87. How The Saudi Crown Prince Played Trump

This episode is brought to you by Revolute Business, the all-in-one account designed for efficiency and built for business.

The less time you spend agonizing over a repetitive financial admin, the more time you've got to focus on what's next for your business, or in your case, Anthony, for your next tweet.

Listen, I call it multitasking, Caddy.

Why not both?

Yeah, whether you're scaling up in Sheffield or consulting in Chicago, Revolute Business gives you everything you need to manage your business finances in one account.

Pay and get paid globally in over 30 currencies with no hidden fees and at great rates.

There's spend management too, cards with custom spend limits.

We like those for our kids.

And automated expenses, full control, no administrative headaches.

Open a Revolut Business account today by scanning the QR code on screen or using the link in this episode's description.

Add money to your account by the 7th of July 2025 and you'll get a £200 welcome bonus.

Feature availability varies by plan, fees, and terms and conditions apply.

You know, that's Revolute Business, designed for efficiency and built for business.

You know how to make a great meal.

And when it comes to the mess, Palmolive knows how to handle it.

Palmolive Ultra removes up to 2.5 times the grease versus Dawn Non-Concentrated.

Palmolive's most powerful formula instantly cuts grease, leaving you with sparkling clean dishes.

Palmala Vultra.

Click or tap the banner to shop now or visit palmolive.com.

ABC Tuesdays, Dancing with the Stars is back with an all-new celebrity cast.

You have the crew!

Robert Irwin, Alex Earle, Andy Richter, Shen Affleck, Aaron Davis, Lauren Howreggi, Whitney Levitt, Dylan Efron, Jordan Childs, Ilaria Baldwin, Scott Hoyd, Elaine Hendricks, Saniell Fischel, and Corey Feldman.

This season, get ready to feel the rhythm.

If you got it, Flumton.

Dancing with the Stars premieres live.

Tuesdays, 8-7-Central on ABC and Disney ⁇ .

Next day on Hulu.

Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics US.

I'm Katie Kaye.

And I'm Anthony Scaramucci.

I'm wearing my 17th Superman shirt of the year purchased from Amazon.

And by the way, just a little promotion.

July 11th is a very big day for Superman fans, Caddy K.

Not that you're necessarily a Superman fan, but I just pointed that, I wanted to point that out.

Do you wear the t-shirt because you think you are Superman?

Because that's what I've always assumed, that men who go around wearing Superman t-shirts are trying to kind of tell us something.

Please, I wish, I wish.

All right, I'm not on testosterone replacement.

I'm just here doing my best at age 61.

I don't think I'm Superman.

I just happen to be a Superman fan, Caddy K.

Okay.

By the way, congratulations on Elon Musk.

Caddy.

Yes.

This was, I just want to point out to everybody, this was a Caddy K idea to do special programming, a four-part episode on Elon Musk.

I think it's actually five parts.

It's going to be because the story is so gripping that we couldn't end.

Yes, before we get started, we do want to remind you that the first episode of our Elon Musk miniseries is out now.

So if you want to hear the whole series as it drops and get the whole full crazy story of Musk's journey from tech titan to political powerbreaker, just head to therestispoliticsus.com to become a founding member.

And if that's not enough to convince you, you can listen to a little taster of episode one for free by going to therestispoliticsus.com slash Musk.

So it's all there.

We had great fun making it.

It is, it's a story you might think you know, but I promise you the details of Elon Musk's life and the way he thinks and the way he is operated astonished both of us.

So go to therestispoliticsus.com and then you can get the series.

But in this episode, we're going to do something slightly different.

We're going to focus on all of the diplomacy that's been going on this week in both the first half and the second half because there is so much of it.

We're going to look at President Trump in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in the UAE, at the Investment Forum, his relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the diplomacy behind all of this, because it's been a frenetic week in diplomacy and how much of this is actually producing results and how much isn't.

And then after the break, we'll have a quick reality check on who is actually benefiting from all of this, where's the money coming from?

And perhaps just as importantly, where is it going to?

And yes, we will talk about the plane and what we think about that.

But But first of all,

I had some very interesting conversations this week, Anthony, about the president's trip with Middle East watchers and with former members of the CIA who have been kind of Middle East experts for a long time and people who have been actually pretty critical of President Trump, but who looked at some of the things that are happening in the Middle East this week and thought, actually, you know what?

Some of this is exactly what Joe Biden would have done.

It looks more like conventional American foreign policy.

And here is Donald Trump getting back re-engaged with the world on multiple fronts.

And we can run through the list of this very busy week on the diplomatic front.

And that what he has been doing in the Middle East is actually pretty good for America and pretty good for the region.

We'll talk about the sort of the possible corruption side of it and the money side of it in the second half.

But what's your read on what you've seen so far?

in these palaces that I know you have been to with the people, many of whom you've actually met in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

Well, I mean, there's a villain.

We were talking about Superman earlier, but there's actually a villain in Batman.

For people that don't know the Batman lore, there's a villain called Too-Face.

And so one side of his face is perfectly handsome, and the other side of his face was disfigured in a sulfuric acid accident, and he has a split personality.

And I think Donald Trump is actually our Two-Face president because there's a part of what he's doing.

What star sign does that make him?

I know you're big on star signs.

Yeah, he's a Gemini.

He's a Gemini.

He fits his star.

He fits his star sign perfectly.

He's born on the 14th of June, 1946.

He's going to be 79 years old.

And so I always try to be as objective as possible on this podcast.

So let's state some obvious things.

For a 79-year-old, he has tremendous energy.

He flew to Rome, came back,

wasn't wearing the right suit, probably helped the Pope get elected, but now he flew over to the Middle East.

He's a vigorous 79-year-old, and you got to give him credit for that.

He's got a lot of energy.

But that star sign, you have two people inside one body, and he's manifesting that right now on the world stage.

So what is he doing that I like?

He's talking about a foreign policy renovation for the United States.

And he's saying something that's actually true that we have to accept.

The UK accepts this.

I think we have to accept this in the United States, that our interventionist policies born from the Gulf wars, really the Second Gulf War, have failed in the Middle East.

The nation building was nation destruction, 20-year war in Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S.

history, not a winning war for the American people.

And a lot of Americans are very dissatisfied with the money blown.

that could have been spent on education, infrastructure, deficit repayment, et cetera.

So his speech to me, I thought was great.

I'm just going to be very honest with people.

He talked about

re-engineering the way America thinks about the Middle East and trying to foment peace and prosperity.

And he threw an olive branch out to the Iranians.

And by the way, so much so that Leon Panetta, who's probably 87 now, former chief of staff for Clinton, former Defense Secretary, CIA director, praised the speech.

And you can go to an interview on CNN where he praised the speech.

So that's one side of him, Caddy.

And then just briefly on the other side, while he's doing that, he's got one angel on his shoulder saying, you know, you could really be a break president if you just calm the F down.

And then he's got the devil on the other side of his shoulder saying, hey, I want to make $200 billion for my family before I blow out of this presidency.

$200 billion.

Okay, let me put the Dr.

Evil thing up.

$200 billion.

I don't even know how you'd write $200 billion, let alone what you'd do with $200 billion.

But this is the problem with where we are right now, because

what I saw there when they were all shaking hands in the royal court is the last vestiges of late-stage capitalism.

And the first thing that came to mind when I saw them all there, those billionaires cavorting with the crown prince, I said to myself, okay, where's Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?

Because

you're moving too far towards the capitalists, and you have to make sure that capital and labor has a roughly equal distribution of the economic rent in a society.

50-50, we're happy campers, Caddy.

If it even goes 52-53 capital to labor, you get great dissatisfaction and economic desperation from the working class.

So to me, It's just a weird thing to watch Trump.

It's like, you know, dude, you want to be a better guy.

I know you do, but you're overwhelmed by the attention and the greed.

If you could just calm those elements down in your personality, we could probably get some things done here.

The world wants peace, Caddy.

And so I want to be optimistic about that.

The world wants peace.

Yeah, I think the question is, look, we've seen a massive amount of diplomatic, from somebody who has said that, you know, that this administration is more isolationist.

And I do believe that J.D.

Vance is genuinely on the kind of isolationist wing of this White House.

We've actually seen a huge amount of intervention from the Trump administration.

We've seen it in the UK-US trade deal.

We've seen it in the China-US deal.

We've seen it in Donald Trump going into a kind of war against the Houthis and then pulling out after a month when he realized the cost was going to be too high.

We've seen it in the Iran negotiations that are happening at the moment.

They are trying to do something on Ukraine, and we can get to kind of what's working and what isn't for them.

We've seen it in India and Pakistan directly intervening there to bring those two countries back from the possibility of a nuclear strike.

We've seen it in them lifting sanctions on Syria, which then allows other countries to invest in Syria.

So I think, you know,

it doesn't quite fit with the narrative of JD Vance, who initially said, for example, on India and Pakistan, this has nothing to do with us, or has told the Europeans, you know, you're kind of on your own, has told the Ukrainians you're on your own, to see Donald Trump so interventionist on the world stage and so keen on making deals.

Now, some of those deals, I'm not sure, are going to work out.

Certainly doesn't look like there's much of a deal on Gaza at the moment, which is something that he said he had wanted to solve.

But it doesn't kind of fit with the narrative that we've heard about this administration that they are totally pulling back from the world, because this actually looks to me more like America as we've always known it.

Yeah,

the goal of the Trump administration.

in terms of getting involved in other countries' human rights issues or promoting democracy, completely different from the Republican Party as we've known it.

But it is still America involved on the world stage.

I think it was The Economist has described it as the globalism of greed, which gets to your point, that is the overarching policy here all around making money, making money for the United States, as we're going to talk about in the second half, potentially making money for the Trump administration.

And maybe that's the driving force that...

Trump really believes if you that wars cost money.

If you can get people to trade with each other and ideally trade with the United States, they'll see that it's in their vested interest because actually there's money to be made for leaders individually and for companies and for countries.

And maybe that's the overarching theory.

This is different.

This week is different.

Donald Trump is behaving differently.

There are some things that are the same.

The kind of some of the grift stuff is the same and we'll get into that.

But the level of engagement and diplomatic activity feels different.

Do you think that it's going to be successful?

Do you think this is a successful negotiating strategy that he's kind of taking to all these different places?

I'm conscious that as we're talking on Thursday,

the Ukrainians are in Turkey and trying to have some kind of talks with the Russians, and the Russians have sent the dog catcher.

I just want to give some context.

Back in 2018, Jared Kushner called me and said, Hey, we're doing a big economic event in Bahrain.

We're presenting an economic plan related to the Palestinians.

I don't know if you would remember this, but I flew to Bahrain in June.

We went to the Four Seasons Hotel on that island off the coast, and we had guys like Steve Schwartzman and Professor Jeff Sonnenfeld and a whole coderie of people, very similar to what you saw in Saudi Arabia, talk about an economic plan for the Palestinians and for the West Bank and for Gaza.

Unfortunately, there were no representatives from Palestine there, and they said that they were rejecting the deal without a concomitant economic proposal.

So the proposal basically was the Israelis are going to run everything.

They're going to run your government, but you can have great economic bounty if you follow this plan.

That's basically the Trump theory, isn't it?

That's

basically the Trump theory.

That's why I'm bringing this up.

The Trump theory is you have a political overlord.

In this case, in the United States, I am your political overlord.

And if you bow down to me, you can get favor curried upon you.

Okay, the problem with this is that it doesn't really work because, again, I'm not a sociologist, but I'm just a good observer of things.

In autocracies and in systems that are built like that, Caddy, you get a big funnel at the top for lots of corruption.

Lots of people get rich at the tippy top that are close to the leader, and everyone else gets screwed.

And then the power becomes so absolute that it becomes so corrupting that the leader himself or herself, but it's usually himself, they start to make the laws capricious.

And then once the laws become capricious, the investment capital dries up because people are like, I can't buy that because I may or may not own that.

You know, I don't have a legal backing.

You know, if they're not going to listen to the courts, how can I go out and buy that property in the United States or something like that?

So the reason I'm bringing all this up is that there's great hope and there's great optimism in what could happen, but there's a design flaw in what they're doing.

Now, listen, up against everything I just said in the Middle East is the piece of the puzzle that's related to Israel and Palestine.

And I think Netanyahu, frankly, Prime Minister Netanyahu, probably roughed up some people in the Trump administration.

They would like some of the tactics that the Israelis are using to stop.

I think it's very clear.

And Netanyahu has said that he's not going to stop.

And now there's this big fervor about the Israeli lobby in the United States.

Matt Gates said on a podcast this week, you can't win an election in the United States if you're against Israel.

You know, they've got a very strong lobby.

They funnel a lot of money into these elections.

And again, I'm not saying that's true or not.

I've never run for elected office in the U.S., so I'm not saying that's true or not.

But there's a lot going on here that has to be unpacked.

And then it would require a transform.

formative leader to go to the American public and say, okay, here's all the interests that are on the table.

This is what the American president would recommend to everybody, understanding the interest.

But remember, if you're promising somebody something economic, but they feel like they don't have freedom of choice, this goes right back to the ancient Greeks who made the decision to create a democracy.

You have to have in an aspirational, economically flowing, economically growing society, that libertarian ideal that, hey, I am here.

I have freedom.

I can speak my mind.

I can create an aura ring, an Apple watch, an Apple phone.

They go together, Caddy.

That's the thing.

This is the reason why,

even though I've been shit on by like so many different journalists in my life, I mean, somebody yesterday in Canada said, can I call you Mooch?

I said, dude, I've been called a lot worse than Mooch.

I mean, you can call me anything you want.

Okay,

my point is, I've been shit on by a lot of journalists in my life.

I don't care.

Journalists can shit on me all day.

They have the right to their freedom of speech.

Their freedom of speech transcends down to our economic opportunities.

If you teach the second grader that he can speak freely or she can speak freely, she goes on to create great things.

If you tell them they can't, they end up in re-education camps if you go after the leader.

You see what I mean?

And so this is all tied together.

And the guys in the Middle East don't get what I'm saying.

And by the way, if you sat down with Trump, He doesn't get what I'm saying.

He yelled at me once.

I wrote an article saying that the press was not the enemy of the people.

He called me.

He yelled at me.

He said, no, no, no, the press is the enemy of the people.

But it's not caddy.

See, it's all tied together is my point.

I mean, for anyone who thinks, you know,

that playing YMCA as his kind of anthem, which is known as a gay anthem in Saudi Arabia as he's leaving, was a kind of jab at the Saudis.

I don't honestly don't think it was.

We're in a country where being gay is illegal and can get you severely punished.

I don't think he's trying to direct the country in that direction.

And I think what's interesting about this theory is that in some countries, the sort of mercantilist theory of foreign policy might work.

I mean, it may work in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states if you ignore any attempt to kind of change human rights records or bring about democracy.

But I think what Trump is hitting up against is that his theory doesn't take into account historical or cultural or ethnic forces that override those mccantalist impulses.

So that's why he hasn't managed to have much success in Ukraine, because the Ukrainians are fighting an existential war.

If they don't get a good deal, what they perceive as a good deal for their sovereignty, whatever deal is signed doesn't mean the Ukrainians are going to stop fighting.

This is why he's having such problems bringing about, you know, the Riviera in Gaza, because there are very strong forces at work here.

It's why it didn't work in North Korea.

In some cases, he can have successes with this type of approach and and i get your point about america had a long period where it did think it could go in and remake the world in america's model and he has just upended that i wanted i wanted to just read you a couple of things because i thought this is this week this felt very appropriate this is what george w bush said in his second inaugural address in 2005.

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

That was 20 years ago.

This week, Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia.

This great transformation does not come from Western interventionists giving you lectures on how to live or to govern your own affairs.

Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought about by the people of the region themselves developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions and charting your own destinies.

In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built.

I mean, I think those I

went back and looked at Bush's second inaugural, which is kind of peak neocon philosophy, peak interventionist, peak America can rebuild the world in its own image.

And then you look at what Donald Trump has just said this week.

And I agree with you that it is a repudiation that is valid because the nation builders, as Trump says, did wreck more than they built.

I'm just not sure that it is a model that works.

for every country and every situation.

And if Donald Trump has the kind of grandiose view of himself that he can make deals based on money effectively that will supersede policies and culture and other countries' desires, I'm not sure it's always going to work, which is why we don't have peace in Ukraine yet and why we don't have peace in Gaza yet.

In fact, we may be on the brink of even more atrocities in the Gaza Strip.

Does that sound fair?

Yeah,

I think it's brilliantly insightful.

I just want to add two sentences and then I want to talk about MBS, if that's okay.

So two sentences I would add is that Cheney was really the architect of this interventionist strategy.

Cheney basically said.

Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, that crowd of neocons.

Yes, we control the world.

we are the massive military might let's go into the middle east rough these people up take 9-11 as the crisis that we need to rough everybody up and get them in line and get them to live the american way okay which was highly arrogant okay george soros by the way in a november op-ed 2001 new york times george soros the legendary investor considered to be a pariah by conservatives but george soros wrote please do not overreact Osama bin Laden wants you to overreact.

You've lost 3,000 lives.

It's a horrific tragedy.

But if you go to war in the Middle East, you're going to end up in an endless war.

You're going to spill a lot of treasure.

You're going to actually weaken the country if you do that.

And bin Laden actually said this on the dark web in the late 90s after he bombed the

embassy sites in Africa.

He said, I'm going to spill your blood like we did the Soviets.

We're going to come hit you on your land.

You're going to to overreact and you're going to spill all your treasure.

And of course, with the Patriot Act, you're going to take away your own civil liberties.

And, you know, Osama bin Laden was right about that.

We've blown through $20 trillion

doing stuff that we shouldn't have done.

Soros became a pariah when he wrote that.

Cheney targeted him, and they've spent 20 years chanting that he's a bad dude, even though what he said was actually insightful.

If you don't mind, I'm just going to go to MBS because I know the Crown Prince.

I've met the Crown Prince in the palace.

Did you get the lavender carpet?

I didn't get the lavender carpet.

No,

I did get a really good meal, actually.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, Anthony, looking at all the pictures from Saudi Arabia, this is a very different country than the one I moved to when I was just 10 years old in the mid-70s.

And we arrived there.

And one of the first things we did was go and have lunch with the royal family.

They had invited all of us.

My mother and I went with the women, and my dad went with the men.

And it was barbecued camel on the floor in a tent.

And my mum, who spoke fluent Arabic and was fascinated by the Middle East, always reminded me that this was a culture that had changed just massively since the 1960s.

I mean, really in two generations, as many Arab leaders have said to me in the past, you know, we went from being Bedouin who were living in tents in the desert and having a nomadic lifestyle to what you saw this week in Saudi Arabia.

Just the difference struck me.

I mean, that's the politics and the diplomacy and America's relationship aside, how much these cultures have changed, how much these countries have changed.

The reason I got invited to the palace is sort of funny.

So I was there for FII, which is the Financial Investment Initiative.

I got the opportunity to speak on that stage where Trump was speaking from.

And then I got invited to the palace.

It was on CNBC.

MBS was fighting with the Biden administration.

And they asked me a question.

And I said, they said, what do you think about the U.S.-Saudi relationship?

I said, listen, it's like a Catholic marriage.

Now, Caddy, I know you're not Catholic, but there are Catholics listening.

Okay, when you're married and you're Catholic, you don't get unmarried.

Okay, just the way it is.

Okay.

You get, you know, your mother beats up on you.

You know, the Catholics are really tough on each other.

You can't even take communion if you're divorced in the Catholic Church.

So I said on TV, I said, the Saudi-U.S.

relationship is like a Catholic marriage.

They can get pissed off at each other and they could yell at each other, but they're staying married.

That must have been an analogy that went down very well in the home of Mecca and Medina, right?

It did.

It did, actually.

So MBS loved it.

Next thing you know, I'm getting a call from

one of the staff royal secretaries that are like, he would like to have you come to this dinner tonight.

I said, great.

So I came to the dinner, and I had a nice conversation with him.

And I'm going to say three things, and then I want you to react.

So thing number one is he was consolidating power.

He's the younger of the sons of the king.

And there were other potential rivals that were going to be the crown prince, his relatives, half-brothers, etc.

And he was consolidating power and there's a little bit of a rift.

I think U.S.

intelligence,

potentially Trump and Jared Kushner, helped him consolidate that power.

You may remember after the first FII, they rounded up some of the Saudis.

They left them in the Ritz-Carlton.

They were quasi-imprisoned.

And the message was out, hey, you guys are rabble-rousing related to MBS.

Stop doing that.

Otherwise, you're probably, you know, you're going to see Mecca and Medina more quickly, potentially, okay, or paradise.

Okay, so number one, so he's very grateful to the Trump administration.

Trump won for that.

Number two, during the Biden tension, because obviously the relationship fell off with

Biden, I think a lot of Trump people stayed in touch with MBS.

A lot of Trump people did.

And I think that helped the relationship that he now has with Trump.

And the last thing, and this is not a news flash to you, but it may be to others.

Trump is an ageist.

So, what is an ageist, Caddy?

He respects people that are his age.

He doesn't respect people that are not his age.

If you're 40 talking to Trump, he actually looks at you like he doesn't give a shit.

If you're 60 talking to Trump, he rolls his eyes.

If Steve Schwartzman, age 80, calls Donald Trump, he picks up the phone.

He's decided that if you're not his age, you're stoonat, to use an an Italian expression that everybody understands.

And so MBS

gets this because he has an elderly father, and he throws massive, massive respect at Donald Trump.

Jet fighters escorting him, purple rugs, horses taking them to wherever the hell they're going.

And so MBS.

Okay, whatever his weaknesses are, and I'm sure he has them.

Okay, I don't know him well enough to assess them, but this is one of his strengths.

I've got an elderly father that's the king.

You want to be feted and treated like a king.

I'm half your age.

I am going to glitch you up in a way that you're going to leave here very, very happy.

And that's exactly what he did.

I mean, to be fair, the relationship with Joe Biden fell apart partly because of the killing of Jamal Khoshoji, the Washington Post columnist, which U.S.

intelligence services deemed MBS had had knowledge of, being behind.

You know, we have short-term memories in this society and in this world and this communications environment.

So it's kind of now, well, that's in the rearview mirror.

And I get that, but the time that was a big deal.

And it did put Saudi Arabia and MBS himself in the kind of political and diplomatic and certainly media doghouse for a long time.

He's done a big effort to rehabilitate himself in the kingdom and around the world.

And you're right, the ties, and we're going to talk about that after the break, the ties between the Trump family and the Saudis and the Gulf states have been and have been maintained all the time.

And we know that because Jared Kushner has had very close relations with them.

Before we go to the break, I have to ask you a question.

Yeah.

The Khashoggi thing is obviously a huge tragedy.

I don't know if you describe it as a tragedy, Anthony.

I mean, I think a tragedy is when something happens that is not willful.

This guy was dismembered in a consulate in Turkey.

I mean, let's spell it out clearly.

I think you're fair.

So let me rephrase that.

I think that's a fair comment.

The situation around Khashoggi, the response to it, the international response to it was horror.

The FII one in 2017, very, very popular.

FII 2 in 2018, no American corporation went to it.

Right.

J.P.

Morgan, BlackRock.

I get that.

Realpolitik.

You're right.

People move on.

America needs Saudi Arabia.

Here we are, eight years later, and the television cameras are back on in Saudi Arabia.

And every one of those people that didn't go in 18 and 19 are

in full force there now.

And by the way, I'm not besmirching that.

I'm not even calling that hypocrisy.

I'm calling that, quote unquote, the way the world works.

If there is a chance to have peace with the Iranians, we got to go for the peace.

The same way

we were killing each other, the Japanese and the Americans, 80 years ago, and they're now our ally.

That is the way the world works.

And maybe only if you're like a Manchester City fan and you hate Manchester United, I get that.

Take that to your grave.

But everything.

My husband's a Manchester City fan, has been since the age of seven.

So let's try it.

So he's not leaving Manchester City, God bless him.

Nor am I leaving the New York Mets who have only, you know, I probably need ProZ being a New York Met fan.

But the point I'm making is, unless it's just a sporting event, you have to be pliable.

You have to be flexible in these international relationships.

We're going to take a break and come back and look at the plane.

You know what we're talking about.

And just talk a little bit more about the winners and losers this week.

Be right back.

I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, turned spy novelist.

And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

Together we're the hosts of another goal hanger show, The Rest is Classified, and we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies.

That's right, and this week we're talking about one of the most significant stories of the 21st century, Edward Snowden, and how he orchestrated the biggest leak of classified secrets in modern American history.

It was 2011 when Snowden shocked the world by revealing that the American government was bulk collecting data on its own citizens and even spying on our allies.

And it's a story which really also gets to wider questions about what privacy means in the modern world, how technology has changed our lives, and what the government and companies can do with data we might have thought was private.

We will take you through the whole story from Snowden's early career career in the CIA and the NSA to his life in exile in Russia.

If this sounds good, we've left a clip at the end of the episode for you.

This is a paid ad for better help.

In moments of stress, we tend to turn to whoever's in reach, that flatmate in the kitchen, the barista on a slow morning, the stranger who simply asks you how you're doing.

It can help, but being heard isn't always enough, and the more confidently people speak, the the more we mistake it for wisdom.

But if you're dealing with anxiety or loss or something that's been weighing on you, what you need isn't noise, it's actual experience, somebody who really knows their craft.

BetterHelp has spent over a decade helping people find that match.

A short questionnaire sets your preferences and they'll connect you with a therapist who fits.

It's completely online, it's fully flexible, and if your first counselor doesn't really feel right for you, you can switch at any time.

There's no pressure, no extra cost.

As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp gives you access to credentialed mental health professionals with a wide range of expertise.

Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com/slash tripus.

That's better H-E-L-P.com/slash T-R-I-P-U-S.

This is a Bose moment.

You've been there.

Small talks going nowhere, but then the Bose speaker kicks in.

Music you can feel fills the room.

And no more chat with Danny from accounts.

Your life deserves music.

Your music deserves Bose.

Shopbose.com/slash Spotify.

Okay, welcome back, everybody.

It is time to talk about something that I have been trying to figure out this week.

I've been wrestling with this idea of whether Qatar Force One, or whatever we're going to call this plane that the Qatar users have offered to Donald Trump, is signal or noise.

I interviewed Senator Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut this week about Qatar Force One or whatever we're calling it, and he called this whole trip President Trump's corruption tour and that it's all about asking for cash payments that don't necessarily benefit the United States, but very clearly benefit President Trump and President Trump's family.

And I guess this plane has been picked up so much in the press and Democrats are making such a lot of noise about it.

And actually, interestingly, a lot of Republicans have come out on the record and said this does not pass the 12th person in a bar test.

It doesn't look right.

It doesn't smell right.

It doesn't feel right.

And

the president needs to drop this one.

He clearly doesn't want to drop it because...

I'm going to be honest, the plane looks a lot nicer than Air Force One looks, and it's got a lot of bling.

So, what do you think?

Is this a distraction, this whole Qatari plane story, or is this serious?

So I think it's a distraction.

I think, like I said, the angel devil thing going on with Trump, he's like, okay, I got to rake in a couple billion dollars here.

We've already made

we're estimated he's made one to two billion dollars for the family since the presidency started.

And so far, there's been no opposition to it.

There's been a few speeches in the Senate, but no one's coming after him.

He's disemboweled the Justice Department, so they're not going to come after him.

I guess the real question is if a Democrat were to win in 28, could they go back after him?

He'll probably pardon himself.

So, I'll say the answer to that is no.

So, he's on the run, he's got a lot of money coming in, he's very happy about it.

Let me shoot out the $400 million plane over here as a bobble to distract everybody while I'm working on a few billion dollars somewhere, either in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world for myself and my family.

And

I really believe that.

But I will say this: and this is a direct conversation with me and Trump when we were once close.

And so Trump sits in the same seat on Trump Force One.

Okay, so he sits at the table, which is sort of like the dining table.

There's a couple of chairs in front of him, and there's a large TV screen that he can look at where he usually has Fox News on.

And he always has a cardboard box next to him on the plane.

And inside the cardboard box are emails or letters or magazines.

And so while he's talking to you, he's pulling stuff out of the cardboard box that his assistant gave him.

Maybe he's autographing something or he's reading something and he's looking at you, half listening to your shit while he's telling you how wonderful he is.

And he's explaining to me that his rich friends have G650s or G this or G that.

But it's nothing like this.

This is a 757.

And come on, when this thing touches down, look at the majesty of it.

And of course, I got the Trump name all over the damn thing.

And he's explaining to me that the plane's only like $100 million and these other planes are like $100 million and they're sleek, but they're not like this.

Okay, even though it's like a little bit of a clunkier plane to fly in, okay, it's not as sleek as a G7.

And then he looks at me and he says,

I'm just so happy with this plane, right?

All right, now I got to fast forward.

I'm in the White House.

I flew Air Force One three times.

I flew baby Air Force One twice, Large Air Force One once.

I'm on Large Air Force One with him.

I had gotten a tour of the plane because, you know, I'm a little bit of a voyeur caddy, right?

I called one of my buddies in the Air Force.

I said, I'm going out to Andrews before we take off for Youngstown, Ohio.

I got to get a tour of the plane.

So I got a full tour of the plane.

The president copters in.

He calls me into the little office.

He says, Did you get a tour of the plane?

I said, Yeah, I got a tour of the plane.

He goes, Did you go into the front, into the nose of the plane where the residence is?

I said, Yeah, I did.

He goes, Okay, be honest with me.

He goes, My plane's nicer, isn't it?

My plane's nicer.

And I said, Mr.

President, you could never fucking say that to anybody.

As your communications guru.

As your soon-to-be failed communications guru.

Let me just tell you something.

Things you don't trash.

The stars and stripes, Air Force One.

I said twice.

You got to promise me that you're never going to say to them.

But no, no, tell the truth.

I mean, that goddamn bathroom up there is 40 years old.

That bathroom up there.

And by the way, he was right, Caddy.

He was right.

He was right.

okay so this shit has been bothering him from day one he's like what the hell we said last week wrong answers to the right questions right right what are we doing with this antique plane right 40 year old plane that we're flying around and by the great communications on the plane and they refurbished that plane the engines are pristine etc

but the inside of the plane Okay, and this is eight years ago when I was flying it, it does look a little tired, but it is the same plane.

So I just want to tell people that

he's going to get a new plane.

It's just not going to be this plane.

Okay.

And he may not get it by the end of the term.

And he's going to screw up the color of that plane, too.

He's not, that is a baby blue from Jackie Onassis.

He's going to make it some garish colors and some shit.

Some future president's going to have to repaint the plane when he's done with it.

I could see purple and gold.

You know, there's a sort of popish thing,

the kind of emirates, the Gulf, those kind of colors.

I could see that happening.

But look, the other thing that people are saying about this plane is that, first of all, it's going to cost like a billion to retrofit, and they have to take out all the spy stuff that will be put in by the Qataris if he were to take it.

Plus, then they have to kit it out with all the safety stuff.

So it's not going to be as sleek and take off as nicely because that's part of the reason Air Force One is so clunky.

It's so heavy because of all the kit that it has to have on it to keep the president safe.

But also, there's no way that this is going to be ready by 2028, unless he really is going to be around for a third term.

So when will it be ready?

When he leaves office, which even though he has said, of course I'm not going to use this after I leave office, how much do we think that's possible?

I think this is all for about when he leaves office.

But I kind of agree with you.

My feeling is this is a distraction from actually what is happening in the Middle East this week.

and has been happening.

And we spoke about it a lot last week, guys.

So if you want to have a kind of full blowdown account of all the ways that there is potential conflict of interest, let's call it that, in this administration.

We spoke about it a lot last week on the whole crypto front, but you're also seeing it this week with the suns in the Middle East.

You're seeing it with the plane.

It's just been interesting to me how much Republicans have been, Republicans who have said zip about other issues during the Trump administration have realized that they need to send a signal to the White House that this will damage, including, by the way, all of the influencers like Laura Luma and Trump acolytes in social media saying, look, you do not want to mess with your reputation on this one.

It's so obvious that this is going to cause you an uproar.

When you've lost Josh Hawley, if you're Donald Trump, you've probably got to call it a day.

The one thing I would say about the businesses, I would say to Donald Trump Jr.

and to Eric Trump, I get the fact that you're businessmen.

I get the fact that you're allowed to do business, even though your father is president.

I would just suggest to them, you got to be way more transparent because less transparency, the cynicism creeps in, and people will think that you're doing something nefarious or dishonest or self-dealing.

And that's it.

And again, the meme coin stuff is ridiculous, by the way.

Let me give you these stats real quickly.

58 wallets made $10 million each, over a half a billion dollars.

794,000 wallets lost $1.1 million.

So that's the problem.

That was an exponential grift.

And that was a very stupid thing for them to do.

And I'm just telling you, be careful because, you know, it's going to hurt you when you least expect it.

You know, yep, you're getting away with it now.

Blah, blah, blah.

Fantastic.

Let's rake it in.

But, you know, be careful because if you turn Josh Hawley and you turn Jon Thune, all of a sudden they're going to caucus with the Democrats on this and you're going to get hit.

You're going to get hit.

It's unpopular.

It's unpopular.

You're cutting 13.7 million people off of Medicaid and you're raking in billions of dollars for yourself.

Not popular.

I mean, you're doing developments all over the Gulf with entities who have direct relationships or are partially or wholly owned by the Saudi government, the Qatari government, the UAE.

and you're putting up Trump towers everywhere.

And to what extent does that put you in hock then, your family's businesses to those governments?

I think there is that conflict of interest side of it.

And somebody said something interesting to me this week, which was that, you know, accountability can take time.

As with a lot of what is happening at the moment, we don't really, full disclosure, know the ramifications of everything that Donald Trump is doing right now.

It's too soon, but there can be accountability and it can come in the form of Republicans saying, okay, that's enough.

We are

going to leave it there.

We'll be back on Sunday with our founding members' QA, where we're going to talk about why Trump is welcoming certain South Africans as refugees.

And our next episode of our Elon Musk mini-series is out on Tuesday, and we'll get into how he rose to fame as a tech icon and became a celebrity, the story behind building SpaceX, which is wild and Tesla, and how he clawed his way back from near financial ruin in 2008.

And of course, we'll be back with our regular news episode next Friday.

We'll see you then.

We'll see you guys next week.

I'm David McCloskey, former CIA analyst, turned spy novelist.

And I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

Together, we're the hosts of another Goal Hanger Show, The Rest is Classified, and we bring you brilliant stories from the world of spies.

Here is that clip we mentioned earlier on.

June 5th, 2013, this first article drops, and it's a massive one.

It is a massive one.

The world doesn't yet know that the source for this article is Edward Snowden.

All they get is this remarkable story.

And I mean, I remember it dropping and thinking, where has this come from?

It just felt so kind of unusual as a story.

We should explain what it was and why it's so significant.

It's a court order to the company Verizon that demands it hands over the details of every phone call in America.

And what it was after was what's called the metadata, not the content of the call.

So it's basically saying these these two phones connected at this time for so long, not necessarily what was said in that phone call, but it allows the idea for the NSA and then the FBI to kind of carry out searches on it to look for terrorists or other suspects.

The point being though that this looks like domestic surveillance by the NSA.

And that was stunning partly because the U.S.

Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, just a few months before had been asked in Congress by a senator almost a question which suggests that the senator knew about this program because the senator said, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?

And Clapper's reply was no.

There is a tremendous gap between the understanding of this program, I think, inside sort of the upper reaches of Congress and the intelligence community and the White House.

and what the American people think is happening.

And that's where this article is such a bombshell because Americans prior to this, ordinary people, did not have an understanding that any of this was authorized.

Exactly.

I think what's interesting, if it had just been that one story, it would have been big, but actually, it's really an American story.

It's about the kind of American constitution and legal protections.

But, and I think you can imagine U.S.

officials going, okay, well, you know, that's bad.

But then the Guardian tells U.S.

officials who they're in contact with that they've got another story coming down the line.

And I think that's important because it makes clear that it's not just a single document that's been leaked, but there's more and it's coming from what looks like inside the NSA.

So the next day, there's a little race, but the Guardian publishes a story on something called Prism.

Now, this is another biggie in terms of a reveal.

And I think for a lot of people, this is perhaps, particularly around the world, this is the more famous one.

This is about the content of emails and communications, which are coming from big US tech firms.

So this is about basically the idea that the NSA had access directly to companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, to things like Gmail, Outlook, Photos, all the data that people are sending around the world.

This is, in some ways, a more stunning revelation because everyone around the world uses American tech companies.

You know, those were basically the only companies you used for email and for everything else.

And suddenly, this program is being revealed saying the NSA appears to have access to it and is able to target and get particular accounts and details of it.

But if you go back to that time, I mean, if you then talk to people now about what it was like in GCHQ, you know, Britain's intelligence agency, I mean, there is blind panic.

Ian Lobbin, who was then the director, later said, when I heard the news, I lay awake saying to myself, I hope this isn't a Brit.

Because, you know, they've realized they've got a leak.

Some of it looks like it relates to Britain.

He's reported to have gone around colleagues asking, is anyone in your teams at GCHQ taking a, you know, a long holiday?

And and i think meanwhile in in nsa as well there's this kind of desperate panic as they realize their secrets are being unfurled but what's interesting is that they're kind of narrowing it down and they're certainly kind of heading towards snowden if they don't know it already at this point typically someone who'd done this would keep themselves secret but luckily he's a massive narcissist with a

massive ego and if you want to hear the full episode listen to the rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts

Hey, it's Anthony Scaramucci, and I want to tell you about my podcast, Open Book, which just joined the Goal Hanger Network, which we're all very proud of.

In my latest episode, I interviewed Goal Hanger's very own James Holland.

We spoke about World War II and what World War II teaches us about today.

Here's a clip.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Well, I think he was a great man.

I think he was a man of vision.

He was a man of enormous geopolitical understanding.

And he was a man who offered possibilities.

When you're in a life and death struggle, you need people that can persuade you.

You need people that can bind you.

You need men of vision, of charisma.

That's the problem with the moment is we haven't got those guys.

I mean, he's flawed, of course.

All the great men are.

But thank goodness for the developed world and the democratic world that he was political leader of Great Britain in 1944.

and throughout the whole of World War II.

He literally, in so many different ways, man of the century, I think, because Roosevelt was a charmer.

Roosevelt was a great strategist.

He pulled the Americans through the Depression and helped to manage the war.

But without Churchill holding ground in May and June of 1940, it would have been a much darker, much worse world.

It would have been not a lot that the Americans could have done without Churchill's steadfastness and his inspiration to his fellow citizens.

If you want to hear the full episode, just search Open Book wherever you get your podcast.

You are not luminous, Watson.

But you are a conductor of light.

Here they are.

Dr.

Mortimer, I presume.

Yes.

Hi.

John.

Dr.

John Watson.

Who is your client?

He was my client.

Sir Charles Baskerville.

Kate Reed in.

A local shepherd noted, I saw first that of the maid, Hugo Baskerville, past me thence on his black mare, and there behind him, running mute upon his track, such a hound of hell that God forbid should ever be at my heels.

I wish I felt better in my mind about it.

It's an ugly business, Moss.

An ugly, dangerous business.

And the more I see of it, the less I like it.

I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Baker Street Pastor.

Hello?

Goal Hanger presents.

You're not Sherlock Holmes.

I'm Henry Baskerville.

From one of the biggest audio dramas of all time.

Like, in a creepy kind of way?

Like in there's an evil giant hound that likes the taste of Baskerville's coming to play.

The seminal gothic novel by Arthur Conan Doyle.

They're watching.

Who?

We're watching.

It's not safe now.

Run Meyer.

I could just make out its pitch black form.

Welcome to Deepest.

Everything a hellish void.

Darkest.

For this piercing yellow glow of eyes.

Darkness.

Of giant fans.

Sherlock and Crow.

The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Listen now.

Five stars, says the Eye Paper.

Hugely popular, says the Guardian.

A successful reinvention of homes for a younger generation, says The Times.

Search Sherlock and Co.

wherever you get your podcasts.