. And even if something happens to him, I don't believe that.

everything will change in a moment, obviously.

So I think I'm just so focused on my my work and what I can do right now, and how I can help Ukrainians, how can I help Russians who are imprisoned because of their views?

Yeah, and I think with all of my Russian friends and colleagues, we always remember this

words

of

people who survived in World War II, and

that like people who thought about

what they lost and people who always thought about their future they just went crazy and only people who focused on their job right now survived

and this is what we are all doing right now and

about people who how what I think about people who stayed

We

obviously feel very divided, people who left and people who stayed, but I

know that

obviously there are a lot of people who like Putin, who make money on this war, but I also know that some of my brilliant friends who stayed in Russia, they work anonymously as journalists. They help

finding and they help to save Ukrainian children and they work with Ukrainian organizations

and help them to

help them looking for all of these children. There are people who helped political prisoners, even if it's really dangerous for them.

There are people who sent letters to political prisoners or sent food

and people who still protest even.

And I

yeah, I just wanna appreciate them because it's really dangerous for them. And that's great that they're still doing it.

Yeah, no, that they're they're risking everything. Well, Julia, last word to you.

I mean, w what is how is this uh making this film, editing this film, releasing this film, and all these crazy times within, how has that changed you?

I just feel incredibly honored that I got to share these incredibly difficult years with characters because it's not a normal documentary where you have experts like telling you, here's, you know, even here, Xenia's playing the role of expert and she's explaining things that in the film, it's like we're hanging out at kitchen tables, we're in taxis.

You're really living through it. And for me, it was so important to be able to tell a story of what does it feel like to be living under a government that you oppose? What is that experience?

And to suddenly, you know, in the course of my film, all of the characters in the film had to flee their country, usually with like a carry-on suitcase and a few hours' notice.

And then I continued, there's a part two where I follow them in exile. And I just feel like...
I got to create a

historical document, but just through people you come to know. And it's like somebody we were talking to, a critic in LA, and he said, oh, this is a hangout film, kind of.
And it is.

I mean, I think it's a, I'm like, I think it's a new, it's a new genre, maybe the hangout tragedy rather than the hangout comedy. Although there is, you know, a fair bit of dark humor in it.

So I just feel incredibly honored to be able to tell the story.

Well, everybody, you know, should keep an eye out for My Undesirable Friends. I imagine you're going to be hearing more about it.

And I want to thank you, Julia, for making the film and Canesia for all your work and your colleagues. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you so much, Ben, for having us.

Thank you to Julia and Cassenia for doing the show. Thank you to Cash Patel for making us laugh.
I'm going to, I just, I hope he hangs on for a little while because

it's

a good segment every week.

I hope this random group makes some more reports. We get to us.

Help me out.

You know our emails. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know our emails. Yeah, you know our emails.
All right, talk to you guys next week.

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