S2 Ep1008: Michael Weiss, Ben Smith, and Annie Karni: Radioactively Stupid

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Hello and welcome to the Borg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
We're doing something different today. We got three guests, a triple rainbow of guests on the podcast.

Remember, it's Wednesday, so you can check out me and JVL and Sam Stein and for Sarah Longwell on the next level where we go long on all the politics and news of the day. But first up, it's our friend Michael Weiss, editor of The Insider, a Russia-focused media outlet,

contributing editor to New Lines Magazine, formerly an investigative reporter for CNN, our unofficial crazy foreign policy correspondent. And we wanted to bring him in immediately because we've now officially seen the text.
Michael Weiss, are these war plans? The White House is saying this is a hoax. These are not war plans.
What do you make of it? I mean, you've got the timings of the strikes. You've got the platforms being used.
There's no way that this was unclassified data, right? I'm talking to former CIA officers, including a former CIA lawyer who says this is all top secret. I mean, even more critical than the attack plans themselves is the policy discussion, right? Like if you're a foreign adversary, you absolutely want to know what the back and forth is amongst Trump's national security team.
So the fact that J.D. Vance is a little squeamish about attacking the Houthis because that gives a freebie to the Europeans, those freeloading

welfare queen Europeans that he's always on about. That's useful information.
Mark Polymeropoulos

said to me, if you're a CIA case officer and you obtain this data on an enemy of the United States,

you get a medal, right? That's how valuable this stuff is. It certainly looks to me, and again,

I've just done some very quick reporting on this, thanks to the Atlantic's disclosure. It certainly looks like

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that are going to be a lot of people that are going to be a lot reporting on this, thanks to the Atlantic's disclosure. It certainly looks to me like some people went ahead and perjured themselves at Congress yesterday by saying this was all unclassified.
Now, it may be the case that Donald Trump has decided to declassify it after the fact, but the chronology of this, you know, what did you know and when kind of thing is going to be key here. So I don't think the story is going away, Tim.
No, Donald Trump declines about it with his mind, apparently. And there's so much here to go over.
But just because, you know, the White House is already out this morning, saying, you know, these are not war plans, they're still dying on this spin hill, as you mentioned yesterday, in, both Ratcliffe, that of the CIA, and Tulsi were testifying that this was not classified. Ratcliffe was saying it's pretty concerning, the poor memory on the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
He's like, I cannot recall when asked several times. It's all pretty preposterous.
And I just put it in this context. Imagine if somebody involved in the actual execution of the mission, an actual war fighter, to use Pete Hegg says term, let's imagine this person is a DEI hire.
Let's imagine this is a black woman. And she decides to text the Atlantic two hours ahead, the exact timing of when we're going to bomb Yemen all caps this is when the first bombs will definitely drop I love that and then it leaks what is Pete Higgs saying about this person I mean this person is getting court-martialed they're getting fired and they're getting prosecuted no question I mean by the way I love the waltz sets the timer for deletion to four weeks I I correspond with my dog groomer on signal and we have a three-day time window for deletion.
So Humphrey getting his haircut is, I guess, less sensitive or more sensitive than when and where we're bombing the Houthis. The Trump administration line is very clear on this, right? Deny, deny, deny, attack, attack, attack.
It's kind of the Roy Cohn playbook. There is no question that everybody has egg on their face.
There is no question that they realize what a colossal fuck up this is. There is no question in my mind now that people ought to be fired or ought to resign, but they're not going to, right? Because that's just handing a gift to the media and, you know, the big bad wolf, Jeffrey Goldberg, who evidently may have hacked his way we got elon musk our best man on the case to figure out if jeff goldberg let's actually sit on this let's let's sit on this for a second because i think this is important since we you know we talked to jeff yesterday since then last night and again if anybody listened to the pod yesterday had these guys just said you know what this was just a total mistake i meant to put in whatever, you know, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And that was JC.

And I thought I wrote JG instead.

Who knows?

I mean, it would be still a huge egg on your face.

But if they had said that, these details don't come out today.

And what they did instead was crazy.

I just want to play the audio of Michael Waltz last night on Fox, essentially accusing Jeffrey Goldberg of espionage. Let's listen.
How did a Trump-hating editor of The Atlantic end up on your Signal chat? You know, Laura, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but of all the people out there, somehow this guy who has lied about the president, who has to gold star families lied to their attorneys uh and gone to russia hoax gone to just all kinds of links to lie and smear the president of the united states and he's the one that somehow gets on somebody's contact and then gets sucked into the script have you ever had somebody's contact that shows their name and then you have an and then you have somebody else's number there those mistakes right you've got somebody else's number on someone else's contact so of course i didn't see this loser in the group it looked like someone else now whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we're trying to figure out whether he he did it deliberately. And that's the national security advisor.
He got sucked in to a signal chat that you have to be added to by a member of the chat. And then the question is whether he did it deliberately.
I mean, Michael, do they think that that is better spin? I guess it's because they're so, they hate the media so much. And like, he can't, you know, he's worried that he's going to be accused of being like a secret deep state neocon inside the administration so that's why he has to do this but like that is worse right if the the idea that it's like oh some boomer magazine editor hacked his way into the chat where we planned our bombing campaign that's their spin right so they're accusing they're accusing him or he is floating a conspiracy theory a slanderous one that je jeff goldberg has committed espionage which is a crime very serious this is their spin right that that jeff is a criminal yeah and that's how he obtained this but you know look the critical thing here is nobody is disputing the authenticity of these these communications right right so that we have documentary proof we have screenshots of the signal checks so what what will happen now is I hope these guys will be brought back before Congress, before the Senate, and grilled and told there is no way that this stuff was not classified.
You can FOIA this, by the way, now. And if it turns out that Tulsi Gabbard and Hegseth and Waltz perjured themselves, well, in the long, long ago, Tim, that was a crime.

Punishable. it turns out that Tulsi Gabbard and Hegseth and Waltz perjured themselves.
Well, in the long, long ago, Tim, that was a crime punishable by prosecution and jail. I don't think the DOJ and this administration is going to do anything like that.
I'm worried about Tesla vandals. I want to get your take on one other, maybe some of the folks you've talked to.
I don't know if this has bubbled up in any chats you've said, but just me as somebody who's not involved, has never been involved in any like military type conversations like this the pete hegseth just kind of tone on this chat really jumps out to me and on the one just like all caps this is when the first bombs will definitely drop followed by we are currently clean on opsec when like there's an unknown number on the online it's pretty funny as far as incompetence is concerned.

Just over and over, you know, calling the Europeans pathetic, all caps,

saying he loathes them, sharing maybe more information than he needs to

with like the Secretary of Treasury, like all the people on this chain,

being very solicited.

To me, it reads like somebody that like knows he's in over his head

and is trying really hard to demonstrate competence.

And it totally backfired.

But I don't know.

What's your sense?

A friend of mine put it well.

This sort of reads like he's in a direct-to-video Steven Seagal film

where Seagal is spending 90% of the film because he's so obese in a chair,

like barking orders.

I mean, it's written in crayon. It's like cosplay.
It's like, I want to be a military commander. And this is what I've seen in movies and on TV.
So it sounds authoritative, right? I think everybody is in this government. Of course, you know, it's sort of a goat rodeo.
First of all, let's take a step back here. There's some other contextual things that need to be discussed.
Number one, you're not supposed to have signal on your private devices communicating with other members of the national security team. That's just a cardinal rule.
In fact, former CIA people told me that CIA messaged out, here's what you need to be aware of with signal and its vulnerabilities. That's one.
This idea that Ratcliffe installed Signal on his

computer at the agency the day he took the jet. No, I mean, this is just insane.
Number two,

Tulsi Gabbard was abroad when these messages were going back and forth. I think she was in India.

Yes. Steve Whitcoff, Trump's envoy to, I guess, everything now, was in Russia.

In Russia.

With Signal on his phone in Russia at the time that these chats were taking place. Now, if you use Wi-Fi, if you have Bluetooth turned on in Russia and you're somebody like Steve Witkoff, whom the Russians are very interested in finding out who is he talking to and what is the nature and content of those conversations.
I mean, I sense you'd think the Russians would be interested in that. But since Dmitry Peskov is saying everything that Dmitry Peskov would say in all of his interviews, maybe they don't really need to work him.
Maybe they got some pretty good insights into how to psychologically manipulate this guy as a result of hacking his phone. I mean, everything about this is just radioactively stupid.
and just the sort of cardinal rules do not do this if you're in a position of authority and you have top secret clearance, which all of these people do. Just real quick on the phone thing also.
Tulsi, Tulsi's asked about this in the hearing yesterday. Just body language, Tim, doctor.
She looked nervous to me. And she was very uncomfortable.
I mean, Radcliffe was kind of nude, theraboned,

and kind of had a lying smirk on his face a little bit.

She looked like she was sweating.

And Jack Reed, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island,

was pressing her on whether she was on her personal phone or not,

whether she was overseas.

And she was like, oh, well, we need to wait for a review to look at that.

And he's like, what is the review?

Are you on your phone or not?

And clearly, the director of national intelligence was on her personal phone also overseas, in addition to Wyckoff being in Russia. And I don't know how many devices Tulsi Gabbard has had, if she still has the phone that she had before she was DNI, but this is somebody who has traveled to the Vatican, a trip paid for by a foundation headed by a Belgian businessman, Pierre Louvrier, who is a Russian intelligence asset.
There's literally photographs of him with Igor Gyrkin, the FSB colonel and war criminal who led the separatist movement in Ukraine during the first invasion in 2014, right? And Louvrier is like, just a Google search of this guy's social. My My colleague kristo grozov did a deep dive investigation into him is he in the phone too he was like her sponsor his foundation paid for the trip this is why she was you know the new york times had a story about she was flagged in her international travel it's because of that trip i mean the russians are doing all kinds of shady things in in the vatican't ask me why.
It's like the new Vienna for them. It's probably easy to get compromised inside the Vatican.
Hey, I've seen conclaves, so I get it. So does she have him in the contacts? Has he had access to her phone? These are all kinds of questions that, you know, even before you get into a counterintelligence sort of frame of mind, you have to be asking and wondering.
And yeah, she looked deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Her apologists and defenders when she was nominated for this position, their kind of fallback on, well, no, no, no, it's total McCarthyist claptrap that she's a Russian asset and she's this, was that, well, she's just not very bright that's why she's regurgitating RT talking points on Syria and all that okay so she's not terribly bright but let's put her in a position of oversight of the entire US intelligence community the chain begins with Walt's asking everybody to add somebody to be a representative for them on the chain she puts on Joe Kent there's this that ran for congress who's a total kook who is like sidling up to white nationalist youth he was like begging for the support of the white nationalist grovers he's advanced some pro-russian views he's obviously an election denier they all are so he's her point person so it's not like she has nominated somebody who's like an old hand intelligence person to kind of guide her through this and then you got the vp you know when waltz explains what happens in like a brief summary and the chain he's like what he's like what are you talking about like he doesn't understand like basic terminology it's really the i mean the keystone cops is like too nice the insights that you get apart from, as I say, the policy back and forth, who thinks what, and the kind of kit that's being brought to bear.
Also, by the way, there was battle damage assessment. When, was it Walter Hexeth says, the building collapsed and we got the Houthi missile guys going into his girlfriend.
That's easy to piece together, like who the target was right so that's also valuable intelligence but you just get a sense if you're a hostile state or a foreign adversary that these people don't know what they're doing and that they're deeply deeply insecure like in the literal sense of the word that you know they're easily infiltrated and And that's also, I mean, a windfall.

Because then you know, like, I just have to shadow the national security advisor or his staff and, you know, get to know these people. And, I mean, they've got classified on their personal devices.
I mean, that's great insight into how the United States government is being run. And then, you know, added to which what Jeff told you yesterday, which is that a CIA officer's name was mentioned in the chat.
I mean, Ratcliffe's chief of staff, I think it's now been reported. Whether or not that was somebody under cover or it doesn't matter.
You still don't do that kind of thing. We've already accidentally like the first name and last initial of cia agents already as part of the doge effort doing the russians work for them y'all it's a crazy world out there you know secretary of defense might be texan strangers about the details of weapon system attacks on foreign countries and And, you know, when things are shaky, it's important to have a plan in your personal life.
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All right, let's talk about the Russians. So Trump has agreed.
I covered with Bill Kristol on Monday. People missed it at great length.
The Steve Witkopf just useful idiot spin on behalf of Russia just straight down the line. So our man in Amsterdam is like, at best, just extremely gullible.
It's the best thing that you could say, maybe actively working against our allies. And then we've got this deal here.
Peter Baker, Trump agrees to start lifting sanctions on Russia, even without getting the full 30 day ceasefire he had proposed. He accepted a limited halt to strikes in the Black Sea and on power plants.
And, you know, some lengthy then discussion about all of the now access to markets that Russia is going to have and the lifting of certain sanctions. Meanwhile, I don't quite get this.
I want you to explain it to me. Military analysts are talking about how it really benefits the Black Sea ceasefire, particularly benefits Russia.
Phillips O'Brien, a military analyst, has a great sub-stack post where he's arguing that they basically put Ukraine in a box where Russia is now getting economic relief and a military advantage out of this deal. What do you make of it? Yeah.
So on the sanctions side of the ledger, remember Donald Trump said, if Russia doesn't come to the table or abide by a ceasefire, we're just going to sanction the hell out of him. That was his tough guy, his one or two moments of appearing or posturing as a tough guy in Russia.
Well, what the Russians are doing, and Putin specifically is doing, is dragging out this process of negotiating a truce, whatever you want to call it, and adding new conditions and caveats to it. So now the Russians are saying, well, actually, in order to get us to do a maritime ceasefire, you have to lift some sanctions on our agricultural exports and also, critically, reconnect the Russian agricultural bank to SWIFT, the international banking system.
Now, the nice thing about that is that that doesn't get done without the European Union's consent. And the EU votes by consensus on it.
They're not set to vote until the summer, July, August, right? Just before coming on your show, the European Commission came out and said, no, the only way we amend or change or lift sanctions is Russia's full withdrawal from Ukraine. So it's a very strong, solid statement.
So the Europeans have, to use the metaphor of the hour, cards to play here. So if they don't get swift, what then do they get access to? Well, the U.S.
can start to lift sanctions unilaterally, but the EU can do secondary sanctions. So it doesn't have the full impact.
I mean, if the EU keeps in place its sanctions on the same institutions, that tends to constrain or limit Russia's ability to do business. But to the point that Phillips is raising, and I made this point myself, one of the unsung victories for the Ukrainians in the last couple of years has been to drive the bulk of the Black Sea fleet out of Crimea, their base in Sevastopol, through drone attacks, missile attacks, including with ATACAMs that we've provided them with their own homegrown or homemade Neptune cruise missiles.
They've expended a lot of resources doing this. And it's also allowed them to create an alternate route for their own grain shipments, right? I mean, the Black Sea Fleet imposed a blockade, and that completely circumscribed Ukraine's ability to make money by selling its food on the international market.
So the question is, if this maritime ceasefire does come into effect, and already there's some issues in terms of the readouts on either side and what conditions have been agreed or not, does that mean the Black Sea fleet is able to return in its entirety to Crimea? Because that furthers Russia's military occupation of sovereign Ukraine. And if the Russians are allowed to do that, well, where does it say that the Ukrainians are able to move their personnel or their military assets to places where they currently are not on the battlefield? So yes, it is very one sided.
The Ukrainians will say, well, look, the best thing that we can get out of this is fewer restrictions on our ability to export, assuming that the Russians abide by any agreement and don't open fire on our commercial vessels, and a cessation of bombings of the port in Odessa, for instance. I said, well, but the Russians being the Russians, they're going to muck about, they're probably going to use their own commercial vessels to transport weapons and material, because they do that anyway.
And as far as things going boom, I mean, they can still bomb you, and they'll just say, well, that's the Ukrainians bombing themselves, doing false flags, and trying to blame it on Moscow. And knowing Donald Trump, he'll probably believe Putin's word over his own intelligence community.
It was interesting. Trump was on Newsmax last night.
I'm going to spare people the audio of his voice. But he's talking to Greg Kelly, who's maybe the craziest Newsmax anchor, which is a competitive category.
And Kelly had a rare moment of lucidity and asked him about Russia dragging their feet. Trump said, you know, I don't know if they are.
I mean, I'll let you know at a certain point, but I think that Russia wants to see an end to it, but it could be they're dragging their feet. I've done it over the years, you know.
I don't want to sign a contract. I want to sort of stay in the game, but maybe I don't want to do it quite.
I'm not sure. Then he goes on to say that he's encouraged by the fact that Russia had surrounded the Ukrainian troops and that they didn't kill all of them and that he gets credit for that.
Yeah, which never happened. The Ukrainian troops were not encircled in Kursk.
The Ukrainian military has been quite clear about this. Our own military has come out and said this is not the case.
Our own intelligence community has come out and said this is not the case. But he maintains that this is happening.
And the only people who claim that this is happening are the Russians and Putin in particular, right? And, you know, this idea that, oh, well, you well, the way that Vladimir is thinking is just the way I was thinking as a real estate developer. As a shady real estate developer.
Just the tough negotiations in the closing room and all this. No, no.
And this is the problem with Steve Whitcoff. You have these sort of tender-, outer borough, you know, goombas who made a lot of money in developing properties in New York and beyond, or the Middle East in Witkoff's case.
And they think that they, you know, they have found their equal in a Russian dictator who was trained as a KGB case officer. And I mean, this is terrifying to me.
Witkoff, he sort of reminds me of Armin Hammond, the industrialist, the pharmaceuticals guy in the 1920s who became so besotted with the Sovieties. I thought you were talking about Armie Hammer.
Armie Hammer is related to that family, yeah. But these guys were, I mean, Soviets...
He was like eating the flesh of the women, though, you know, so I thought, I was like, that's a pretty... Before that, his great-grandfather was known as Lenin's favorite capitalist.
This is the guy who essentially enabled the Soviets and the Cheka, which is the forerunner to the KGB, to do money laundering and to move things into the West when there was no diplomatic recognition. This guy does not have any kind of independence of mind anymore.
He is not curious. He is not skeptical.
He is not critically minded when it comes to what the Russians are telling him. He goes to Moscow.
Putin releases this American school teacher as a goodwill gesture and dazzles him, charms him, makes him think that this is his best friend he's been waiting for his entire life. I mean, he's literally said, we have a great relationship.
And I think he's behaving and acting in good faith, all of which is not true, of course, but he has convinced himself. And so, again, let's go to what the kind of MAGA fallback position is here.
People will say, well, yeah, it's Russian talking points. But you know, he's just being clever.
He's flattering Putin to get Putin to do things that we want him to do, right? This is tough negotiation. No, no.
He sincerely believes what he's being sold. And I mean, on whose behalf is he really negotiating now? He sounds like Russia's special envoy.
And Putin hasn't given us anything. And this is part of the reason why Trump, I think, has to flatter himself with the idea that he saved the surrounded Kursk soldiers, because it's like, we're not actually making Putin give anything up.
The Ukrainians haven't gotten anything yet out of this whole deal. So if you create a fake story where you saved a bunch of Ukrainians, that's how you even the imaginary ledger.
So, one more thing, there's a kind of a tie between these two stories is the Russians have been supportive of the Houthis. And I do think that that adds to kind of the absurdity of it all that Witkoff was in Russia.
So anyway, close us out on either this. Not just supporting the Houthis, but providing them with targeting data to go after commercial vessels in the region, according to the Wall Street Journal.
So yes, I mean, Russia has a strategic relationship with Iran, which is the patron of the Houthis, which has armed the Houthis and propped them up. This is the kind of weird sort of dynamic, I guess, that's taking place in Trump world, which is they're very pro-Israel.
They want to get tough on Iran, threaten to bomb the hell out of Iran's nuclear program, go after Hamas, go after Hezbollah, go after the Houthis, put the onus on Iran. But they don't want to hear that doing that sort of upsets the apple cart with their new best friends, the Russians, right? They've managed to kind of keep these two ledgers separate.
And, you know, it reminds me, frankly, of term one, when that great strategic genius, Michael Flynn, I mean, his grand design was exactly this, to separate, to cleave Tehran away from Moscow and for us to befriend the Russians to do counterterrorism jointly. And we all saw how that worked out.
Fundamentally, the Russians don't care that much about their allies and partners. We've seen this now in Syria, right? I mean, Putin kind of shrugged when Bashar al-Assad's regime just didn't even crumble, it just evaporated.
And now he's trying to do deals with HTS, the new government in Damascus, to keep the Russian military infrastructure in place there. So the Russians have no problem throwing their own friends under the bus.
They do this all the time. But the biggest strategic objective that they have is to get the United States to do this realignment, right? Abandon our allies in Europe, abandon the Ukrainians, and basically be open for business with the Russians and, frankly, invite their intelligence officers back to American soil, which is what Marco Rubio is more or less saying when he says we're going to start reopening their embassies and consulates here.
Well, hopefully they're too incompetent to achieve their goals of our rapprochement with Russia. I guess that's the best thing we've got working for us right now.
All right. Thank you, my guys.
I do need to, I should just say, my friend Jamie Kerchick wrote a very in-depth piece on the Army Hammer cannibalism accusations, and they were overstated. And i don't mean to kink shame on here so i i apologize to army armand hammer seems like was a little credulous his grandfather but army you know i think maybe got the brunt of some bad some bad media well the whole the whole hammer family going back in the 20s and 30s just deeply deeply compromised by the Soviets so yeah Army I mean hey

I thought he was the

star in what was

that movie that made Call Me By Your Name

yeah I thought he was better than

Timote but okay Michael

you're not going to be invited back on the pod

Timothy Slander no

no Chalamet Slander on the pod alright everybody

that's Michael Weiss he'll be back soon crazy

shit's happening every week. Up next, Ben Smith.
All right. We are back with my buddy Ben Smith.
He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semaphore. He also co-hosts the Mixed Signals podcast.
I was probably the best guest on that podcast so far. It's had a pretty good slate of guests, though.
But, you know, I'm a good pod. Ben, what do you think? Am I on the podium? You or Anthony Fauci? The listeners are divided.
Yeah, me or Fauci. I mean, Fauci has a lot of skills that I don't have, like a lot of experience that I don't have.
But I think in the podcast space might be the one area where I have him, podcast and basketball. This wasn't really the topic when we had initially planned to talk.
But I had Jeff Goldberg on yesterday, and we were talking about what he should do. I saw.
You're not his lawyer. Yeah, the Houthi small group PC chat, but it was worth thinking about.
And I think that the fact that he was weighing what to do was evidenced by the fact that he released the text about an hour ago this morning before taping. And you had kind of a similar kind of quandary where you were dealing with lawyers and national security officials and classified information when you're at BuzzFeed, you're running BuzzFeed and you guys had the Steele dossier and you ended up publishing it in its entirety.
And so I'm just, I'm wondering if you have any kind of insight on what, on what Goldberg was going through and how you think they handled it. Yeah.
I mean, I think Jeffrey, you know, I think Jeffrey has a stronger impulse to take national, to defer to national security concerns than a lot of journalists do, actually. I mean, I don't think he had any obligation to keep those secrets, which, which had been texted to him.
And he was sort of asking the Trump people like, Hey, are you really sure that you want me to release it? Cause they were out there daring him to release it. I mean, there was sort of, but they basically put him in a position where they called him a liar and said the stuff wasn't real and wasn't secret.
So at some point you got to, I mean, there's not really, they were really basically asking him to release it. And I think, you know, the Steele dossier was different in that it was, it was authentic, but we didn't know if it was true.
And the debate about releasing that was, what do you do with a document like that where everybody's talking about it? It's being used by the government. It's kind of a public document, but it contains a bunch of unverified allegations.
The call was easier for Jeff, is what you're saying, because it's verified and true. We know it happened because the building collapsed in Yemen.
And actually, I do think there's a reasonable question to ask often when kind of quote unquote national security secrets or declassified national security officials warn of dire, dire consequences. So you do occasionally see really awful consequences, but more often you don't.
I mean, I think WikiLeaks is a really interesting example where there was a lot of warnings about the terrible things that would happen when these cables leaked. And they were very disruptive and probably damaging to American power and prestige.
But I'm not sure that there was, that there was a physical danger to people that, that a lot of people anticipated. So I don't know.
In this case, I mean, this is very rare that you get something where had it leaked, obviously the, you know, the Houthis friends would have told them, Hey, get out of that building. And I think it's not totally clear that didn't happen.
Right. I mean, the Houthis friends, the Russians may have done that.
We just don't know. Right.
And who knows what anti-aircraft, it could have even been worse than that, getting out of that building, I guess, conceivably. What about the legal aspect of this? I mean, I do, you know, Jeffrey was asking me whether I was the right person to be giving him legal advice on whether or not that he should be releasing these texts yesterday on the pub.
Yeah, the main legal aspect is that no one should take your legal advice or mine. Yeah, and I agree.
Nobody should take our legal advice. But you dealt with all these guys, all these lawyers.
I just kind of wonder, give us a little insight into what those conversations were like. It is kind of unprecedented.
Both of these situations, you talk to experts, but they're like, it's a judgment call, partly, right? Yeah, I mean, the tradition in the United States, unlike most countries, is that journalists who have obtained this information are, you know, in a legitimate way, have no legal restrictions, no prior restraint, no legal restrictions against publishing. In Britain, for instance, the government will send out these notices to the press saying, you cannot publish this.
They can't do that here. And actually, I had an experience that I found very somewhat inspiring back when I was at BuzzFeed, where we had a story where the CIA had a really legitimate concern.
It was about a Russian defector. Really legitimate concern that if we reported on a person's whereabouts, that it would put them in physical danger.
And all Mike Pompeo could do was ask me and our investigations editor over for a cup of coffee and make the case to us. And that was it.
And you're like, you know what, this is a pretty amazing country. We're the most powerful intelligence official in the world.
All he can do is ask you politely. That is a huge prerogative of the press, something that we do, I think, take pretty seriously.
The Jeffrey takes, I think, extremely seriously. But all that said, I do think there's always been an element of the government that feels that that's insane, that we should have something more like the European model, where the government could just step in and censor the press.
And I think that a lot of journalists anticipate that at some point you'll see a national security prosecution of a journalist, usually I think not over necessarily publishing it per se, but over how they obtained the information in this administration. I mean, when you listen to how the Trump folks talk about the press, I think that seems like a reasonable prediction.
It's something people are really worried about. I mean, as Walter Sobchak said, the Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint, but we've got a new Supreme Court now, you know? So you do never know.
I think that when you looked at the discussion yesterday at the Senate Intel hearing, that was, boy, horrible timing for Ratcliffe and Tulsi there yesterday. The Democratic senators asked them point blank about this, and it was notable that they would not say, no, he would not be prosecuted for this.
There was no defense of the free speech rights of Jeff Goldberg yesterday by the Trump administration on this point. I mean, it's an unusual situation, right? Where you're handed a bunch of classified documents and an unusual thing about the United States where you have no responsibility as a citizen to protect them, to be honest.
What a great country. You might say fist bump, flag emoji, fire emoji to the USA right now.
Exactly. I do want to transition this to what we were actually talking about, which is how the media has changed in Trump 2.0 versus 1.0 and how it's matured.
I'm wondering what your top insights are on that. Honestly, I was thinking about that before coming on this show and I was listening, as I often do in the morning, to Steve Bannon's War Room, which is where I heard you interview Goldberg.
Oh, really? He was on Steve Bannon's War Room because I didn't catch the bulwark yesterday. Bannon's a mutual fan of both of us.
I had a lengthy tribute to your reporter, Dave Weigel, on a podcast like a week or two ago that I was listening to at an airport. I told Weigel, I was like, you have like a 12-minute ode to Dave Weigel of Semaphore on the Bannon War Room.
It's an interesting show.

Dave Weigel's a great reporter who saw a lot of this stuff coming.

I think Bannon is alert to who understood that populism was a real thing.

And he's also very preoccupied with you.

You'll be glad to know.

I'm sure he'll pick this up and put it on his show, so we'll complete the circle.

But I think what that is to say is that there is really, I mean, I think for all the years and years in our whole careers of talking about and being involved in a new media that was rising and changing things, it's here. And I think when you look at the conflict between the Trump and the White House press corps, I mean, I do think it's very important that the press sort of retain prerogatives and not hand control of facts over to people in power.
That said, Trump is not the reason that the White House Press Corps and the White House Correspondence Association, you know, is in real trouble. It's because, you know, the organization's been dominated for nearly a century by these broadcast outlets that are no longer all that relevant and are being replaced by a kind of chaotic new group of digital outlets.
And there's no, you know, Trump may have sort of pulled the last brick out of the wall, but he's not the reason that there's a crisis there. The reason is this vast, rapid technological shift.
And it feels like Trump was the thing that broke the dam, but he wasn't really the cause. And it really is different than 2019 at this point.
I mean, I was, I've been using this analogy of a 90s movies references movies reference, Elder Millennial now, obviously. So on Men in Black, remember how Tommy Lee Jones said the real news was the tabloids? Yeah.
Like that is kind of like true. Like, you know, obviously, we have friends Maggie and John Swan and Caputo, like the traditional outlets are getting scoops.
But there are times when you're either listening to Bannon or I was watching the Newsmax interview on the side and Greg Kelly would say something something about something that he's hearing. And you're like, it's kind of true at some level that there are certain things that are known and covered in the MAGA media sphere that are a more accurate view of what is happening in the administration than what you see elsewhere, or at least a more influential one.
I don't know. What do you make of that? I think that's right.
That's who they're talking to, and that's what they're watching. That's a source of strength for them.
It's also extremely dangerous for them, I think, in a moment. They're in this early, they're on this high, they're in a bubble of self-congratulation.
Obviously, there's a risk when you do that and you don't, you know, you don't take any signal. And I think on this story in particular.
And the ridiculous Mike Waltz defense that maybe Jeff Goldberg hacked the chain. Like, it's just, you'd probably have a better spin if you felt like you had a more challenging counterparty.
Yeah, and the coverage in the sort of magasphere tends to be like the White House is fighting back against this media campaign and the Democrats and that's all true, but also what happened factually, what's going on here gets a little swept away. Yeah, you were asking Megyn Kelly about this and I recommend people watch your interview at a, was it a semaphore conference? Was it a? Yeah, yeah, our media summit.
Yeah, you had a media summit with Megyn Kelly and at some level there are points of the interview where it was where you seemed a little scared of her like you were kind of interviewing like uh god like you're like on this like you're walking down the street and there's somebody that's like drunk and carrying a knife and starts yelling at you and you're just kind of like whoa okay whatever you want but okay she was unhinged i don't think she was unhinged i think she think she's one of a handful of people who are extremely capable broadcasters who are good at owning people who cross them on air. And I didn't feel that I was necessarily going to win a shouting match with Megyn Kelly.
So I thought it would be interesting to... She was hinged.
I agree with you. She was not unhinged.
I want to correct that. She was just, she was hinged, but she could have gone anywhere.
She could have, yeah, she was going to say what she was going to say, and she could have gone anywhere. And, you know, it's not like a typical restrained interview.
She was unrestrained. Yeah.
I mean, that's her, that's her brand and her strength, I would say. The interesting thing about the interview, though, is, I mean, she's obviously obsessed with her numbers and all this, but she's like, her show alone is getting cnn level numbers on youtube like everything on the cnn network combined combined and so again that is a development from trump 1.0 and it really was just fox you know it was just fox and then these there are these other little outlets that that serve like the mega sickos you know they're like very online mega people right but like now it's changed the power dynamic has changed yeah megan kelly tucker bannon's war room drives like phone calls and book sales like whatever like the renax digital media metrics are all kind of nonsense notoriously but there are these sort of real metrics like can you light up the switchboard can you sell books you? Can you sell books? And those are the now increasingly shows, I would say, like this one, and diminishingly television, broadcast television, I would say, with the exception of Fox.
And Nicole, we're selling books on this podcast. That's why Andy's going to be on next.
Both of us have gone way back with Breitbart, as you mentioned earlier, with Bannon back when he was at Breitbart. You wrote for Semifor about the challenges, about the growing up, the coming into adulthood of mega media, where you can become establishment mega, where you have responsibilities, and you're getting outflanked by the people that are using the tactics that you'd use to succeed.
Talk about that. Yeah, I mean, it's funny because I spent a bunch of time with Matt Boyle, who's Breitbart's Washington Bureau Chief of Longstanding, and a bit with John Carney, who's their finance writer.
And Carney was saying to me, I sort of realized if I tweet like tariffs are coming, the market's going to dip 100 points. And so it's like this weight of responsibility that I did not previously have.
And Boyle, I think, is constantly a situation where Breitbart's readers and fans are saying, hey, I saw this thing on X that is totally made up, can you confirm it? And then annoyed at them and disappointed when they can't confirm it. I saw them running AP fact checks on USAID the other day, you know, on Breitbart.com.

And I think I would say they are still fundamentally committed to supporting Donald Trump and occasionally perhaps holding him accountable to being the best version of Donald Trump.

Maybe they're in their adolescence.

I think there is some world where these outlets are sort of forced by reality to actually Breitbart, which is kind of an attack machine and very aggressively partisan, does try to get facts right. And I think that's being forced to get facts right.
Which is just not true on X. On X, the best way to monetize your account is to make things up and get them retweeted.
Facts do have a certain kind of gravity. And you can imagine an evolution toward a kind of partisan, but like British style partisan media.
Don't think that's where we are right now. Yeah, no, we're seeing it.
And it's the danger. I think this is a big warning sign for the left right now.
Look, I have a lot of criticisms for you and your pals and the mainstream media's treatment of Trump, normalization, the both sides. I'm sympathetic to all of the so the criticism it's tough i think it's a big challenge covering him like when somebody's like constantly lying you know it presents a new challenge from covering politicians like lie occasionally but i think the democratic there's a be careful what you wish for with the democratic base which we saw during after the biden debate which is like that there is now emerging kind of left-wing media ecosystem where you also can do pretty well by not telling the truth.
Oh, totally. And that's true in the influencer space and in the YouTube space where it's like, you know, I remember after the Biden debate, remember he does that press conference on foreign policy.
And I was turning on to one of the fellow, I'll just say it, I was turning on to midas touch to see how they were covering it over on youtube and and they were like this was the greatest demonstration of knowledge and skill that we've ever seen by a president in a foreign policy press conference and you know those guys are succeeding and that gets us to a danger well i'm not worried about getting out playing i'm saying it takes us to a dangerous place place where you've got to be careful what you wish for on what replaces the existing incumbents. I'm very worried seeing it, and I think that on the left you might see it too, I guess is my point.
Yeah, I think to put a point on it in a way, and this is I'm stealing an idea from my colleague Max Tani, but I think that there was a belief among Democrats that the New York Times was Democrats' partisan outlet. You rely on Times and, and, and what the New York Times is going to do is expose what Trump is doing and write factually about it with perhaps, you know, it's heart beating on the left, but basically with the facts and that will then people will see that and they'll change their minds and, you know, they'll vote him out.
And I think there's a sense now on the left, well, that didn't work. And so what we need are hyper-partisan shows that create a bubble in the way that the right has created a bubble.

And I think that's in some way what's driving the growth

of this booming new hyper-partisan left-wing sphere

that's going to turn you into the New York Times

and turn the New York Times into the Wall Street Journal.

We'll see what Annie has to say about all this up next.

Thank you, Ben Smith. Come back soon.

Good to see you.

All right, brother. Up next, Andy Carney.
All right, we are back. Segment three.
She's a congressional correspondent for the New York Times and co-author of the brand new book, Madhouse.

How Donald Trump, MAGA, Mean Girls, a former used car salesman, a Florida nepo baby, and a man with rats in his walls broke Congress.

It's Annie Carney.

Is Matt Gaetz the nepo baby?

Who's the nepo baby?

The nepo baby is Gaetz.

His father was Don Gaetz, a powerful Florida state senator. But good job.
Most people don't guess that oh yeah no i know don me and don go way back actually um and uh boy if you want to understand how matt became matt you just you you should go find some youtube videos of don gates he's a character i wanted to ask before we get uh to the book stuff and maybe there's nothing here, but so Mike Waltz was in this madhouse and he was kind of a, you know, one of the more normal characters. I had Tom Malinowski on and he was talking about how Waltz, about how pissed and disappointed he is with Waltz, you know, because he was like the one that he thought was responsible on a national security.
And like here he is now at the center of this tornado, you know, around the Houthi small group chat. And I think part of the reason that he is like advancing the preposterous crazy about how Goldberg might have hacked him, et cetera, is because like he knows that he has to try really hard to fit in.
And I'm just, I wonder if you have any thoughts about Waltz or just broadly, if you kind of observed this, like kind of trend of the people who are more normal and aren't preternaturally MAGA feeling like they have to, you know, kind of really go overboard to fit in. That's a good question.
I mean, Waltz, I didn't cover him. He's not a character in the book, but there's two kinds of Republicans in Congress.
Like there's those who were kind of the more responsible streak and most of those people left. And those who stayed, you know, have made the decision that they want to rise and have power in this tribal party.
And that means going all in with Trump, basically. There's not a lot of room for breaking with him so Mike Waltz got chosen to be the national security advisor and now you know I mean has to completely toe the party line so if you're still there you are towing one line which is you know attacking the mainstream media attacking Jeff Goldberg for sneaking onto the chat.
And we see them do it in different ways. Like there's Elise Stefanik is a character in the book who, you know, has become emblematic to a lot of people of like, she's been the future of the party since it was George W.
Bush's party. She's still the future of the party.
She just completely transformed herself to be the future of the Trump party. And then there's like a Nancy Mace who criticized Trump after January 6th in her first floor speech, who, you know, told me in the summer of 2023, if Trump becomes the nominee, I am pulling myself down from the airwaves.
I will just disappear. That clearly didn't happen.
And who like at one point a few years ago looked like kind of like a unicorn, like she Trump-backed challenger. She was sort of moderate on social issues.
And that, like, she talked a lot to us for the book and, like, literally said the quiet part out loud, being like, I have some really tough decisions to make. I want to move up, and I can't do that and be anti-Trump.
So I'd say Mike Waltz is like, yes, he knows. He's in the you-should-know-better caucus, but there's only one playbook, which is what he's doing.
They said that the only Nixon could go to China, right? Because if a liberal did, they would have been, you know, called a communist. There is almost like this element of this that the people who are OG MAGA have like a little bit more rope to kind of be responsible.
The old kind of Republicans have to act crazy to fit in. Right.
It's like the zeal of the converted, right? Like Jim Jordan, he's a made man in MAGA world. You don't see Jim Jordan trotting to the courthouse to stand outside the federal courthouse to show Trump how loyal he is.
He does not have to prove himself. Some of the others do.
Let's talk about Mace a little bit more because I thought this segment of the book was the one that gave me a chuckle. So she really did, and we talked about this at the time here at the Bulwark, it just was kind of obvious.
She thought that she could be VP. Yeah, which is crazy to me because she had approximately 0% chance of ever being VP.
Like Elise Stefanik, yeah, not likely, but not a percent chance nancy mace after she had you know criticized trump after january 6 like a zero percent chance but it shows like how intentional this stuff is right like the pivot of these people like she like she went from saying that oh if he's a nominee i'm gonna i'm gonna be out to basically saying I'm going to completely reorient my media strategy to go on shows in the hopes that Trump sees me in the hopes that, I don't know, he likes my smile and I get to be VP. Yeah, yeah.
So I spent a ton of time with her for the book, kind of just embedded with her a little bit. And what happened was it was like the summer of 2023, her name had been floated in a political article about like a short list for Trump's VP.
I was in the office with her when she like read this story. I could watch like the dollar signs in the eyeballs almost like her mind was off to the races.
Like I could see her picturing possibly like first woman president

in the mirror so and she was like kind of open and talking it out out loud and I witnessed like the justification that so many people make which is like well adults in the room it's better if I'm there than I'm not there and but it was like a little delusional because as I said she was not on any actual shortlist for Guppi, ever.

Did she ever break character when you're in i mean it does feel like she has a new character as you write in the book she's got a bunch of tattoos now okay so the nancy yes she became a different person and i don't i don't fully grasp what happened to her around the speaker's boat um and a horrible like that sounds very traumatic but she got she got nine tattoos all over her body and the funny thing about the tattoos is that when I told this anecdote to some other people in Trump world this just shows you how petty this world is and how it's all about like I told this anecdote to a few people who don't like mace and they're they were so excited to tell trump because they said trump hates tattoos i can't wait to tell trump like it's all about nancy mace's tattoos were leverage to use against her standing with trump because he doesn't like tattoos i mean i that was like fascinating to me. The Democrats that you talked to, like have you just noticed, and you've been covering this for a while, just an evolution from, I feel like during the first Trump, there was a lot of like, oh, we can work with these guys behind the scenes.
They're very rational. Like they just have to do this and we're gonna, et cetera, et cetera.
I feel like that has kind right it has changed i mean look at the leadership level johnson mike johnson the speaker of the house and hakeem jeffrey's a minority leader actually came in with a great relationship they are both men of faith they both both kind of corny it's corny but they found a lot in common and they actually like trusted each other and liked each other and then that relationship is sort of broken you know as you recall in the congress that we wrote about in the book democrats actually saved mike johnson's job when marjorie taylor green was going to oust him because he brought a bill to send money to ukraine to the house floor so there was like actually behind the scenes they were working together they felt like they could be honest with each other. And that sort of broke down over the Trump's budget resolution, which Jeffries and Johnson negotiated together.
And then Trump just like it became clear to Jeffries that there's really no point. The one from during the lame duck.
Yes, the lame duck that there's really no Johnson can't stand by his word because Trump is in control. So like there's really no point the one the one from during the lame duck yes the lame duck that there's really no johnson can't stand by his word because trump is in control so like there's really no point in negotiating with johnson when it can like it just all fell apart so there's like the idea that there they can work behind the scenes and work together kind of has fallen apart with trump because it's there that johnson doesn't actually have any power or control over his members it's all all just related to Trump's control.
Maybe even a little bit different on the Senate side. I guess Chuck Schumer might be the exception to what I'm saying, given that what you've said in your book, you know, about him thinking that Trump fever could break.
Usually there's been this reporting about Chuck talking about in the gym, how I talked to Republicans. Maybe a little different over there.
I don't know. What think yeah i mean look that's a very old school the senate is a little more still like that it's collegial there's only a hundred of them there are a lot of them have been around forever and do have these like the senators love to do funny pairings on legislation like elizabeth warren and jd vance on like claw clawbacks for banks and Fetterman and Cruz on a bill together.
Like they do do these, they do like to do bipartisan legislation. But Schumer's view, which he articulated to us many times, so it's like a deeply felt view of his, is just that Trump is an evil sorcerer that was his quote um who is a quote turd that the Republican Party will reject and then it will revert to being the old Republican Party and like I was driving around Brooklyn with him at one point and he was like it was after the border security deal fell through in the Senate that was like the border security and Ukraine funding deal together that fell apart because Trump killed it.
Chuck Schumer was like, look, there's 10 senators that actually hate Ukraine and would vote that way anyway. And then there's the rest that without Trump, they would flip and want to support Ukraine.
And his hope was that like this flip would happen. And I just don't I think that's out of touch with where Democratic voters are

and where a lot of his caucus is at this point.

Most Democrats and voters have come around to the idea

that MAGA is bigger than Trump.

There's no reverting.

There's really no evidence that anything is going back.

That's correct, actually.

It's out of touch with reality.

It's also out of touch with where Democratic voters are, but it's just

out of touch with reality.

I mean, just look at what happened in the primary.

Yeah. So I don't know.
I mean, maybe

Schumer's saying that because that's what he would like

to happen, and it's like wishful thinking,

but it's not.

Yeah, it's out of touch with reality. I wonder what you

make of the upcoming Congress.

On the one hand,

and the one we're in, the one hand, they haven't done anything and they've done literally nothing on the other hand you know we haven't seen the unruliness you know that you write about in this book um at least yet you know again maybe that's just because like the rubber hasn't really met the road on anything yet i mean like the trump is just legisl just legislating from the executive branch, like a wannabe king. And like, we haven't like, there hasn't been any major legislation passed really.
What do you make of that? Like, are the things you observed in the books, you know, they're under the surface. You think Trump's like kind of holding it together tenuously, or do you think maybe because Trump's in there, you know, you're, you're a man with rats in the walls and all these, these car salesmen might behave for a couple of years.
What do you make of it? Yeah. I last Congress was a complete shit show as one person even told Don Bacon told us we should name our book shit show, but you can't really promote a book with a curse word in

the title. So we didn't, but it was just completely defined by Republicans feuding with each other.
And it literally like ground the floor to a halt this time there. Trump is sort of uniting them.
Like for instance, the short-term government funding bill that just passed the house unanimously one Republican,

Thomas Massey, who's like

just his own person, voted for it. This is literally the same kind of short-term spending bill that they hate so much that they ousted Kevin McCarthy because of it.
Like, and now Trump told them that he wants it. So they fall in line.
So they are

more united right now because of Trump. He is holding it together.
And no one wants to cross

him. Like his power over the party is like near total.
So there's really no room to end. So they

are more together. I'd say like the top line out of this Congress so far is that they've just

ceded their power completely to the White House. Like in this Jeff Goldberg group chat story,

Thank you. line out of this Congress so far is that they've just ceded their power completely to the White House.
Like in this Jeff Goldberg group chat story, like the Congress has, is part of this

story. They confirmed Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary.
Like they have some responsibility

here for what's happening because they have happily just handed over the power to Trump.

Well, not to be Justin Amash over here, but also we haven't declared war on

Yemen.

So Congress also could take some power back on that side of things as well.

They don't really seem to care about that.

All right, Annie, it's good to see you.

It's been too long.

Go check out the book, Madhouse, how Donald Trump,

mega mean girls, Matt Gaetz, other people broke Congress. Thanks, Tim.
We'll see you soon, girl. Bye.
All right. Thanks so much to Michael Weiss, Ben Smith, and Annie Carney.
Let me know in the comments what you all think about the triple show. We'll be back with one of our faves.
Maybe there'll be tears tomorrow. Who

knows? We're going to go along with a single guest. I think you'll enjoy it.
We'll see you all then.

Peace. Body's swollen behind my eyes I ain't cried for them In time to return solar We on the ride forward The reverse not working Sometimes we collide The black sky full of supernovas The stars that died, no lie I'm still rooting for us Two foot in the soil Rhyme spores the conjoinance to the cosmic Splits burning like crude oil Pool water drip like osmosis I set the mood for you, you know the vibes And then I got time for it, run for it Five on me like I'm Bob Hurry for the tribe slime Mamba mentality stars Falling out of the sky Sly He was a star, when I got him he was a star I told you that everybody is a star When I got him, he was a star Sly told you that everybody is a star The only problem is some people haven't been put in the dipper and pulled back on the world Woke up on the west coast for the first time in my life Drove cross country but I remember those flights Genuflected when I heard the weed price White boys with the weed pipes Sunny days, sunny nights, mighty clouds and northern lights I was always bright so no sooner than we touched down I'm seeing how we could get home and be right It's hard to live in the moment but I guess I had a gift Hawaiians so potent, zoning off bone rips I painted houses all summer, they paid by the shift My boss was an enterprising white kid

Eagle-eyed everything you did, shit gig, but I didn't quit

MJG and 8-ball spittin' out the whip

Spliffs with Keith at the tip

It felt sleepy at night, but I liked that

Felt like you could relax, like you could disappear

Like I wasn't surrounded by the past

Months passed and we goin' back

And in the back of my mind, the plan already hatched

The door panels already stashed

Illinois State Troopers just waitin' for time and space to cross our path

I'm sorry. It's past and we going back and in the back of my mind, the plan already hatched.
The door panel's already stashed.

Illinois State Troopers just waiting for time and space to cross our path.

It's daydreams that I love, where you might be controlling some of the thoughts.

The green takes over.

Things are unraveling.