Ben Wittes: Who the F*** Are You?

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 4 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 12 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 8 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 7 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 13 November is all about gathering. Friendsgiving, Thanksgiving, and football weekends.

Speaker 13 Total Wine and More has everything you need for your table and your toasts, with thousands of wine, spirits, and beers at the lowest prices.

Speaker 13 From bold reds to sparklers and smooth bourbons to tequilas made for celebrating. Total wine has it all.

Speaker 13 With the lowest prices for over 30 years, you'll always find what you love, only at Total Wine and more. Curbside pickup and delivery available in most areas.
See TotalWine.com for details.

Speaker 13 Spirits not sold in Virginia, North Carolina. Drink responsibly, B21.

Speaker 13 Hello and welcome to the Blorg Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
I'm so excited to have back Ben with us.

Speaker 13 He's editor-in-chief of Law Affair, Senior Fellow, in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He also writes Dog Shirt Daily on Substack.

Speaker 13 What's up, Ben?

Speaker 14 Oh, you know, it's just another day in paradise. You know, every time you think you've hit bottom, you scratch and there's a Dan Bongino underneath.

Speaker 14 I mean, you know, I got to tell you, Tim, I've been ready for a lot of things.

Speaker 14 That one, I was not ready for.

Speaker 13 I think it's cute that you think that we were at or near the bottom.

Speaker 13 We're not even, we can't even see the bottom from here, Ben.

Speaker 14 I'm just, you know, when you're falling down a well,

Speaker 14 it always feels like, not that I've fallen down a well before, but it always feels like you're about to hit the bottom. And then you realize there is no bottom.

Speaker 14 It just goes down into the center of the earth. And there is Dan Bongino waiting for you.

Speaker 13 Hugging you on the way down, bringing you down with him. We're going to get to Dan Bongino.
We've got so much to get to.

Speaker 13 I've been binging on the lawfare part. I'm not alone.
Actually, I had a friend that sent me a screenshot of something. And

Speaker 13 if you're playing on CarPlay, it accidentally gives you a double screenshot. Have you ever done that where you send a text to someone? And anyway, they were also listening to the lawfare pod.

Speaker 13 So many of us want to understand what's happening in the law.

Speaker 14 You know, I appreciated you and Ezra Klein saying that things must be really bad if you were listening to the Lawfare podcast again. A lot of people took a break from us for four years.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I understand that. There were happier times, but when things

Speaker 14 really,

Speaker 14 really suck,

Speaker 14 we're there to hold your hand.

Speaker 13 All right. Well, here's the thing for me that was so disorienting on my plane flights as I was coming in and out of dozing, listening to your dulcet tones.

Speaker 13 It's so strange to have to match the considered legal analysis that's happening on the panels with what you're responding to, which are executive orders or decrees by unelected bureaucrats that seem to have been dictated by voice note while they were playing a first-person shooter game, like are written in marker or poop smeared.

Speaker 13 And then you guys are like, whoa, we have to look at the reference.

Speaker 14 Couldn't they at least get the apostrophes right? You know, like

Speaker 14 the editor in me really bristles at this stuff.

Speaker 13 You know, so as Anna's like referencing precedent from a 1952 case, and it's like, is this, I mean, that must be challenging for you to have to figure out how do you take this stuff seriously, I guess is my opening question.

Speaker 14 Okay, so the

Speaker 14 first point is you have to bifurcate your brain.

Speaker 14 If you are talking in politics, you do not have to take this stuff seriously and you shouldn't take it seriously. And the right approach is mockery derision expressions of anger you know all the feels

Speaker 14 but if you are us

Speaker 14 and you're trying to track litigation over it you're trying to figure out what the pressure points are in which things can actually be stopped we're not the people who are doing town halls we're not making political ads and god bless you guys for doing that stuff.

Speaker 14 That's not what we do. What we do is we try to give information to legal practitioners who are working in this space.

Speaker 14 And that means actually cutting through a lot of that stuff and talking about this in the language that people are going to have to talk about it in briefs challenging it, in briefs defending it.

Speaker 14 And it means taking the defenses seriously, including the 1952 cases, which you would quite reasonably be reacting to by saying, wait a minute, Elon Musk doesn't give a crap about what happened in 1952.

Speaker 14 And I think you just have to be able to hold multiple ideas in your head at the same time. We're trying to talk in the language that the district judges are hearing this stuff in

Speaker 14 because we're trying to provide a resource that's useful to people who are engaged in or following in detail those litigations.

Speaker 13 Yeah, I kind of hated the, I kind of got sick of the buzzword sane washing because it just got overused and misused.

Speaker 13 But what you guys are, to your point, the legal briefs that you're analyzing, when Musk is like, you're fired if you don't reply to my email. Or, you know,

Speaker 13 an executive order is like, you must call it the Gulf of America. And then legal briefs get written defending their positions that, like, literally, I guess sane wash isn't even the right word.

Speaker 13 It's like they legal wash it, right? Like they come, they have to come up with fancy justifications for like Elon's ketamine-fueled impulses. And so, I guess that is then the space you end up in.

Speaker 14 It is inevitably the space we end up in. And I do not begrudge anybody who says, wait a minute, that's not the space I want to be in.
I want to be in the space of primal scream therapy.

Speaker 13 And I'm offering that. Right.

Speaker 14 And like anybody who wants, like for the people who want primal scream therapy, I actually like lawfare is not probably the best place for that.

Speaker 14 But if you want to

Speaker 14 understand,

Speaker 14 so my colleague Anna Bauer has been on a

Speaker 14 whimsical one-woman quest to identify who the actual administrator of the Doge is. And this is a really,

Speaker 14 like, it should be like, who's the head of a federal agency is something we typically know, but the Justice Department hasn't been able to answer questions about this.

Speaker 13 This is not a one-woman quest anymore. It was a one-woman quest.
I was listening to this on the podcast, but did you see this from yesterday? Judge Colleen Collar-Cottelli.

Speaker 14 Yes, well, I was about to come to Colleen Coller-Catelli.

Speaker 14 And, you know, yesterday there was a hearing in which Colleen Kohler-Catelli, who is an extremely fine district judge in Washington, basically basically said this question really matters because, you know, there's all kinds of things that presume that there is such a thing as a doge, right?

Speaker 14 And it has a head, and we can evaluate that head under whether that's a legitimate thing under the appointments clause. Well, if we don't know who it is, you can't do any of that.

Speaker 14 And so, our role, you know, our role is to ask the nerdy questions that the courts are going to end up having to ask and wanting to ask and which things are going to turn on.

Speaker 14 And look, that's not for everybody. And for those, I don't know if the bot Endless Screaming is still on Twitter, but it's

Speaker 14 a little bot that whatever you tweet at it, it tweets back.

Speaker 14 And for those who want that, that's not lawfare.

Speaker 14 I love Endless Screaming.

Speaker 13 I appreciate that. Yeah, it's

Speaker 13 different strokes, different strokes. I just, I launched my podcast focused on Gen Z issues with all Gen Z guests.

Speaker 13 Episode two is out today, FY Pod. If that interests you, go subscribe.
But like, I've already had some comments this morning from people complaining about the 24-year-olds.

Speaker 13 And I was like, maybe this isn't the podcast for you if you're going to be very annoyed by 24-year-olds. And that's okay.
And that's okay.

Speaker 13 I want to get back to the judge Color Catelli because it was pretty striking. The New York Times article this morning about this.

Speaker 13 Bradley Humphries was the lawyer for the government who just couldn't answer this question, who is in charge of Doge, who is the Doge administrator.

Speaker 13 And I was listening to you and Anna talk about that. You know, maybe this is just my politics brain on, but like the reason that they're eliding this is all related to FOIA, right? Like, is that why?

Speaker 13 Because they want Elon wants to avoid having

Speaker 13 to have any transparency or accountability. And so if he's technically in the office of the president, the rules are different for him than if he was the administrator of

Speaker 13 a government agency. Is that what this comes down to? Or is there something else I'm missing?

Speaker 14 That is part of what it comes down to. So,

Speaker 14 general rule of thumb that if you are the White House, generally, the executive office of the president, a lot of it, for a lot of purposes, is exempt from FOIA.

Speaker 14 It's also exempt from a law called the FACA, which is the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

Speaker 14 If you set up an advisory committee in the Department of Homeland Security, I was on such an advisory committee. It has to follow certain rules.

Speaker 14 It has to have, you know, minutes of meetings, et cetera. If you're just the president's chief of staff, you don't have to do any of that stuff.
So there's a lot of that.

Speaker 14 But there's another factor, which is, I think, what Judge Kohler-Catelli was getting to, which is something deeper, which is, you know, if you're the doge,

Speaker 14 whatever that may be, and you're sending around orders to the federal government, then

Speaker 14 you are actually wielding executive power. You're not merely an advisor to the president, like the chief of staff whispering in the president's ear.

Speaker 14 You know, you're not allowed to wield certain executive power without being nominated by the president with the advise and consent of the Senate, right?

Speaker 14 And so one question is what level of transparency there is. Another level is, you know, pardon me for putting it this way, it's the who the fuck are you question, right?

Speaker 14 You're not the Secretary of Defense.

Speaker 14 You're not the secretary of homeland security you're not the secretary of state who are you to you are not the boss of me right who are you who are you dismantling usaid or you know taking apart

Speaker 14 you know maybe the answer is the formal answer i think has to be is he's not doing any of that he's actually merely whispering in the president's ear and the president is doing that but then you have this little problem which is you know what about these emails which we all know probably exist, where he actually is doing things, or the little monkeys under him are,

Speaker 14 you know, big balls or whatever his name is, is actually wielding executive power, is ordering people to do things.

Speaker 14 And so there's this question what the formal structure is by which a bunch of outsiders show up and wield the executive power of the United States.

Speaker 13 Yeah. So here's a tangible example.
This is in the Matt Bayh's story in the Washington Post this morning, which is really alarming and good and terrifying all at the same time.

Speaker 13 But he's writing about the USAID and the funding and how funds are being dispersed.

Speaker 13 And he writes this, Rubio decreed that certain critical programs, such as aid to Ukraine and cost away to the PEPFAR program to combat HIV in Africa, would continue to be funded.

Speaker 13 Several times, USAID managers prepared packages of these payments and got the agency's interim leaders to sign off on them with support from the White House.

Speaker 13 But each time, the Doge employees would veto the payments.

Speaker 13 So, meanwhile, AIDS clinics shuttered and staff found themselves stranded in unstable countries such as Congo, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, this is an example of what you're talking about.

Speaker 14 It's exactly. And so, one question is all the transparency stuff.
But, another question is:

Speaker 14 who the heck is the Doge people

Speaker 14 who vetoed that? And what authority do they have to do that? And where does it come from?

Speaker 14 This is the Secretary of State who ordered something and it's vetoed by, you know, Big Balls or whatever his name is, right?

Speaker 13 Like, where does that authority come from? Yeah. I looked into it.
It was, they named the two guys.

Speaker 13 It wasn't Big Balls. I guess Big Balls doesn't, I guess this is outside his remit, but it was, I think it was the guy from Nebraska that also uncovered the scrolls.

Speaker 13 And then it was like one of Elon's vaping staffers at SpaceX, one of his interns, I think.

Speaker 14 The point is the same.

Speaker 14 I just kind of use the name Big Balls to refer to all of them. But

Speaker 13 it's a little bit

Speaker 13 you're puffing them up a little bit more than I think they deserve. And some of these guys

Speaker 14 think it's other Doge Monkey Erasure is what it is. But no, look, it's a serious question, and there's a reason why a federal judge is focused on it.
and it is our job to spot those questions.

Speaker 14 And so, you know, Anna spent last week being the person who was shouting about this.

Speaker 14 Like, I'm sorry, we have a federal agency closing down the federal government, and the United States Justice Department can't even answer the question, who runs it?

Speaker 14 You know, and so, like, yeah, is that nerdy? Yeah, it's really nerdy. That's what we do.

Speaker 13 Well, and what we do, what I do here, is now take this this moment to appreciate, because we all need this, the fact that little Marco Rubio is the first Secretary of State in history to get vetoed by a 23-year-old who just has decided that his decrees are not worth the paper that they are printed on.

Speaker 13 So Marco, despite being whatever that is in line to the presidency, fourth,

Speaker 13 he's also reporting to a 23-year-old Berkeley dropout who is

Speaker 13 playing Minecraft while vetoing his statements. Okay, so there's that.

Speaker 13 We're going to come back to, I want you to educate us on these lawsuits that are happening right now because it's really important, but that's also very thick.

Speaker 13 And so I want to start with Eagle Ed Martin first before we get back to the lawsuits. Eagle Ed, who's a U.S.
attorney from D.C. We've been discussing him a lot.

Speaker 13 He put out a statement yesterday that I think it's worth us breaking down. It's a legal document.

Speaker 13 He says this, as President Trump's lawyers, there's a typo there. He acts as if the word Trump is plural.
It's T-R-U-M-P-S apostrophe. So it's a plural apostrophe, even though it's a singular human.

Speaker 14 There's also a legal error there. He is not.

Speaker 13 Well, no, we're going to get to legal error. There are many errors in this, in this, it's a two-sentence statement that contains abundant errors.

Speaker 14 Are we doing like it's like, okay, stop from the.

Speaker 13 You can if you want.

Speaker 13 As President Trump's lawyers, okay, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our president, and we are vigilant in standing against entities like

Speaker 13 who do you think the entities are that he's vigilant in standing against? I'll tell you. The Associated Press.

Speaker 13 I see. Yeah.
Entities like the AP that refuse to put America first. There it is again.

Speaker 13 As President Trump's lawyers, we are proud to fight to protect his leadership as our president, and we are vigilant in standing against entities like the AP that refuse to put America first.

Speaker 13 That was an official statement.

Speaker 14 I think listeners might need to know why the AP is not an America first organization, and that is because it refuses to change its style book to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Speaker 14 And I want to side with Mr.

Speaker 14 Martin on this, because what does the First Amendment mean when it says freedom of the press, if not the freedom of the press to follow the direction and threats of the president?

Speaker 14 And, you you know, the president wants us to call it the Gulf of America. And these lame shit reporters are refusing to do that.
And I just think that that's why we have a U.S.

Speaker 14 Attorney's Office, Tim, so that he can represent the president in his coercive threats. By the way, this man is the acting U.S.
Attorney. He was recently nominated to be the permanent U.S.

Speaker 14 Attorney after threatening multiple members of Congress with investigations for making threats. And I am, of course, speaking sarcastically when I praise that.

Speaker 13 Well, I'll say this to Eagle Ed Martin, because they've obviously got nothing else to do as the U.S. attorney.

Speaker 13 for the Washington, D.C., you know, prosecuting criminals, prosecuting corruption, prosecuting terrorism. He doesn't have to worry, none of that is important.
So he's focused on the important thing.

Speaker 13 So if he wants to stand vigilant against entities that refuse to put America first, I welcome it. Yeah, the

Speaker 13 I am calling it the Gulf of Mexico, and it will be the Gulf of Mexico, and that is a fact, Ed Martin. It is the Gulf of Mexico, and I dare you to come for me.
Bring it.

Speaker 14 Can I just point out, though, that you know, it's kind of insulting that they went after the Associated Press for this instead of the bulwark? I mean,

Speaker 14 the Associated Press has merely not changed a style book. You are out there attacking them every day.
You're insulting little Marco. I mean, you're doing so much more than the Associated Press.

Speaker 13 Not only am I refusing to put America first, I was actively rooting for Canada in the hockey match.

Speaker 13 Okay, so I'm putting Canada first, actually. So bring it.
Mr. Martin.

Speaker 14 You got the wrong target here. Stand with America against the bulwark and particularly Tim.

Speaker 13 With vigilance. Where is your vigilance? I don't know if this is the law and order they're going for.
I guess so. In other news, just there's a couple more things from Ed Martin's department.

Speaker 13 You'd mentioned the letter he sent to Robert Garcia threatening him for a figure of speech used in CNN.

Speaker 13 In more tangible actions, yesterday we had news that Corey Mills is a Republican congressman from Florida. He's not one of our finest congressmen.

Speaker 13 Federal prosecutors Friday declined to charge Florida Congressman Corey Mills, who was accused of assaulting a woman in his D.C. apartment.
The U.S.

Speaker 13 Attorney's Office turned down a request from police to seek an arrest warrant. Story goes on.

Speaker 13 I guess the woman had some injuries, some visual injuries, and her phone had broken, but then she also was, I guess, backing off of her charge. So there's that.

Speaker 13 Don't know exactly the details, but again, not a great sign when the D.C. police go to try to arrest a Republican congressman and Ed Martin's office.
It's like, nah.

Speaker 14 So agreed. I also think there's

Speaker 14 an issue about the conference that you were at this weekend, which was infiltrated by Enrique Tario and the Proud Boys and later received a bomb threat that required the evacuation of the portions of the facility that Principles First was using.

Speaker 14 You know, you can get a long way in intimidating your political opponents merely by not investigating thoroughly things like bomb threats or efforts to intimidate people.

Speaker 14 And if you ask me, do I have confidence that the FBI under Cash Patel and Dan Bagino will thoroughly investigate that bomb threat? And do I have confidence that the U.S.

Speaker 14 Attorney's Office under Ed Martin will prosecute aggressively the results of that investigation should they turn up proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a particular perpetrator?

Speaker 14 The answer to both of those questions, unfortunately, is no. And that is how you build a climate of impunity in going after

Speaker 14 the enemies of the president. And

Speaker 14 this is a picture, the Corey Mills example may be an example of this, but the fact that you and I can't sit here and have confidence that the threats that were directed against you guys will be and against Harry Dunn and the officers in particular.

Speaker 14 The fact that you can't have confidence of that and you would be a fool to have confidence of that is a, I think, more dramatic example because it actually affects political dissent.

Speaker 13 Thank you for shaking me from the sarcastic posture I sometimes fall back on to deal with the trauma that is our lives right now. But you're right.

Speaker 13 I mean, like the seriousness element of this, it may be even slightly worse than you're saying, right?

Speaker 13 Like, obviously, we can have no confidence that they're going to investigate it, but as Fanon said at the conference, which I played on yesterday's pod, like it's a feature, not a bug, right?

Speaker 13 Like they want Tario to be menacing dissidents, opponents to this administration. Like they want it to happen.

Speaker 14 And just to give...

Speaker 14 I mean, this is something that you know and you've experienced 50 times, but just to give your audience a sense of how it trickles down, I had a meeting yesterday with some foundation execs who are supporters of lawfare.

Speaker 14 And one of the questions they asked me as we talked about their support of lawfare was our physical security.

Speaker 14 And, you know, it's something that every organization that works in this space has had to think about. You can't just walk in off the street to, you know, the bulwarks office in Washington.

Speaker 14 and as we you know budget for things one of the things we have to think about is you know what if somebody comes after us on some you know garbage congressional investigation right that's the political investigative harassment stuff but there's also what if enrique tario shows up and tries to intimidate you what if you know how do you as a small organization deal with that and this is a very picturesque example and part of the answer to the question historically is that, you know, Merrick Garland makes a speech about it and says, we are going after people who make threats.

Speaker 14 And then they do it, right? You take away that protection and you become much more vulnerable to this sort of thing.

Speaker 13 Well, this is traditional law and order. I mean, it's a niche

Speaker 13 example of something that like people understand in their common lives, right? Like we hear a lot about how people are frustrated in places like San Francisco or in DC, even.

Speaker 13 This happened to me in DC just this weekend. I didn't, I forgot to bring deodorant to DC.

Speaker 13 And, you know, because I did not want to instinctify my fellow panelists at the principals first, I went into the CVS and it's locked, you know, just whatever.

Speaker 13 Like, you got to ask somebody to come and unlock it.

Speaker 13 And that's annoying, but it is a sign that the public safety in the area is not such that people feel comfortable keeping the deodorant out from behind lock and key. This is analogous to that, right?

Speaker 13 Like it sucks.

Speaker 13 Like small nonprofit organizations that want to protect people's free speech rights should not feel like they need to have a security guard at the front of their office in a free country.

Speaker 13 And like that is a freedom that I think is not going to be available to people over the next couple of years.

Speaker 14 Yes. And there's a physical security element.
And there's also, you know, you and I both know people who've done advising for local election workers who've had,

Speaker 14 you know, had to raise tens of millions of dollars to pay legal bills because they're getting harassed by state attorneys general and congressional committees.

Speaker 14 And these are, you know, costs of doing business now that, you know, for, you know, non-political work, let alone the sort of stuff that Principals First and you guys are doing, which is, you know, active political dissent.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming Manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive.

Speaker 4 to destroy them. This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 12 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 8 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 7 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 13 November is all about gathering, friendsgiving, Thanksgiving, and football weekends.

Speaker 13 Total Line and More has everything you need for your table and your toasts, with thousands of wine, spirits, and beers at the lowest prices.

Speaker 13 From bold reds to sparklers and smooth bourbons to tequilas made for celebrating, Total Wine has it all.

Speaker 13 With the lowest prices for over 30 years, you'll always find what you love, only at Total Wine and More. Curbside pickup and delivery available in most areas.
See TotalWine.com for details.

Speaker 13 Spirits not sold in Virginia, North Carolina. Drink responsibly, B21.

Speaker 13 All right, so it's obviously related to the FBI. As you've mentioned a couple of times, you had some have friends who have been on the top floor of that building.
The Bongino thing,

Speaker 13 because I can speak, I guess, for somebody that is a listener that doesn't have a ton of experience with the FBI.

Speaker 13 I never worked in the building, never been investigated by the FBI, never had an FBI connection. I just, you know, I know what I read in the newspaper like anybody else.

Speaker 13 And so as I've been talking to some people who worked there over the past few days, it's actually the Bongino appointment that has seemed to be more alarming because, you know, the director is kind of a political role, you know, like whether you want it to be or not, it is a little bit of a figurehead role.

Speaker 13 Obviously, there are big decisions that come through the director. So not to minimize that at all.

Speaker 13 But day to day, like the role that Bongino has been chosen for is the person that is like managing the bureau and managing the agents and managing these big decisions.

Speaker 13 And it sounds like that has really shaken people up in a way that the Patel thing didn't. Is that fair to say, do you think?

Speaker 14 Well, I would not say that the Patel thing didn't shake people up. The Patel thing happened in slow motion.
Yeah. You know, and so people had a lot of time to get used to it.
That's fair.

Speaker 14 It also coincided either. accidentally or intentionally, depending on whether you think Cash Patel lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Speaker 13 Has he even denied that? Actually, has he denied that he lied?

Speaker 14 He's sort of denied it. He's said he had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 14 But he hasn't really denied it. He hasn't, and of course, he was protected from being asked questions about it.

Speaker 14 But it coincided with this incredible shake-up that happened at the Bureau, where they started demanding that people report on themselves. And they fired a bunch of people.

Speaker 14 And so the Patel thing, to a certain extent, I guess, faded into the background of the turmoil, right?

Speaker 14 It was like, oh, they're trying to destroy us. And one element of that is that they've put this crazy, unqualified person in charge.
And

Speaker 14 the Bongino thing is different because it's not a Senate-confirmed position. I mean, you know more about him than I do.
He is not.

Speaker 13 This is the type of person that you literally need to watch one 20-second 20-second clip of his podcast. You can pick one at random, and I think you get it.

Speaker 13 He's about a centimeter deep. I mean, he is a meathead, and he's exactly what he looks like.

Speaker 14 One really, really important thing about Dan Bongino is that he is not a career FBI agent. And the deputy director of the FBI is always a career FBI agent.

Speaker 14 He's somebody who comes up through the system.

Speaker 14 Traditionally, in the FBI, there is one political appointee, and that is the director.

Speaker 14 And so, the message that this sends is: we're going to go through all your papers, figure out if you're a January 6th investigator.

Speaker 14 We're going to fire your traditional leadership, and we're going to install at the top a political apparatchik, and we're going to install,

Speaker 14 as you say, the day-to-day manager of the bureau, a crazed podcaster who's not a career FBI agent. And so, it could not be more insulting and it could not be more dangerous.

Speaker 14 Now, the part that people are talking about less, but that is, I think, even more concerning, is that they have removed the entire substrate leadership. And so not only does Cash Patel

Speaker 14 and Dan Bungino are kind of the one and two of the organization, but they're going to be able to fill all these assistant assistant director positions, all these, you know, executive positions.

Speaker 14 They're over time going to be able to replace heads of field offices. And so you're going to see a very different FBI, and it is all subject to the oversight and management of Pam Bondi.

Speaker 14 and Emile Bovie and Todd Blanche, none of whom has behavior has inspired any kind of confidence.

Speaker 14 And so I think it's a, you know, this is the organization that most directly interacts with Americans on, you know, with guns, with guns and coercion.

Speaker 14 It's much more domestically dangerous, if mishandled, than, say, the Department of Defense. And, you know, it has arrest power.

Speaker 13 I don't want to over

Speaker 14 dramatize the danger. because I don't want to be particularly dramatic, but it's kind of as serious as a heart attack.

Speaker 13 Yeah, it's look, it's extremely serious. And

Speaker 13 we're just going to have to wait and see how Cash and Dan act. I mean, I think that any, that's pretty easy to judge these guys' character.

Speaker 13 Like, these are not the types of people that are going to rise to the moment.

Speaker 13 You know, you can listen to Dan Bongino's phone call with my former colleague, Mark Caputo, from a couple of years ago, where he starts telling Mark to fuck himself. And

Speaker 13 Mark's laughing at him. And he's like, is that a request? Is that an offer? And Dan gets madder and madder.

Speaker 13 And, like, it's just, these are not the type of people that have the temperament for this job. Like, it's just, it doesn't take a psychologist to determine that.

Speaker 13 What they actually do with their bad temperament TBD.

Speaker 14 I will say that there's one really encouraging thing that has happened at the FBI,

Speaker 14 which is that you actually do see a state, a sort of sagebrush rebellion among what are called the special agents in charge, the people who run individual field offices, who are pushing back in ways that are mostly invisible, but they could not get people to self-report.

Speaker 14 And that was done with a lot of SAC encouragement. A lot of people, including the person who was made acting director, Mr.

Speaker 14 Driscoll, who had been a SAC for six days in Newark when he was accidentally elevated to run the FBI.

Speaker 14 I mean, a lot of people have been really good because 70 years, 50 years of cultural reform at the FBI to create a rule of law law enforcement agency at the federal level has actually worked, right?

Speaker 14 And you have whole generations, it's really two whole generations, three sort of who have grown up with the idea that there are things the FBI does not do and there are things that it does do.

Speaker 14 And that is not going to unplug right away. And, you know, you're going to see a lot of people get fired.
You're going to see a lot of people doing courageous things.

Speaker 14 And you're going to not see a lot of people doing courageous things, but you're going to hear whispers about it. And so I do think there's a, you know, changing the culture of an organization for bad

Speaker 14 is actually pretty hard. It can be done, but it has to be done over time.

Speaker 14 And the FBI has some pretty cool resistance to that that has developed over the years, which, you know, the left has never appreciated and never understood, but is very real.

Speaker 13 So, one more on this, which is where I was going, is like these invisible actions that are, that we're not seeing.

Speaker 13 I guess I was wondering the folks that you're talking to, like, what are the worries beyond the political? We'll see if Cash Patel and Dan Bongino try to arrest Adam Schiff or whatever.

Speaker 13 You know what I mean? Like, we'll see what they do as far as politicized revenge. But what about like the stuff that it might be getting missed, right?

Speaker 13 Like when you fire all of these high mid managers, right?

Speaker 13 And when there's all this disruption, like what are there legitimate worries about like actual business of the FBI, like the real business of our public safety not getting done?

Speaker 13 Or is that stuff kind of just going to happen?

Speaker 13 Like people are just going to do their jobs and try not to let Dan Bongino get in the way? Like how are people processing that side of it?

Speaker 14 All of the above. So first of all, this is something that like a lot of people who look at federal law enforcement really don't understand.
We think like, oh,

Speaker 14 Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotton, these are Supreme Court clerks. You lose people like that.
They're very hard to replace.

Speaker 14 With all due respect to the Supreme Court and to the Harvard and Yale law schools, they're actually easy to replace. We churn

Speaker 14 out first-rate lawyers in giant batches every year.

Speaker 14 And if you get rid of a bunch of lawyers at the Justice Department, they're actually pretty replaceable. FBI agents are exquisitely crafted over time, right?

Speaker 14 There is no

Speaker 14 Yale Law School and Harvard Law School and Stanford Law School that churns out FBI agents. There's Quantico.
The classes are small every year.

Speaker 14 And that's just the basic training. These are often people who have just exquisite training over time in really refined areas like, you know,

Speaker 14 art theft, like, which is a really important thing in money laundering, right?

Speaker 14 So. you know you you need people who really understand the art market who really understand forensic accounting who really who need have good language skills in chinese and russian right?

Speaker 14 You show me a good counterintelligence agent, and I'll show you somebody who's been built over 20 years.

Speaker 14 And so when you take those senior managers, these are cumulatively centuries of experience that you're losing.

Speaker 14 It's very unlike, you know, I'm not diminishing firing people like, you know, at the Justice Department. You know, we tend to be dismissive of it because they're just the cops.

Speaker 14 They're actually the people whose expertise is really, really hard to replace. And the more complicated an investigation is,

Speaker 14 the more you look to that really sculpted training of very individual agents.

Speaker 14 And that, you know, we have already lost an enormous amount of that. We're going to lose more over the next six months to a year, both because of firing.

Speaker 14 And, you know, I had a meeting with somebody at the bureau who

Speaker 13 you know is stepping down and you know i asked why and the person said i just don't want to work for these people you know and that that is not somebody who's going to get fired right that's so hard you can't blame them like on the one hand you want like this is so hard like i wrote about this i felt like this was complicated from political appointments in the first trump term and i was on the side always of people should not take these jobs and they should quit if they're political appointees in the first trump there were other people like, you know, me and Steve Hayes went round and round on this where he was forced to take.

Speaker 13 Right. It gets way more complicated in this situation.
Like I feel horrible for somebody that's at the FBI.

Speaker 13 There's part of me that's like, I wish that person that you talked to would have stayed, I think, but I don't, but it's just like, because this is what they want. They want those people to quit.

Speaker 14 They want those people to quit. And one of the things that they're doing is they're putting people in a situation that they don't know if they're going to be fired.
And so they basically,

Speaker 14 you know, in addition to the, I don't want to work for these people, it's, and they might fire me next week anyway. Right.

Speaker 13 So let's get a safe job. Yeah.

Speaker 14 But they might not. So, you know, and these are people with families.
They're people with, who've expected to spend their careers in the bureau. So look, I think there's going to be a lot of turmoil.

Speaker 14 There is going to be loss of, there has already been a lot of loss of expertise and capacity. There is loss at the top of management ability.

Speaker 14 Dan Bongino is not qualified to be the deputy director of the FBI, and his boss is not qualified to run the building.

Speaker 14 And if you amalgamate that over the entire organization and say, what is going to be the aggregate loss of effectiveness, it is going to be substantial.

Speaker 14 And I don't know how to sit here and tell you how substantial, but

Speaker 14 it matters that we have an FBI, have had an FBI that is very, very elite. And it will matter that we will now have an FBI that is much less elite.

Speaker 13 Well,

Speaker 13 from people who have a lot of job insecurity right now across the federal government, there's been a lot of people for a president that was elected ostensibly on fixing the economy and on being a great businessman.

Speaker 13 Not seen a lot of that. Stock market's down, prices are still up.
A lot of people losing jobs or having job uncertainty.

Speaker 13 Not a ton of people gaining job certainty under this administration, with one exception, Washington, D.C.-based employment attorneys.

Speaker 13 I was listening to the Law Fair podcast and I was like, you are crushing right now. If you are a law firm and you represent wrongfully terminated employees, this is going to be the golden age for you.

Speaker 13 I don't know that there's a lot of Republicans in this work, so I don't know if that was intentional for the Trump administration, unintentional consequences.

Speaker 13 But I mean, you've done hours on this over on Law Fair.

Speaker 13 But so just give us the basic summary of like the state of play as far as all of the lawsuits about people that have been terminated, particularly with regards to these probationary employees.

Speaker 14 All right. So I think you can lop, group all the lawsuits about Trump executive actions into three broad categories.

Speaker 14 There's some others that are ancillary to it, but almost everything fits into three broad categories. One is he announces policies that people think are illegal, and those policies are challenged.

Speaker 14 So the biggest of them, the most obvious is the birthright citizenship, right? The Constitution says if you're born in the United States, subject to the jurisdiction thereof, you get citizenship.

Speaker 14 Trump says, I interpret that to mean, no, you don't. And so some people sue.

Speaker 14 That's basket one. There's a bunch of these cases.
This is by far the smallest basket. In some ways the highest profile.
The second category is the spending freezes.

Speaker 14 And these are, you know, Congress has said, you'll sometimes hear these called the impoundment cases. Congress has said we're going to spend X amount of money on

Speaker 14 A, B, C, D,

Speaker 14 and the administration issues an executive order that says we're freezing money to A, B, C, and D.

Speaker 14 And people who are supposed to get money under A, B, C, and D, either USAID recipients or Medicare, Medicaid recipients in

Speaker 14 states or the states themselves, sue and say, no, you can't do that. Congress appropriated the money.
Third category of litigation, by far the largest, is Trump fires people who have some

Speaker 14 statutory protection against firing. And these are at very different levels of the executive branch.
So, at the highest level, they're the independent heads of federal agencies, right?

Speaker 14 He fires all the Democrats who work for a federal agency. There's also the Office of Special Counsel,

Speaker 14 and the Inspectors General, people who have

Speaker 14 right, exactly. And then there's a different level, which is

Speaker 14 all kinds of federal federal civil service level employees. So the Justice Department lawyers who were detailed to the special counsel's office to work for Jack Smith, they were all fired.

Speaker 14 The Justice Department junior lawyers who worked on the January 6th cases, they were all fired by Ed Martin, by the way.

Speaker 14 And these are going to be very different categories of firings because these people have civil service protections.

Speaker 14 And so all of these present different variations of the same big question, which is how much constitutional authority does the president have to control appointments and firings within the executive branch.

Speaker 14 And generally speaking, the higher level you go, the closer somebody is to the head of an agency, the more power the president is going to have, and the less power Congress is going to have to put limitations on that but trump has been so aggressive that he's reached down to the literally junior attorneys level at the justice elon has been so aggressive but yeah well but again elon doesn't formally exist

Speaker 13 right sure and so individual forest rangers individual justice department lawyers anybody who had gotten a promotion at any level anybody who is an entry-level employee at any any department, except for a couple that had carbouts.

Speaker 14 And so there's going to be a hundred of these litigations. There's already a million of them, but each one will present a different question.

Speaker 14 Can you fire an FBI manager who's got you know, because he's politically unreliable?

Speaker 14 Can you fire a forest ranger because he's probationary and though he didn't do anything wrong, you're just getting rid of all the probationary employees, right?

Speaker 14 Can you fire a Pentagon JAG because, you know, JAGs are kind of the

Speaker 14 wimp shit people and we want to run a warrior culture here, right?

Speaker 13 Yeah, this guy doesn't want to let us do prospective war crimes. Oh, he's got it.
We got to get rid of him.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, if you're a JA, you're probably, you've probably said no to somebody at some point. And we were pro-war crimes now.

Speaker 14 Can you fire all the people who've done Russian disinformation from all the relevant agencies because now we're pro-Putin?

Speaker 14 These are all different iterations of

Speaker 14 a common question.

Speaker 14 And I think the answer is going to be the Supreme Court is going to take very different views depending on what level people are, the reasons for the firing, and also how bad the record is.

Speaker 14 And the good news is,

Speaker 14 honestly, they have been so blunderbuss about it that they have created in many of these instances terrible records for themselves that are going to be very hard for them to litigate, even in front of a friendly Supreme Court.

Speaker 13 Now, that seems expensive to me. I know that Doge is supposed to be the Department of Government efficiency, but it doesn't.

Speaker 13 Doing thousands upon thousands of legal cases to determine whether forest rangers should be fired doesn't seem to be a particularly efficient use of resources to me.

Speaker 14 Oh, and oh, it's so much worse than that, Tim. I know you're being sarcastic, but you're actually understating the matter a lot

Speaker 14 because they're going to lose a lot of these cases. And by the time they lose them, these people will have gotten other jobs.

Speaker 14 And so what they're eventually going to end up doing is having to pay back wages for a large number of people for doing no work.

Speaker 14 Because the the Forest Ranger is going to go get a job in eco-management from the firefighting, I think, a lot of needs.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 14 And the Justice Department lawyers, Justice Department lawyers are pretty expensive, by the way. They're going to all end up eventually at law firms.

Speaker 13 They're going to drain the swamp by moving deep state Justice Department lawyers from the government to Washington, D.C. law firms, and then they're going to pay them for not suing the government.

Speaker 13 They're going to pay both the

Speaker 13 law firms that are suing the government and the lawyers individually. So that's going to exactly.

Speaker 14 So you're not going to save, you know, like you can say, oh, look how much money we've saved in wages we're not going to spend.

Speaker 14 You're going to spend them and you're going to spend the money defending the lawsuits, which, by the way, you've fired some of the lawyers who are going to do.

Speaker 14 So how is like the Justice Department is going to have, you know, they're quite short staffed now in the civil defense area.

Speaker 14 So it's pretty stupid as a way of saving money.

Speaker 14 There are ways to downsize the federal government, some of which are not crazy, that are money saving. But, you know, if you just fire people randomly, that does not save money.

Speaker 13 Okay. Well, Ben Wittis, we've got more with you coming.
We're bringing in a couple of your colleagues to do foreign policy. We talked about Ukraine and a new podcast you guys are working on.

Speaker 13 So you, Ben, stick around. Everybody else, stick around.
We'll be right back.

Speaker 1 Get Ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 4 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 12 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 2 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 10 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 8 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 7 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 13 November is all about gathering, Friendsgiving, Thanksgiving, and football weekends. Total Wine and More has everything you need for your table and your toasts.

Speaker 13 With thousands of wine, spirits, and beers at the lowest prices. From bold reds to sparklers and smooth bourbons to tequilas made for celebrating, Total Wine has it all.

Speaker 13 With the lowest prices for over 30 years, you'll always find what you love, only at Total Wine and More. Curbside pickup and delivery available in most areas.
See TotalWine.com for details.

Speaker 13 Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, B21.

Speaker 13 All right, we are back. Ben Wittis is still here.
Unfortunately, he's not exactly been uplifting so far today. And so we're hoping some new blood will help freshen things up.

Speaker 13 We've also got his colleagues, Anastasia Lepotna, a Ukrainian journalist, and she's the co-host of this new podcast, Escalation, which is a narrative series on the history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations.

Speaker 13 Tyr McBride, managing editor of Law Affair, is the other co-host. What's up, y'all?

Speaker 15 Great to be here.

Speaker 13 I don't know if we're going to add much levity to the program, but I was just going to say, no good news from ukraine do you have any jokes do you have any ukrainian jokes you want to share with us anastasia anything we're we're not in a joking mood the past few weeks it's all doom and

Speaker 15 the uh the the nuclear codes i thought i thought there was a bit of ukrainian gallows humor uh that you shared with us earlier Right, that was very funny.

Speaker 16 Apparently, there is a joke going around Ukrainian Twitter that after Zdensky's fiery press conference, which happened last Sunday, Trump might want to nuke us.

Speaker 16 So it's great that he fired everyone who may know where the launch codes are.

Speaker 13 That's good.

Speaker 13 That's not exactly an uplifting humor.

Speaker 13 That's all we got. It's all we got.
Chuckling. All right.
Talk to us about the podcast. Why are you guys doing it? What was the rationale behind it? What are you trying to get out of it?

Speaker 14 Well, we started this project about a year ago, and I asked Tyler and Nastia to host it.

Speaker 14 The idea was that the United States and Ukraine have a 30-year relationship of trying to deal with Russia and a history of misunderstandings and seeing the matter in sometimes dramatically and sometimes in subtly different ways.

Speaker 14 And we thought, partly at the time, not because of the presence of Trump, but partly because Republicans were souring in Congress on support for Ukraine.

Speaker 14 and because the Biden administration and the Ukrainians were so at odds over how weapons should be used, that there was just a real value in telling the story of this relationship.

Speaker 14 And of course, that became much more urgent in the fall when the Trump administration made clear that they were, first of all, going to come to power again, but secondly, that their hatred of Ukraine had not abated.

Speaker 13 Well, I was pretty disappointed that you had to start the podcast in 1991 rather than, I don't know, a little bit later, because it meant that you took a shot at Poppy Bush, the best president of my lifetime, who I guess, you know, maybe maybe had a couple misses.

Speaker 13 We all have a couple misses, and maybe didn't get things started off on the right foot. So, what happened in that first episode?

Speaker 16 In the first episode, it's titled Chiken Kiev, and we're talking about how Ukraine regained its independence, officially declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and what was the American reaction to that.

Speaker 16 And the U.S. really wasn't kind of on the right side of history there, if you ask me, Ukrainian,

Speaker 16 because the U.S. was very much shocked by the fall of the Soviet Union, and they were just trying to, you know, make this as clean as possible, avoid violence at all costs.
And apparently, the U.S.

Speaker 16 government was sure that Ukrainian independence could only come as a result of some horrific violence.

Speaker 16 And so they basically came to Kiev, Bush came to Kiev, and said, you know, all of this independence jazz is cool, but we're actually basically going to back Gorbachev in Moscow.

Speaker 16 And, you know, he said that we are not here to pick sides, but everyone in Ukraine heard him picking a side. And so the speech then got titled Chiken Kiev.
It's named after a famous Ukrainian dish.

Speaker 16 But of course, it's to throw shaded bush. And

Speaker 16 yeah, everyone in Ukraine knows about this speech, and Americans have no idea. And this is kind of a theme in the podcast.

Speaker 16 There are a lot of hard feelings that Ukrainians have towards America, and Americans have no clue what we're talking about. So hopefully we're going to fix that with the podcast.

Speaker 13 Got it. Tyler, as a non-Ukrainian, what of those hard feelings or other facts did you discover

Speaker 13 over the course of the project that stuck out to you?

Speaker 15 I'll just first say the chicken key speech illustrates this dynamic that we trace throughout the podcast, which is the U.S.

Speaker 15 determining Ukraine policy essentially on Russia's terms and through the lens of Russia. We spoke to one Ukrainian diplomat who said that the U.S.
always looks at Ukraine through Russian glasses.

Speaker 15 And I think what we're trying to pull out is this has led to some pretty short-sighted decisions, both short-sighted looking forward and backward in terms of a misunderstanding of history.

Speaker 15 I will say, though, this is not an entirely pile-on U.S. foreign policy kind of podcast.

Speaker 15 Another, I think, interesting, contentious period that we look at is the Budapest memorandum in which essentially Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for assurances of security from the U.S.

Speaker 15 But

Speaker 15 in Ukraine it got translated to guarantees.

Speaker 15 And I will say I did play the role of a sort of naive American at some points, but Nasty and I would have arguments between ourselves that almost mirrored US and Ukraine relations.

Speaker 15 Take the nuclear weapons. Ukraine maybe couldn't maintain them financially and geopolitically.
But of course, looking back, Nastia would probably prefer that Ukraine had nuclear weapons right now.

Speaker 15 So it's an interesting dynamic.

Speaker 13 Nastia,

Speaker 13 take us up to the present day. I just, it's impossible for me to get in the head of how Ukrainians are thinking about all of this right now.

Speaker 13 And obviously, you know, there can be people of different perspectives. It's not going to be a uniform response.

Speaker 13 But I'm just wondering, you know, when you talk to folks back home, et cetera, like how the mood is, you know, as these kind of negotiations, so to speak, unfold.

Speaker 16 Aaron Powell, there is a lot of shock and outrage and anger just at all the absurdity that Trump is spewing, you know, talking about Zelensky being a dictator, just lying, about Zelensky having 4% approval ratings, which is blatantly false.

Speaker 16 Zelensky's ratings are at 63% this month, which is higher than Trump's, which is important. But the most interesting element of this reaction for me is

Speaker 16 Ukrainians have this remarkable talent at unity when there is this radical threat to us, which is why, you know, we survived the 72 hours that were giving to us in 2022, and it's now been three years that we're fighting back.

Speaker 16 So what we've seen over the past few weeks is that the more more Trump attacks Zelensky, the more Ukrainians rally around Zelensky. Even though a lot of people in the country really don't like him.

Speaker 16 A lot of people think he's a bad president, want him out, et cetera.

Speaker 13 What are the complaints about him from people that don't like him?

Speaker 16 That, you know, he's corrupt, that the guy who runs the presidential office, Andriy Yermak, that he is this great cardinal who wasn't elected. He's kind of like Aron Musk.
It's

Speaker 16 an imperfect analogy here, but he is an unelected official who runs the country for some reason. Zelensky cares about looking good and

Speaker 16 doesn't make tough decisions when necessary, which impedes the war effort. So there's a lot there.
But once Trump started attacking him, the entire country

Speaker 16 started rallying around Zelensky with the message basically that like, hey, this is our guy. This is our president.
We have a right to criticize him.

Speaker 16 We have a right to accuse him of whatever democratic backsliding. You, Trump, do not have the right.

Speaker 16 And you see journalists saying this whose entire careers are built around criticizing the government. You see even members of the political opposition in Ukraine saying that.

Speaker 16 Poroshenko, the guy who Zelensky sanctioned just a few weeks ago, he's one of our political leaders in opposition. He said that

Speaker 16 we are unifying around Zelensky and we think he's our legitimate president, our legitimate government. So it's just a very interesting reaction to kind of protect our president from Trump.

Speaker 13 I would go around the horn. I mean, obviously this podcast is a look back, but

Speaker 13 there are lessons, of course, from that escalation throughout history. I just want to hear what everybody thinks, you know, what the echoes are going to be now and like where

Speaker 13 things are going to go from here, because obviously there's a ton of uncertainty, but surely there's some lessons from your guys' work on that.

Speaker 13 So, Ben, why don't you go first and we'll just go around the horn.

Speaker 14 I mean, I think the entire history of U.S.-Ukrainian relations until a week ago can be summarized in the theme:

Speaker 14 two partners, each imperfect, and we've talked about the US failures, but we haven't talked about, which we also cover, the Ukrainian follies, which are non-trivial, but which and which we devote several episodes to.

Speaker 14 Two parties who are both imperfect, both groping for a way to work together to manage a threat from Russia, and

Speaker 14 mostly doing so successfully with big failures. And then last week, that changed, and the United States switched sides.
And how decisively it switched sides is going to play out over the next year.

Speaker 14 But

Speaker 14 we fundamentally changed the nature of the relationship to one that is imperialistic, extractive, and cooperative with the totalitarian regime that we had been previously trying to help Ukraine keep at bay.

Speaker 14 And I think the tale of that decision is going to be very long. It's going to be very tragic.
And I don't think we should understate it.

Speaker 14 And so I think what happened in this podcast is we told the story. We've done six plus episodes that are all leading up to this decision.
And there is a final chapter of it that is yet to be written.

Speaker 14 And that is whether Trump will be meaningfully rebuffed in this effort to rewrite the relationship from one of partners to adversaries or whether he will accomplish that. And I think it's

Speaker 14 one of the big things other than dismantling the U.S. federal government that he has tried to effectuate in his first months in office.

Speaker 13 Just a few casual things, switching sides beyond the baddies and trying to dismantle our federal our republic. Other than that,

Speaker 13 some minor actions the first month. Tyler, do you see it that stark?

Speaker 15 I do. To pick up on something Ben was saying, the fact that Trump has seemingly done a 180 for U.S.

Speaker 15 foreign policy, whether that'll stick or not, I think it's safe to say that there is a lot of ambiguity. And in looking back in U.S.-Ukraine relations, the U.S.

Speaker 15 has often trafficked in this type of strategic ambiguity only to Ukraine's detriment. It's a situation in which Russia can exploit easily.

Speaker 15 Just very briefly, one of our episodes touches on a period called the Bucharest Summit, which was in 2008, which essentially gave Ukraine these vague promises of joining NATO and enjoying all the security benefits of that, but with no real map or commitment to get them there.

Speaker 15 But it was just enough to anger Russia and

Speaker 15 spark further aggression from them. So it's this kind of ambiguity, I think, that the U.S.
is continuing to our own and to Ukraine's detriment.

Speaker 13 Yeah, Nasiya, what do you think?

Speaker 13 So like both the gentlemen said, I mean, there is some ambiguity here, but if Trump continues to move down the path that they went down, like yesterday at the UN, siding with Belarus and Russia, et cetera, against Ukraine and Europe, is there the resolve or the desire within Ukraine and within the rest of Europe to go at it without us?

Speaker 13 Like, how do you see that playing out?

Speaker 16 I mean, it's terrifying to imagine, right? Because the vast majority of Ukraine's military aid came from the U.S. And we see clearly that Europe just does not have the production capacity and

Speaker 16 seems to have wasted three years not getting itself there. And they've done a lot.
They've done equally as much as the U.S. in terms of monetary support.
But still, it's not the same.

Speaker 16 I think Ukrainians have had some dark moments of history with Europe as well. And again, that's something went back in one of the episodes.

Speaker 16 The The Europeans were one of the reasons why the Bucharest summit that Tyler mentioned kind of collapsed and was the worst of all worlds, as we say.

Speaker 16 And they were also there brokering peace, quote unquote, with Russia after 2014 when Russia first invaded Ukraine. And look how that turned out.
So

Speaker 16 we don't have a lot of trust towards the Europeans either. And so I think a lot of Ukrainians are feeling like we're being abandoned.

Speaker 16 like we're being left alone, you know, and Macron is scrambling to figure out some coalition in Europe, calling these summits. Nothing concrete is happening out of them.

Speaker 16 Meanwhile, Ukrainians are like guys who've been at it for three years. Like that, that should have been enough time for you to figure your stuff out.

Speaker 16 And it's just so annoying that, like, ultimately, ultimately, it's always going to be us paying the price. Somebody's children, somebody's parents dying.

Speaker 16 It's unfortunately as tragic and as sad as Ben and Tyler kind of put it.

Speaker 13 All right. Well, I hate to leave people with that, but such is the world that we're in.

Speaker 13 Asasia's subsequent is called Yours Ukrainian. You can get the podcast at Lawfair.
So go and check that out.

Speaker 13 Ben, Nasia, Tyler, thanks so much for being on the Bulwark podcast. Everybody else, we'll be back here tomorrow for another edition.
See y'all Ben. Peace.

Speaker 13 trying this to care about

Speaker 13 you.

Speaker 13 Only the breath of my pride could lust for the right wing words I can lose.

Speaker 13 And I say

Speaker 13 that you're

Speaker 13 me.

Speaker 13 And I say

Speaker 13 that I did

Speaker 13 so free.

Speaker 13 I'm out of my time. I'm lost in the crime.
I'm next to Jimmy.

Speaker 13 Only what's left of my cry. Cause I'll run my

Speaker 13 one second.

Speaker 13 I'm running out of my time. I'm lost in the crime.
I'm next to Jimmy.

Speaker 13 Only what's left of my cry. Cause I'll soon light you

Speaker 13 one second.

Speaker 13 The Boar Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 17 We use sunscreen pa protejer la piel, verdad. So, why not be proactive? Protegendo tu salute bucal también.

Speaker 17 Ho la la mijente sea amar la nigra, y con el systema de prevención activa corgate total tu puedes ayudara prevenir problemas bucales, como lascarias, yingivitis, antes de que empiécen.

Speaker 17 The reformulated toothpaste, innovative toothbrush, and refreshing antibacterial mouthwash were designed to work together to be quietes more effective reducing bacterial buildup, like those principal de los problemas orales and solos seismanas, starting in week one.

Speaker 17 Compared to a non-antibacterial fluoride toothpaste and a flaxen toothbrush, SOS prevention power, baby.

Speaker 17 Compre sistema de prevención activa colgate total, visitando shop punto colgate punto com dagunal total. Protect your oral health and be dentist ready.

Speaker 18 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake. Older homes are especially vulnerable to quake damage, so you may need to take steps to strengthen yours.

Speaker 18 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

Speaker 18 Strengthen your home and help protect your family. Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.
Visit strengthenyourhouse.com.

Speaker 13 November is all about gathering. Friendsgiving, Thanksgiving, and football weekends.
Total Wine and More has everything you need for your table and your toasts.

Speaker 13 With thousands of wine, spirits, and beers at the lowest prices. From bold reds to sparklers and smooth bourbons to tequilas made for celebrating.
Total wine has it all.

Speaker 13 With the lowest prices for over 30 years, you'll always find what you love, only at Total Wine and More. Curbside pickup and delivery available in most areas.
See TotalWine.com for details.

Speaker 13 Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly, B21.