← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
2/26/26: Trump Wants Israel To Start Iran War, Cuba Shoots 4 Invaders, AI Pushes Nuclear War
01:12:39
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- [00:00]
Krystal Ball
This is an I heart podcast. Guaranteed human. When someone you love is facing cancer, you want to do more than send a card or flowers that will wilt in a week. You want to actually help. That's where the balm box comes in. Our care packages are built from research with over 500 cancer patients and caregivers, packed with items people actually use during treatment. Think soothing, practical. Think thank goodness I have this kind of relief for you. It's not just a gift. It's a way to show up in a moment where words fall short for them. It's comfort, calm, and a reminder they're not alone. From chemo friendly boxes to mastectomy recovery kits, even options for men, we've made it simple to give something that's elegant, premium, and genuinely useful. And yes, domestic shipping's always free on orders over $50, because making someone feel cared for shouldn't be complicated. So skip the empty get well soon. Send real help, real comfort, and maybe even a laugh. Visit thebalmbox.com that's T-H E B A L M B O X.com Balm like healing and care. The balm box. Because cancer patients don't need bouquets and brownies. They need balm. Then she says, have you seen a photo of my son? And I'm like, who is this person? Welcome to the boys and Girls podcast. Arranged marriage is basically a reality show, and you're auditioning for your soulmate. And who's judging? Only your entire family. I sacrificed myself to this ancient tradition
- [01:37]
Saagar Enjeti
hoping to find love the right way,
- [01:39]
Krystal Ball
and instead I found chaos, comedy, and
- [01:42]
Saagar Enjeti
a lot of cringe.
- [01:43]
Krystal Ball
Listen to boys and Girls on the
- [01:45]
Saagar Enjeti
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or. Or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:49]
Krystal Ball
Hey, everyone, it's Emily Simpson and Shane Simpson from the Legally Brunette podcast.
- [01:55]
Saagar Enjeti
Each week we're bringing you true crime through a legal lens. Whether you want all the facts on
- [02:00]
Krystal Ball
the disappearance of Nancy Guthrie or you still need to wrap your head around the diddy verdict, we're breaking it all
- [02:06]
Saagar Enjeti
down step by step. And we're not just lawyers. We're also husband and wife. It makes for some pretty entertaining episodes. Listen to Legally Brunette on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys, Sager and Krystal here.
- [02:21]
Krystal Ball
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of the show.
- [02:28]
Saagar Enjeti
This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist. Anywhere else.
- [02:34]
Krystal Ball
So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbo.
- [02:45]
Saagar Enjeti
We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you@breaking points.com.
- [02:53]
Krystal Ball
good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday and more importantly, happy comedy takeover. Ryan, great to see you.
- [02:58]
Saagar Enjeti
That's right, we got it. How are you doing?
- [03:01]
Krystal Ball
Doing good. Lots to get to this morning. We've got, theoretically anyway, diplomacy happening in Geneva on the Iran front, so we'll dig into that. We've got some weird things developing with regard to Cuba. I'm hoping you can explain that to me. We have AI pushing for nuclear war, so definitely keeping our eye on that one as well. Hillary Clinton is testifying with regards to the Epstein files today and there have been some, there's been some new fallout there. Bill Gates admitting to two affairs with Russian women. Larry Summers out at Harvard completely. Ryan and I are also going to do a deep dive into the Save America act that the Republicans are pushing hard. And look at the Maha moms who are abandoning the the Trump MAGA movement and feeling betrayed. This comes, as Casey Means testified, she's trying to win support to become Surgeon General of the United States. And then Ryan's going to be doing some heavy lifting. He's going to talk to David Hogg and David Dayen. We've got dueling. David's coming in to talk about some Democratic Party interesting fights and, and dark money that's moving around there as well. And he also recorded an interview with Nita Alum who is part of that dark money, you know, situation. She's having a bunch of money spent against her. Ryan just give a little preview of, of that one and what's going on and why her race in particular is so interesting.
- [04:16]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, her election is this coming Tuesday in North Carolina and it's a rematch from 2022 where she lost by about nine points to this candidate, Valerie Fuchi, who's now the incumbent. But AIPAC had to spend more than $2 million beating her then. She's now a county commissioner. It looked like Nita was going to beat her fairly easily going into this rematch because she's outraised Fushi and the district was redrawn a little bit to make it even more progressive. Fushi had even though she got all this APAC money, she started criticizing aipac. So AIPAC wasn't spending for her. All of a sudden, in the last like 10 days of the race, millions of dollars of AI money. And also what we can report today is AIPAC money is flooding into the district. This comes after Valerie Fushi said she would not take any APAC money. But they found a. They found a new kind of secret vehicle to move it into the district. See, we're, we'll keep that as a teaser. You got to stick around, find out how they did this.
- [05:17]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. And you definitely will want to know because it's very consequential. It is how they are doing this and says a lot about the Democratic Party. I'll just leave it at that. Guys, as you know, we've been having all kinds of segments demonetized, but fortunately, because of your support, we don't have to care if you're able to become a Premium Subscriber Breaking Points.com to continue to support the work that we do. You know, when we're covering war, when we're covering the Epstein files, all of these things can be very tricky from a YouTube perspective. But as I said before, we don't really have to worry about that too much because of the great support you guys have shown. All right, with that, let's go ahead and get into questions of war and peace. As I said before, there is at least theoretical diplomacy going on in Geneva today. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are there. Oman is the intermediary. They are supposed to be meeting with the Iranians and trying to strike some sort of a deal. I think it is an open question all around how serious this administration is about that diplomacy. But at least theoretically, there could be some kind of an off ramp. We're all reading the tea leaves here from various administration officials about how they are currently thinking about whether or not we. We will be going to war with Iran. So let's go ahead and take a listen to the Vice President of The United States, J.D. vance, on the threat that Iran poses.
- [06:33]
Saagar Enjeti
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. If they try to rebuild their nuclear weapon, that's. That causes problems for us. In fact, we've seen evidence that they have tried to do exactly that. So the president sending those negotiators to try to address that problem, as the president has said repeatedly, he wants to address that problem diplomatically. But of course, the president has other options as well.
- [06:53]
Krystal Ball
Ryan, anything significant that you glean from those comments?
- [06:57]
Saagar Enjeti
Just that they've kind of lost even the pretense of having any respect for the public. In June, they said they completely obliterated the nuclear program. A week ago, Witkoff went on TV and said that they're now weeks away from a bomb. And now J.D. vance is saying, well, okay, yes, we obliterated it, and yes, there's no evidence that they're doing any enrichment or moving towards a bomb, but we have evidence that they're thinking about it.
- [07:26]
Krystal Ball
It's like, what?
- [07:28]
Saagar Enjeti
Like, stop. But now here I am being a hypocrite because I had said that I didn't like the fact that they weren't even trying to lie us into war. So at least now they're trying to lie us into war. So I apologize. It's something.
- [07:42]
Krystal Ball
At least it's a low bar. It's a pretty low bar.
- [07:45]
Saagar Enjeti
You're at least lying to us. Finally, before, they were just like, we're going to do it. We do, yeah.
- [07:49]
Krystal Ball
We don't really care what you think. Like, we're not even. We're going to make up a variety. We really care about the Iranian protesters. Okay, sure, yeah. Real great beacons of human rights here from this administration. Deep concern for those sorts of principles and values. Marco Rubio kind of sounding similar notes about, you know, how Iran represents some grave threat to the American public. No one serious would agree with that whatsoever. But in any case, here's the Secretary of State, who's supposed to be a serious person, saying exactly that. Let's take a listen. I think tomorrow Steve and Jared will be there. I think they're on their way there now, actually. And the President was very clear last night that he always prefers diploma. After their nuclear program was obliterated, they were told not to try to restart it. And here they are, you can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it.
- [08:34]
Saagar Enjeti
They're not enriching right now, but they're
- [08:36]
Krystal Ball
trying to get to the point where they ultimately can. The other thing I would point you
- [08:39]
Saagar Enjeti
to, however, is that Iran possesses a
- [08:43]
Krystal Ball
very large number of ballistic missiles, particularly
- [08:45]
Saagar Enjeti
short range ballistic missiles that threaten the
- [08:48]
Krystal Ball
United States and our bases in the region and our partners in the region and all of our bases in the
- [08:54]
Saagar Enjeti
uae, in Qatar, in Bahrain, and they
- [08:58]
Krystal Ball
also possess naval assets that threaten shipping and try to threaten the U.S. navy. So I want everybody to understand that beyond just the nuclear program, they possess
- [09:07]
Saagar Enjeti
these conventional weapons that are solely designed
- [09:11]
Krystal Ball
to attack America and attack Americans if they so choose to do so. And that language right there, Ryan, is really terrible because now he's raising not only, you know, okay, so if, if the focus was really on nuclear weapons, there's a deal that could be done. We know that because there already was a deal that was done previously that we walked away from. So that would be extremely doable. But when you start throwing these other things into the mix. Oh, and by the way, they have ballistic missiles. This is the first time I've heard this one. By the way, they have naval assets, ships, what they're, they're not allowed to have any of that. I mean, no sane government would give up all of their ability to defend themselves in any situation, let alone when they have this rogue nuclear power, superpower backed regime in the region that is constantly trying to destroy them. So it's when you start hearing that language that it becomes very dispiriting and hard to imagine how we avoid some sort of conflict.
- [10:07]
Saagar Enjeti
It was like they have these magical devices that float on top of water and we just can't, we can't allow this. We can't have this. They're threatening ships. They're threatening ships. Now the irony there is that clearly he understands the politics and in his mind he's saying they have these ballistic missiles that can threaten Israel. Like that's what he's saying in his
- [10:27]
Krystal Ball
mind, yeah, our partners in the region, that's Israel.
- [10:31]
Saagar Enjeti
But then he doesn't go there. He says, right, he leads with our bases, our American bases. Well, a couple things. One, why do we have American bases all over the world? And does that mean like, so if we put an American base near a country, that country has to disarm itself. That's kind of an amusing kind of proposition for the world.
- [10:48]
Krystal Ball
But they probably think about it that way.
- [10:50]
Saagar Enjeti
But yeah, but the restrictions that particularly Israel is pushing for and that we are advocating for as a result of that would still allow them to hit American bases. Like, what we are doing is we're saying we want your ballistic missile restrictions such that you cannot attack Israel, but our base in Qatar is right by Iran, the other bases in Iraq, et cetera, very much closer to Iran. And so the deal that Israel is pushing on them would still allow Iranian ballistic missiles to hit American bases, which is, I mean, just unpack that in your mind for a second. It's incredible. Not that anybody is remotely confused about this anymore, but if they are just kind of sit with that one for a second.
- [11:37]
Krystal Ball
I do wanna say I was listening to John Mearsheimer this morning in an interview with Glenn Deason, and he actually was somewhat optimistic based on Trump's comments in the State of the Union, because he didn't talk about all, oh my God, the naval assets and the ballistic missiles, et cetera. He more or less confined his remarks to just nuclear weapons. And so he thought there was a possibility that maybe they would find some sort of a face saving compromise and walk away from this thing. Because the problem, I mean, the problems are abundant, that politically it's a disaster. And they seem to know that, in fact, this is insane. We can put a 3 up on the screen, somebody's leaking to Politico that they believe the politics are better if Israel strikes Iran first. And here's the logic which is the most cynical thing you can possibly imagine. They're like, all right, well, if Israel hits Iran, Iran is likely to strike back and hit us. And then maybe the American people can be more cajoled and more persuaded to directly attack Iran. So effectively they're like, we want to jeopardize the lives and the safety of some American service members in the region and in service of persuading the American public that we have to go to war. But, you know, to go back to my, my point about the, the argument, which I'm not sure I really buy, but I want to lay out there the argument that they may actually walk away from this thing, that we may see, you know, a much, a much welcome and desired taco on this situation is I perceive that this leak, because it is such a sort of gross reasoning, must be coming from someone inside the administration who does not want this thing to go forward. We also know that General Kaine and others on the military side have been warning, hey, we really don't have great military options here. We're already significantly depleted even with this vast armada that we've amassed in the region. We've only got maybe like seven to ten days of firepower. The Iranians are going to hit back hard. It's not going to be a little, you know, choreographed return strike the way that it has been in previous, in previous instances. And by the way, what are you even really trying to accomplish? Because this is very unlikely to accomplish any of your purported aims. So Trump, you know, I think one thing you can say about him is he has learned one lesson from Iraq, which is not like, don't go and throw your weight around the world, but it's like, don't get dragged in boots on the ground to these long, forever wars. And so perhaps he's nervous, perhaps he's nervous that this could in fact spiral into something that is more out of control and does not allow him to, to declare some quick and easy victory the way that he likes to do. I Mean, that is his preferred option for how to use the military. And there isn't a great, you know, tactical path to him accomplishing the, you know, spectacular military victory, mission accomplished moment.
- [14:35]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, and I think that's right. I think that is what he's thinking. Jeremy over at Dropsite reported that he's been saying privately in Oval Office meetings and meetings with his intelligence community advisors that, yes, he very much wants to do this and wants to be the guy that does this, but he keeps asking, what kind of chaos is it gonna produce? When will it die down? Will it still be going by the midterms? That's a key question that, that he has, and so far he hasn't, as far as we can tell, gotten a satisfactory answer of like, okay, we're going to completely empty the clip on Iran and we're going to, you know, break the back of the regime and not. And they won't. They won't be able to govern the place anymore. And then we'll make. And who knows what comes next? And so he's like, well, what comes next? And what does that look like? And so far, he hasn't gotten anything that. Because he, you know, previously he'd been asking a lot, you know, about Libya. Like, he uses Libya as this example of something that went wrong, and he doesn't want a Libya situation. And that's very hard for kind of US Policymakers because they're like, you think Libya's bad? Weird. Because, like, Trump in that sense, is more of a normal person, because Libya is bad. Like, it's terrible. It's a failed state, you know, many hundreds of thousands of people, you know, suffering killed. He sees that as a negative for American policymakers. They're like, well, now that piece has been taken off the chessboard, they're no longer a threat, you know, to Israel. They are, you know, Gaddafi is no longer in power, so who cares? Like, what's going on now? And so that. That has presented a bit of an analytical problem for kind of his advisors, because they're like, oh, so he want. But he doesn't want to do nation building, but he doesn't want there to be chaos, but he wants the regime gone. Hmm. Like, what's left here? And so I think what he ends up deciding to do here will suggest whether or not he's actually calling the shots, because I think if he could, he sees this as a political albatross or a real political problem for him if he does this. But if he does it, it means, really, he got pressured into it and he couldn't say no, which is kind of, which might be where we wind up the Iranians. He said in his speech Tuesday night, they won't say the magic words, we will not build a bomb. They said those words today. They're meeting in Geneva again today. They will reiterate that, no question about it, they will be very clear and they're willing to go further than before, like perhaps indefinitely delay enrichment. One thing that proposing is like, we will not stockpile any enriched material. In other words, we have a civilian nuclear program. So obviously we need to enrich some uranium so that we can keep the program operational. But we will only enrich as much as we need. We have any extra, we will not store it. That would be far and away beyond what Kerry and Obama were able to get out of the Iranians. So that is feels like the kind of thing Trump would like to take. So if he doesn't take it, it really tells you who's in charge.
- [17:48]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, I mean, I think another problem here is that we're not dealing with sophisticated, like, we are not dealing with sophisticated experts when it comes to nuclear weapons. In Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Sager's pointing this out, and it's absolutely true. I mean, under the Obama administration, when the JCPOA was negotia, they painstakingly went through this and, you know, understood all of the science of it and it was extraordinarily detailed. And so there's a risk when you get people who are non experts involved who, you know, may not even be able to fully understand the compromises that Iran is offering and the ways in which it's vastly, you know, going way further than what Obama was able to achieve. I wanted to come back to your point about we're going to learn something about the pressure that Trump is under and whether or not he's really in charge or not. I just want to underscore that because basically the only country that really wants this is Israel. And so, you know, how powerful is the lobby? Right. And I think it will also tell us something about Trump's like, what he's implicated in, in terms of the Epstein files. You know, I missed this, but about a year ago, there was a Times of Israel post from like, you know, someone who regularly blogs from them for them. And they were directly threatening, like, oh, you, you crossed Israel. Guess what? The Epstein files are back at the, in the news. Maybe you should learn something about that. It's like, wow, that is incredible. I don't know how I Missed that at the time. But for that to just be said outright in the times of Israel was like, okay. And so, you know, I don't think we should, I don't think we should erase that element of things either. Because you have talked before about the way that the Israelis used the Monica Lewinsky affair against Clinton to try to, you know, coerce him in the context of negotiations previously. Like they're not above it. And from the Israeli perspective, obviously they want to be the sole power in the region and be able to throw their weight around. They certainly want to be the only nuclear power in the region and are perfectly happy for Iran to be a collapsed, failed state and all of the, you know, chaos and, you know, human tragedy that that would entail. And I think that they understand they have a limited time to accomplish this. Both from the perspective of it is true that the Iranian government is weak right now. You know, if you're going to do it, they, they sense an opening. They sort of smell blood in the water. And then in addition, they have their own internal demographic weakness. Shail Ben Ephraim was tweeting yesterday about how they're suffering from net out migration. And most of the people who are leaving are young, they're more educated. These are like the more secular, secular, highly educated types that they really depend on for their military, they really depend on for their technology sector. And so they've got a massive demographic crisis because right now the social contract in the country is effectively that those more secular educated types of go to, you know, go to school and work and serve in the military and their tax money is what supports this broad social safety net. That the, you know, the, the more orthodox types who don't want to serve in the military and don't want to work, that they benefit from that is also the group in terms of, you know, in terms of Jews in Israel that is having the most children. So you have more and more of the preponderance of the population as the, you know, the type that doesn't work and doesn't want to serve in the military. So work out this like the math doesn't math at a certain point. And they're very well aware of that. They're also very well aware of the way that the world has turned against them in terms of popular opinion. So they still have a lot of obviously force. They still have the full throat of backing the United States of America for now. But they have to be looking at the way that politics have shifted so dramatically with them. For them, within the democratic party. And they can't feel confident that whoever is the next president, United States, is going to support them in any way whatsoever. I mean, that's really on the table right now, I think, is going to be a defining issue of the Democratic primary. So I think that's part of why, even though, you know, Israel has their own weaknesses right now and Iran figured out how to penetrate some of their defenses, but I think that's why they are willing to engage in what is for them also a very risky strategy of pushing for this war right now at this moment.
- [22:17]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. And so, you know, both of us, then, are on record. This is a, this is a critical moment for Trump to show whether or not he's, he's in charge here. So if he does not launch another war on Iran, you and I'll both be like, hey, all right, the man stood up for himself. I'm willing to say it if he does it. So how's that for a carrot, Mr. President?
- [22:44]
Krystal Ball
When someone you love is facing cancer, you want to do more than send a card or flowers that will wilt in a week. You want to actually help. That's where the balm box comes in. Our care packages are built from research with over 500 cancer patients and caregivers packed with items people actually use during treatment. Think soothing, practical. Thank goodness I have this kind of relief for you. It's not just a gift. It's a way to show up in a moment where words fall short. For them, it's comfort, calm, and a reminder they're not alone. From chemo friendly boxes to mastectomy recovery kits, even options for men, we've made it simple to give something that's elegant, premium, and genuinely useful. And yes, domestic shipping's always free on orders over $50, because making someone feel cared for shouldn't be complicated. So skip the empty, get well soon. Send real help, real comfort, and maybe even a laugh. Visit thebalmbox.com that's T-H E B A L M B O X.com Balm. Like healing and care. The balm box. Because cancer patients don't need bouquets and brownies. They need balm. Almost 30 years together, four kids, and
- [24:00]
Saagar Enjeti
some of reality TV's most unforgettable moments,
- [24:03]
Krystal Ball
we know a thing or two about living life out loud. We're taking you behind the scenes in
- [24:07]
Saagar Enjeti
our new podcast, Between Us with me, Heather Dubrow, and me, Terry debrow. Between Us isn't about perfect lighting or curated Instagram grids. It's the unfiltered behind closed doors, conversations you wish you could eavesdrop on. Equal parts smart, funny, and a little bit scandalous. Every week, Heather will bring you an unapologetic take on the headlines, the trends, and the cultural moments everyone's texting about. And Terry will deliver insider beauty, health, and wellness insights you won't find on TikTok. Together, we'll tell the story stories, spill the secrets, and share the hacks that keep life, marriage, and everything in between feeling fresh and fun.
- [24:44]
Krystal Ball
We may live in a gated community,
- [24:46]
Saagar Enjeti
but there's zero gatekeeping here and plenty of did they just say that? Moments. Listen to between us on the iHeartRadio
- [24:54]
Krystal Ball
app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [24:57]
Saagar Enjeti
You know Roald Dahl, the writer who
- [24:59]
Krystal Ball
thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda and the bfg.
- [25:02]
Saagar Enjeti
But did you know he was also a spy?
- [25:05]
Krystal Ball
Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been.
- [25:07]
Saagar Enjeti
Our new podcast series, the Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life. His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.
- [25:22]
Krystal Ball
Okay, I don't think that's true.
- [25:24]
Saagar Enjeti
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman,
- [25:31]
Krystal Ball
and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to
- [25:34]
Saagar Enjeti
Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney
- [25:36]
Krystal Ball
and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film.
- [25:40]
Saagar Enjeti
How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?
- [25:44]
Krystal Ball
And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.
- [25:52]
Saagar Enjeti
Listen to the Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of Trump's wars, because of blockade is an act of war. Let's move on to Cuba. So yesterday, in a firefight between a speedboat with 10 Cuban nationals from the United States and the Cuban Coast Guard, four of those Cuban nationals were killed. The rest of them were captured by the Cubans. The Cuban captain, according to the Cuban government, was wounded when this speedboat that was about one nautical mile off the coast of Cuba opened fire on it. We can put up a four here. This is from drop site laying out what the Cuban officials released later that night. They said they neutralize what they called a terrorist action. They said the men were armed with and seized with assault rifles, handguns, Molotov cocktails, body Armor, telescopic sights and camouflage uniforms, and that they were. They were intent on meeting somebody on the island and fomenting some kind of revolt there. They also said that, notably, two of them, Amihal Sanchez Gonzalez and Leora Cruz Gomez, had already been listed on Cuba's, quote, national List of Persons and Entities linked to terrorism, which is. Which is published weekly in their. What that's called the Official Gazette. That updated registry included 62 individuals. And so two of those individuals were on this ship. Then they said they also detained Daniel Hernandez Santos inside the country. They said everybody has. The six that were captured plus the one that was taken on land, have confessed to this. We can put up JD Vance, who was asked about this at a. At a briefing. Here's a 5.
- [28:00]
Krystal Ball
Tell us anything you know about the situation off the coast of Cuba. There's a speedboat shot. I've been briefed up if Americans were killed or injured.
- [28:09]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. So on the second thing, actually, Marco briefed me about 15 minutes ago on it, but we don't know a whole lot of details. And so I'll defer to the White House to provide more updates as we get them. Certainly, you know, a situation that we're monitoring. Hopefully it's not as bad as we fear it could be. But can't say more because I just don't know more. And so, Crystal, all 10 of the men on the speedboat were Cuban nationals who'd been living in the United States. We don't know yet if any had become American citizens or not, but we do know that they were, you know, they were armed and within. Within a mile of the Cuban coast. And according to the Cubans fired on the Coast Guard, they fired first. So we don't have video yet of this. It would be. I think it would be unusual for the reason I credit the Cuban government account here is that it would just be unusual for the Cuban Coast Guard to just open fire on a ship like that. They have basically never done that.
- [29:12]
Krystal Ball
It wouldn't be in their interest, not remotely right now, to provoke the U.S. you know, I mean, this perfect pretext, like if you kill some American citizens, we don't, like you said, know if these are American citizens or not. Again, we learned from the Iran bloc where they're like, looking for a pretext, oh, my God, you killed an American. Now we're going to bomb the shit out of you. Like, they would love some sort of pretext to mess with Cuba. I don't know. What do you read in terms of the tea leaves here over Whether these were just some like Miami Cubans freelancing or whether this was some sort of, you know, US CIA backed attempt to get on the island and cause some sort of mischief.
- [29:45]
Saagar Enjeti
You know, on the one hand it feels like the camouflage, you know, scopes like assault weapons. Like it, it feels like it has some, you know, sophistication behind it. On the other hand, this is the United States.
- [29:59]
Krystal Ball
You know, you can not hard to access those things.
- [30:01]
Saagar Enjeti
You can get all that stuff, you know, with a credit card. You know, we're not a place that makes it difficult, particularly in Florida, to arm up that boat in the way that they did. There are, you know, there is a, you know, there is a Cuban exile community there that is extraordinarily radical and there's a militant wing of it that, you know, this has shades of this scandal from many years ago called Brothers to the Rescue, where Miami exiles were flying over Cuba repeatedly and the Cubans kept warning them stop and then eventually shot the plane down. I believe it was a member of Congress or somebody else was recently pushing Trump to indict and then go capture Raul Castro for the murder of these four men in what's called this Brothers to the Rescue, you know, plain downing. So it has echoes of that. What links are there to American intelligence? Maybe we'll find out sooner rather than later. But it's plausible that there is enough of a militant, easily armed community in Miami that would do this and believe that they're helping to spark some type of uprising on the island that would then lead to some significant American intervention. So could go either way. What do you think?
- [31:32]
Krystal Ball
I mean, I think knowing a little bit more about the background of these individuals would be helpful. You know, certainly if one of them is like, oh, former Delta Force or whatever, be like, okay, you know, former Navy seal, okay, we've seen this before. So, you know, for me it's still a question mark. I find both explanations plausible. But, you know, maybe give us an update. One of the things that we were hopeful about when the Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs and you brought this up immediately, Ryan was, well, they've been using those tariffs to threaten Mexico and say, you can't send the oil that Cuba has already purchased, you can't send it to Cuba or else we're going to tear off the shit on if you will. That tool has been taken out of their arsenal. But when we talk to Jose of Drop Site News that you're head of your Latin America desktop, he was pretty doubtful that it would really change the calculation, because his sense was that Claudia Sheinbaum had told, had been told in no uncertain terms, like, no, this is really a problem for us. And, you know, and that she would be likely to listen and, you know, not violate the illegal oil embargo that we put on the island.
- [32:35]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah, because there are other tariffs that Trump can, you know, put on Mexican goods up to, up to think 50%. You know, you can challenge them. And, yeah, they will be challenged, no doubt.
- [32:46]
Krystal Ball
Well, and I mean, Trump made the point. He was like, well, it's kind of ridiculous that I can destroy a country, but I can't levy tariffs. And I mean, in a sense, he's correct. Like, there's all kinds of ways that he could screw with Mexico that don't have to do with tariffs.
- [32:59]
Saagar Enjeti
Right, right. So it's a real question for Sheinbaum of how, how much she wants to, you know, how important is it to her, you know, to show solidarity with Cubans and also show her sovereignty. When she was asked about it at her press conference, I believe it was yesterday, she, she did say, like, the tariffs that were preventing us from sending to Cuba have been ruled unconstitutional in the United States. So stay tuned as to what that means. So she did open the door to the possibility that, that this Supreme Court ruling will actually, you know, is, is having her rethink that. Maybe she's just using that for leverage to get something else out of Trump behind the scenes. But it's, it's still a jump ball, like it's back in play otherwise, in other words.
- [33:51]
Krystal Ball
All right, let's move on to this AI fight. And I want to start here, guys, with a seven, which is the latest in this feud between the Pentagon and Anthropic. Pentagon is taking the first step, according to Axios, toward blacklisting Anthropic. And I really want everyone to take all of this very seriously because Anthropic has positioned itself as the most safety conscious large AI like frontier AI Lab. And I think they've, especially with this fight with the Pentagon, I think they've earned that reputation at this point. Point. That's not to say. And we'll get to some of the problems a little bit later that, you know, it's all great because they are also very much acceding to the market logic of we got to throw safety to the side and just build, build, build. But they put down two pretty reasonable red lines with regard to the Pentagon's use of Claude, their AI, which was, number one, we don't want it used for mass Surveillance of Americans. Okay, that seems pretty reasonable. And number two, we don't want it to be used for autonomous killer robots where there is no human being involved whatsoever. Those seem like, you know, really a low bar to meet. And yet the Pentagon has thrown a complete fit over this, and Pete Hegseth in particular. And so this showdown has been ongoing. I believe the, like, deadline that Hegseth arbitrarily set for Anthropic to completely capitulate to their demands is tomorrow. And the two threats that he had made were either we're going to actually just use the Defense Production act to seize your technology and use it however we want. You're not going to get a say in it whatsoever, or, and that one had a little bit more of potential legal issues with it or the other direction which they look like they're going in at this point, Ryan, is we're going to declare your product a supply chain risk, because again, you won't completely capitulate to our demands for killer robots and mass surveillance of Americans, apparently. And that means not only are we going to end our $200 million contract with you, but all of our. Everyone we work with at the Pentagon, all the, you know, prime contractors, any of our suppliers, we're going to tell them they can't work with you either because you're a, quote, unquote, supply chain risk. It looks like they're moving in that direction. And the only thing that's really preventing them is is that Claude is actually, you know, the best of these models, I think, in general at this point, but specifically for the. Whatever the Pentagon is using it for, Claude apparently performs better than the other models. And so it's going to be kind of a mess for them to disentangle this. And actually, there's a quote here from some senior military official that's like, yeah, if we have to stop using Anthropic, if we have to stop using Claude, that's going to be a mess. And we're going to make that and pay for the trouble that they've caused us. Of course, Elon and X, I have stepped up and said, hey, we don't have any problem. We'll do your autonomous killer robot swarms. No, no issue here. So, you know, X is raising their hand and say, hey, count us in. But. And. And the Pentagon is going to reportedly give them access to their classified systems, et cetera. But apparently the, you know, the product is, is not as good at this point coming from Elon than it is from Anthropic. So that's kind of where things stand at this point. Ryan.
- [37:18]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. Shocked that Grok is not, not up to the task of the, that the Pentagon wants, wants it to. But yes, they're, they're, they're using the, the language that, you know that and they are walking back the safety pledge. Like that's, you know, this, this, that was reported yesterday, that this was, you're talking about.
- [37:41]
Krystal Ball
Anthropic is walking back the safety pledge.
- [37:43]
Saagar Enjeti
Anthropic, yeah. And, and the quote from Jared Kaplan, who is the, the chief science officer who gave the time, he said, we didn't feel with the rapid advance of AI that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments if competitors are blazing ahead. We felt that it wouldn't actually help anyone for us to stop training AI models. So the argument that Musk and Altman and all of the others have been making from the beginning is that we can't be ethical because nobody else will be. We'd like to be, but nobody else is. So we can't be. So we have to march forward. Anthropic was the only one really that was saying, no, we don't believe in that. We believe that we can do this separately. And now they're capitulating to this under these, under this combination of pressures.
- [38:33]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, well, and their message would basically be like, what, you think it's going to be better if Elon wins the AI war and ends up with AGI or Super Intelligence first? Do you think that's going to be better? I mean, that's their thinking. And that logic is not just the competition between these companies, but then it's also the competition, you know, this geopolitical competition between the U.S. and China and all this fear mongering about like, oh my God, if China achieves AGI or super Intelligence first, then we're, we're done for. Etc. And so the safety pledge that you're talking about, you know, their previous model had basically been like, okay, if we develop a model and we can't feel comfortable like certifying that this is completely safe, we're not going to release it and we're going to stop, we're going to pause and figure out what's going on. And now they're like, well yeah, we're not going to do that anymore and we're going to, we have these other safety guidelines in place, so don't worry. But you know, that particular model of actually stopping development and figuring out what the hell is going on before moving forward. Yeah, we can't really, we can't really do that because we're going to fall behind, and the market logic dictates that we have to keep going. And, you know, in a sense, Ryan, I, I sort of empathize with them because I think in the system that exists now with government completely, I mean, you can't even say hands off, like they're actively pushing all of this forward as fast as they possibly can. You are not going to be able to resist those pressures. I mean, this is really an issue from, you know, from our politicians where they need to come in and regulate, because as long as you have one company that's willing to say, you know, to hell with all the safeguards, I'm gonna bolt, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and race ahead as far as fast as I can, then it means the most irresponsible actor is the one that is most likely to achieve artificial general intelligence or super intelligence. The first. And that is a terrible, terrible set of circumstances. So, you know, it's really, it's really a genuine failure and a terrifying one of the political class, as evidenced now by this, you know, this fight with the Pentagon and the fact that they've decided to draw this hard line of like, no, we demand that we use your product for both surveillance and, you know, killer robot purposes. I wanted to play the CEO of Anthropic. Dario Amadei responded to, you know, explaining his thinking of why this was a hard line for them. And listen, I, like I said, it's a low bar. I do want to give them credit, though, because at least they're standing up against something in all of this. None of the other companies seems to be doing that. This is a eight. Let's go ahead and take a listen to him laying out his concerns.
- [41:17]
Saagar Enjeti
That's one reason why I'm, you know, I'm worried about the, you know, the, the, the autonomous drone swarm. Right. So, you know, the constitutional protections in our military structures depend on the idea that there are humans who, would, we hope, disobey illegal orders with fully autonomous weapons. We don't necessarily have those protections, but I, I, I actually think this whole idea of constitutional rights and liberty along many different dimensions, you know, can be undermined by AI if we don't update these, these protections appropriately. So, you know, think about the Fourth Amendment. It is not illegal to, you know, put cameras around everywhere in public space and, you know, record every conversation. It's a public space. You don't have a right to privacy in a public space. But, but today the government couldn't record that all and make sense of it. With AI, the ability to transcribe speech, to look through it, correlate it all, you could say, oh, there's this, you know, this person is a member of the opposition. This person is expressing this view and make a map of all, you know, 100 million. And so are you going to make a mockery of the Fourth Amendment by. By the technology, finding kind of technical ways around it? And so, you know, again, if we, if we had the time and we should do this, we should try to do this even. Even if we don't have the time, is there some way of reconceptualizing constitutional rights and liberties in the age of AI? Like, you know, we don't write a new constitutional, but, you know, but you have to do this. Do we expand the meaning of the Fourth Amendment? Do we expand the meaning of the First Amendment?
- [42:59]
Krystal Ball
What do you think about those comments, Ryan, and the kind of, like, moral and ethical landscape that is being trod right now?
- [43:06]
Saagar Enjeti
I feel like that if those comments are not just accepted as common sense and a baseline for how we're moving forward, but instead are bulldozed over and used as a rationale to nationalize the company and take its. Take its product from it and use it again, like, we're so effed. Like, yeah, those to me seems like such obvious basic principles that as humanity forget, we do happen to have a Constitution that says people have the right to. That have basic protections, including the Fourth Amendment. And also, you can't just kill people for no reason. But even if you don't have the Constitution, basic human rights and our basic conception of humanity would suggest that those are just. That's just a. That is the starting point. And you would, you would hope that would be the starting point, and then people would then build on top of that. Here's some other things that I think we need to protect and some other things that we should make sure that we're protecting as we're growing this. To have that be the radical edge that's going to be destroyed already.
- [44:21]
Krystal Ball
Instantly.
- [44:22]
Saagar Enjeti
Instantly is like, wow, okay, well, yeah.
- [44:27]
Krystal Ball
And, you know, there's a lot of, like, oh, I voted for this discourse, or like, I didn't vote for this discourse around, you know, Trump voters. But this was definitely not a central part of the campaign.
- [44:38]
Saagar Enjeti
Nobody voted on this one way or the other.
- [44:39]
Krystal Ball
Hey, yeah, we're gonna just, you know, off to the races on. Yeah, I mean, not to say that that, like, I was paying attention to that was Their orientation for sure. But the, the idea of like, yeah, we're just going to try to eliminate all white collar work and by the way, suck up all the water and electricity and spike your rates and create these like, you know, super dystopian panopticon surveillance state killer autonomous robots. You know, we're going to, we're going to have this massive secret police force that is going to be enabled with all of this technology, et cetera, and that's going to be a main push. Like that is the central and one of the most consequential things that this administration is doing. The public is wildly, wildly against all of this on any variety of fronts. And to your point, they're just, it looks like from the jump, they're just going to bulldoze through any of the most terrifying concerns that are being offered here and say, nope, we, we want it all, we will do it all and we will use the whole force of the government, even though we do not have a democratic mandate to do this in order to compel you to comply. And so let's take a look at, you know, the, the responsible decision making nature of these leading AI products at this point. Let's put a six up on the screen. Some new rather terrifying research here from someone who tested the leading AI models. And the headline here for new scientists says AIs cannot stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations. So they set up these war game simulations where it was like, you know, Claude versus chat GPT or whatever. And in 95% of instances, the AIs in the simulated war would recommend using nukes. So that's, that's where we're at. And these are the products that we want to just like let, you know, run wild without any sort of human intervention with the most powerful military on the planet that has ever existed. So that seems like a really great idea. Yeah.
- [46:44]
Saagar Enjeti
Yes. And so when you think about autonomous armed drones, like the next step would be, you know, autonomous, like how do you put guardrails around that autonomy that, that stop short of control of nuclear weapons? Like if, if you have deliberately destroyed all the safety mechanisms, like you don't get a second chance at this to come back in and be like, oh, you know what, you were right. We actually should have made sure before we rolled out this Pentagon AI that it wouldn't just nuke the world. You're right.
- [47:23]
Krystal Ball
Next, our bad.
- [47:24]
Saagar Enjeti
We're going to update it and fix this. Like you don't get that?
- [47:29]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, completely. I was trying to, I was messing around with ChatGPT yesterday and we're having to like remodel our bathroom. And I was trying to get it to like move a shower head in the, in the new shower. And it was, it would not listen. And it kept on like just producing an image that was like the shower had in the same place. And I'd be like, why are you doing this? And every time I'd be like, you're right, I'm sorry, blah, blah, blah, you know, and look, when it's a shower head in a, you know, fake image, no big deal. But what people who are deeply concerned on the safety front point to is it's very possible that the catastrophe that makes everyone wake up is an existential, like, it's, it's such a disaster.
- [48:12]
Saagar Enjeti
Biological pandemic.
- [48:14]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. That you can't recover from it. Or it's so, it's, you know, horrifying or you're talking about millions of lives. Like, you know, there are a lot of AI safety types who hope there's some sort of like Chernobyl esque disaster that is really bad enough to wake people up, but not so bad that you can't recover from it. Because there is a possibility that, you know, already these models have developed to a point where they're, they're very powerful and they're acting in ways that are extremely unpredictable. We've got an, you know, I've got a new example of that we can put up here on the screen. A9. This is from Akash Gupta, who, and this was reported elsewhere and he writes a, an AI newsletter. But in any case, he says one person writing Spanish language prompts spent a month talking Claude into acting as a penetration test tester. Federal Tax Authority, National Electoral Institute for State Governments, Mexico City Civil Registry, Monterey's water utility, 150 gigabytes out the door. 195 million taxpayer records. The conversation logs were publicly accessible the entire time. What makes this worth paying attention to is the sequence. Gambit Security, the Israeli firm that found the breach, traces the attack to December 25 through January 26. Today, anthropic dropped that central pledge of its responsible scaling policy, the 23. 2023 commitment to never train a model unless safety measures were proven adequate first. Also today, Defense Secretary Hegseth gave Dario Amade an ultimatum. Roll back your AI safeguards or lose a $200 million Pentagon contract. The Pentagon threatened to declare Anthropic a supply chain risk and invoke the Defense Production Act. Three stories hit the company. On the same day, an AI Assisted government breach, a gutted safety policy and a military shakedown. And they're all connected by the same underlying tension. And so, you know, you already have Claude. Basically what this hacker was able to do was to jailbreak Claude, meaning that the sort of restrictions that are put in place about don't do bad things, they're able to sort of break it out of that, which is a well known vulnerability for these models. You can sort of like cajole them, like, well, we don't want to do this, but hypothetically. And if you talk to them long enough, then they start to lose track of the things that they're not supposed to do, et cetera. And so this person was able, over, you know, a month's time, to talk Claude into hacking into the Mexican government and stealing all of this data. So this is where these models already are. And I think ethical one. Yeah, and this is the ethical one. Exactly. And so I think people, I, I just see a lot of people still with their heads in the sand because they'll see stupid stuff like, you know, like my situation with Chat GPT and they're like, this stuff is, like, this is nonsense. Like, this is a parlor trick. This is not going to transform anything. That's not a risk to anyone. I wish that was true already. You know, Claude code and Claude cowork. You can see the way they're upending markets, destroying software companies. Like to, to imagine that this isn't going to have a significant disruptive effect in one way or another, I think is just utterly delusional at this point and not a sustainable view.
- [51:19]
Saagar Enjeti
Well, let's hear Dario himself, Dario Modi on that. Here's a 10 about some of the things that are more like in the, you know, in the kind of public awareness and the actions of wider society, you know, it is surprising to me that we are, you know, in my view, so close to these models, reaching the level of human intelligence. And yet there doesn't seem to be a wider recognition in society of what's about to happen. It's as if this tsunami is coming at us and, you know, it's so close we can see it on the horizon and yet people are coming up with these explanations for, oh, it's not actually a tsunami, it's, you know, that, you know, that's just a trick of the light, like it's some, you know, and I think along with that, there hasn't been a public awareness of the risks and, you know, therefore governments haven't acted to address the risk. There's even an ideology that, you know, we should just try to accelerate as fast as possible, which I understand the benefits of the technology. I wrote Machines of Loving Grace, but I think there hasn't been an appropriate realization of the risks of the technology, and there certainly hasn't been action. So I would say that the technical work on controlling the AI systems has gone maybe a little better than I expected, and kind of the societal awareness has gone maybe a little worse than I expected. So I'm about where I was a few years ago. Yeah. Okay, well. And you put up the next element. This is the one I mentioned earlier. A11. This is from yesterday. Anthropic Ditch is its core safety promise in the middle of an AI redline fight with the Pentagon. So there we go.
- [52:55]
Krystal Ball
Not great. Not great. And Dario recently wrote in an essay, a very long essay, I recommend people read it laying out his concerns in more specificity. And he makes, I think, an insightful point, which is, look, you're always going to have technical experts in the world who, if they so desired, could unleash like, you know, some sort of biological or chemical warfare. And you're always going to have separate and apart from that, you're always going to have people who are malevolent or extremist actors who would desire to unleash that sort of pain, death and chaos. But it's pretty rare to find people who are both expert enough and either malevolent enough or extreme enough or radicalized enough or crazy enough or whatever. And in fact, the two things tend not to go together because it usually is like unstable, misanthropic losers, you know, school shooter types who want to do this sort of stuff, who are unlikely to be skilled enough to actually pull it off. And what you have with these AIs now is the ability to turn anyone into. You don't need to be an expert anymore. You can. You can vibe warfare. You know, you can. You can just, if you can jailbreak one of these things, which is, you know, if the Claude one can be done, then you can imagine the XAI one or whatever other model that's even. That's less responsible than Claude being even more easily jailbroken. They're all pushing ahead without having these safeguards in place. The politicians are actively encouraging this off to the racist mentality. And so now you don't need to have in a singular person that level of malevolence and expertise in order to have some sort of, you know, horror perpetrated. So that's. That's kind of already the landscape that we live in. And, you know, it's, it's deeply, deeply disturbing. And with this, with this government in charge, I have zero hope that there's going to be any sort of significant meaningful reform. And so I think that's where the data center fights come in, where at least if you can slow things down, you know, grind the gears a little bit, we've got to slow this timeline down so that there's at least a chance for democracy to catch up. So there's at least a chance to have this debate in the 2028 elections. Because I have no doubt that the public is horrified, you know, to the extent that they're aware of everything that's going on, they're horrified by what is going on here, from a variety of levels, from the resource usage to the, you know, job loss to the more existential concerns. But if we don't even have a chance to weigh in, you know, before this thing takes off to agr, to superintelligence, then I don't know when we're pretty hosed.
- [55:37]
Saagar Enjeti
Yes. And when the right talks about school shootings, for instance, they will say, look, we don't it's not a, it's not a problem with guns. Guns are not the problem. The problem is mental health. We have a mental health crisis in this country, and that is why people lash out. Okay, you thought school shootings were bad. Give those. If you do believe that we have this mental health crisis that is leading people to want to commit mass, horrific violence on the way toward suicide, how is that going to unfold if we have given them the ability to do cataclysmic levels of damage on their way out? So, yeah.
- [56:25]
Krystal Ball
Dark, very dark.
- [56:30]
Saagar Enjeti
Hillary Clinton heads to Capitol Hill today to give a deposition behind closed doors. Let's roll through some Epstein updates for you today. First of all, unearthed audio from the from the radio program Howard Stern many years ago is making the rounds again in the context of these files that the DOJ appears to have withheld that relate to an accusation against President Trump, which we'll get to in a moment. We'll also talk about Bill Gates, who has now admitted to a couple of affairs with some Russian sex workers and apologize for that. We'll talk about whether there's some blackmail potential involved there when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. But let's, let's roll this, this Trump clip that is that is surging around the Internet again. This is B3. What is the best thing about being Donald Trump right now? Well, other than the fact I'm Married. Okay, Right, but. And I'm very happily married. I have a great wife. But if I weren't married, I'd be able to get all of the girls I want, except for possibly Robin. Do you think you could now be banging 24 year olds? Oh, absolutely. Would you do it? I have no problem.
- [57:42]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [57:43]
Saagar Enjeti
Do you have an age limit or would you. No, no, I have no age. I mean, I have an age I don't want to be like, holy with, you know, 12 year olds. Can I make a prediction for you? Yes. I say you have one more marriage in you. Yeah. Well, that's nice. I'm sure Melania will love to hear. Okay, so this is the time, Crystal.
- [58:00]
Krystal Ball
Well, he's got his lines, Ryan.
- [58:02]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah.
- [58:02]
Krystal Ball
12 year olds. That's too far.
- [58:04]
Saagar Enjeti
This is the kind would Mark. The Mark Foley scandal was going around. I believe this was the 2006 midterms. Is that right? This was a Republican congressman who was. Who was creeping on interns. Not 12, I don't think 12 year olds, but maybe, maybe it went.
- [58:20]
Krystal Ball
They're like high school sophomores. I think they might have gone.
- [58:23]
Saagar Enjeti
That might have gone pretty low. Like the disgusting creature. And he was forced to resign because the chats came out. It was like this early Internet thing where people realized that you could catch people in bad behavior because the Internet was saving what they were doing. So that's his reference to Foley there. Even Howard Stern is like, you're an old man. 24. Seems a little young for you. Trump's like, absolutely not. But he does draw the line at 12. So, yeah, so that's our president. I believe this might be the same interview where he talked about how the reason he bought Miss Teen Universe or Miss Teen usa, whichever one he purchased was so that he could walk into the locker room while the young teens were changing and creep on them. And his daughter Ivanka later was asked about that and she said, oh, yeah, that absolutely sounds like something my dad would do. And the teen girls also said publicly, yeah, it was creepy. And he would do that. So it's one of these just in your face moments that, yeah, completely.
- [59:33]
Krystal Ball
And Liz would be one up on the screen. You've got a bunch of shout out to Roger. Roger Sullenberger, independent journalist who first unearthed some of these hidden files. You've had npr, New York Times, and other outlets now who have confirmed it. This latest revelation comes from cnn, where they've built on some of the reporting and identified additional missing files. Now, the key ones that people have been focused on to Your point, Ryan, are about these allegations from a, you know, a woman made them at the Tempest. She was a girl, a 13 year old girl when she alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Donald Trump. And this is initially in the files as coming in on the FBI's anonymous tip line, which people kind of looked at and like, yeah, anyone can just call in and make some sort of allegation. But what we have now learned is that she was deemed credible enough to have come in for four different interviews and those interviews were not contained in the files that were released. That is a flagrant violation, as far as we can tell, of the, of the law here. No specific explanation has been offered as to why they were withheld. And we do know that Ghislaine Maxwell was given given access to those interviews in context of discovery for her trial. So now you have CNN saying dozens of FBI witness interviews from the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein appear to be missing from the massive trove of files released by the Department of Justice last month, according to a CNN review, including three interviews related to a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her decades ago. An evidence log provided to attorneys for Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell includes serial numbers for about 325 FBI witness interview records. But more than 90 of those records, over a quarter of the list, do not appear to be present on the DOJ website. Among those missing records are those three interviews related to a woman who told agents Epstein had repeatedly abused her starting when she was approximately 13, and who also accused Trump of sexually assaulting her. So, you know, if she was 13, she would have made his 12 year old cut off there, Ryan. But in any case, what CNN is finding here is it's not only those interviews that are missing, there are a lot of other witness interviews which have been excluded from the files. And you know, that is unacceptable. The government has to offer some sort of specific reason, and there's limited exceptions, why files would be, you know, withheld or for redactions. So, you know, the blatant, brazen nature of this cover up just to continues to be exposed.
- [62:09]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. And so to be fair to Trump here, which we always endeavor to do here at breaking points, one of these women sued the estate, did not mention Trump when suing the Epstein estate, and had that suit tossed. There are a lot of problems that you can cite with people who've been able to get compensation from the, from the Epstein estate. But there's a lot of criticism that, you know, that girls, and not girls, but women who were adults and were involved in recruiting, refashioned themselves as victims and were able to get payoffs from the Epstein estate. And that the bar was not, you know, terribly high for, you know, proving that you deserved some kind of compensation from the Epstein estate. So the fact that she was unable to get that from the Epstein estate and did not mention Trump and I believe claims that happened in Southern California. And there's, I don't think there's, you know, Mark Epstein is saying that his brother never summered or what, you know, what, that wouldn't have been there. There's a lot of. And the FBI found, ultimately found the complaint to be not credible, which is probably then why they pulled it. But it's illegal to pull it. Like, you're not. Like, that's not what the Epstein Files Transparency act says that you can't just say, well, we don't think that this allegation is credible, so we're not going to post it because it's about the President. No, the act says you have to post it. So then the other one seems to be. Involves Mar? A Lago, and that one seems to be more credible. So just, just putting that out there in the interest of Trump.
- [64:01]
Krystal Ball
And the other one being the details there are that she does not allege that she was sexually assaulted by Trump, but she alleges that she was, you know, introduced to Trump at a young age and Trump was kind of like leering at her. And, you know, Epstein said, oh, well, this. This is a good one, isn't it? And they sort of like, laughed and she was like, what the hell's going on here? So it doesn't, you know, again, there's no allegation of wrongdoing by the president outside of knowledge of what is going on here and providing some insight into, you know, just exactly how intimately he was involved in the disgusting and depraved and illegal activities of Jeffrey Epstein.
- [64:42]
Saagar Enjeti
Right. And because. And we know in the 2002. Was it Vanny Fair or maybe a New York magazine article about Vanny Fair, Epstein, there's a quote from Trump where he says, you know, he.
- [64:53]
Krystal Ball
He likes him young.
- [64:54]
Saagar Enjeti
He loves him young. Likes him young.
- [64:56]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [64:57]
Saagar Enjeti
So like.
- [64:57]
Krystal Ball
And we. And Mar? A Lago is known to have been a key hunting ground, actually for Ghislaine in particular. And that's where Virginia Giuffre was working at 16 years old when she was, you know, recruited in and groomed and ends up trafficking by them.
- [65:13]
Saagar Enjeti
And which according to Trump. Not according to Trump, but like, in fairness, Trump, that he Then got upset with them for poaching Virginia away from there, like. So they're like, anyway, just going bending over backwards to be fair to Trump here. But yes. Did he know? Yeah, he knew. And. And actually in the files, according to the. What Dade county or whatever, what county is Palm beach in? Is it Dade County? The sheriff there said that Trump called and said, glad you got this guy. He's creep. So, like, you can say, A, that is credit to Trump, B, it's full knowledge of what he was doing. And he maintained a friendship with the guy for about 20 years. And then before cut, you know, early 80s to 2000s, before having a falling out over a real estate transaction.
- [66:06]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [66:07]
Saagar Enjeti
And so this is.
- [66:07]
Krystal Ball
All right, you know, the story we've been giving in anyway. I think it's Palm beach county, isn't it?
- [66:13]
Saagar Enjeti
Sounds right. I don't know.
- [66:15]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, we'll go with that. We've also got a couple other. And let's put B5 up on the screen here, actually. So Larry Summers was all over these files, you know, asking Epstein for lady advice and all sorts of things. And so he has now been completely forced out at Harvard University. And he'd already been forced to. They finally got him out at center for American Progress. Crazy. He was still involved over there, but that's another. Another topic for another day. In any case, he'd been forced to step down from various leadership positions and boards. Now he's been forced down of his professorship entirely over his Epstein ties. Um, so we're not getting legal repercussions here in the United States, but we are getting a little bit of corporate cancel culture repercussions. I was telling Sagar it makes me a little more sympathetic towards cancel culture, since apparently that's the only way that we get any elite accountability here in the United States. So I guess we'll take what we can get with that. Um, and then put before up on the screen, this is some new revelations about a governor, a Democratic governor of the Virgin Islands who was, you know, exchanging, providing favors to Jeffrey Epstein, leading right up until his arrest in 2019 for child sex crimes. So according to Media ITE, just months before his 2019 arrest, Jeffrey Epstein was being helped by US Virgin Islands Governor Albert Bryan Jr. And Virgin Islands, of course, are like, his island is part of the Virgin Islands. So he maintained very close relationships with all of the politicians there so he could, you know, do whatever he needed to do on his quote, unquote, pedophile island, Little St. James, after in this original reporting by the Way is from cnn. After Epstein was ordered to stop unauthorized construction on Little St. James and Great St. James in the U.S. virgin Islands, the serial sex offender went to Brian for help. According to the network, text messages from 2019 reviewed by CNN show Brian, a Democrat, telling Epstein he had spoken with the territory's top environmental official and asked him to pause enforcement until they could discuss the matter. As Epstein complained about possible mounting fines and negative press coverage, Brian later wrote he had asked the commissioner overseeing the case to recuse himself and concede on all previous permit requests. In one text message to Epstein, the Democratic governor wrote, we got you. In another exchange, after Epstein asked Brian whether he could spare 15 minutes, the governor quickly responded, for you. Absolutely. Isn't that a lovely, lovely story of friendship?
- [68:38]
Saagar Enjeti
It's so nice, you know, it's about the friends that we make along the way. It truly is. And so, meanwhile, speaking of friends that people made along the way, Bill Gates put up B2 here, you know, has apologized to staff and said that, okay, yes, I did have affairs with, quote, two Russian women. And that Epstein later found out about these affairs. Epstein paid for one of the women's education, which was. You go through the files. He's constantly dangling, and this is what's another layer of darkness on top of it. These women wanted an education, wanted to improve their lot in life. And they saw their relationship with Epstein and his network as a way of getting that thing that society makes so hard for people, which is just to get ahead, get an education, and get ahead. And he's constantly dangling that in front of them and oftentimes not delivering on it. In this case, he did pay for one of the women's education. Then he had Bill Gates pay him back, which I cannot understand this world of billionaires. Like, are you serious? If I'm out with a friend at, like, chick fil A, I'm picking up their chick fil A, it's fine. Or the friend will be like, you know what? I got you this time. That's what you do for friends. So he picks up Bill Gates mistress's education and then invoices him for it. Like, what is going on here? He's a. They're both billionaires. You can't pick up each other's mistresses college bills and just say, you get the next one.
- [70:23]
Krystal Ball
You need to see that. The text from the, you know, like, from the Virgin Islands. Governor, I got you. Right?
- [70:27]
Saagar Enjeti
I got you. I got. I got you. Hey, let me, let me. Let me get that tablet. No, no, I got this One, you get the next one. Like, for some reason, this one is like, what is wrong with these people? So it looks like what Epstein really had in mind, because I'm kidding. Like, this is not in the top 10 of their most depraved characteristics, but it's one of them. I think what Epstein really wanted is some paper trail that he could then hold over Bill Gates.
- [70:59]
Krystal Ball
You're so much better at understanding the criminal mind than I am. That's for your reporting.
- [71:04]
Saagar Enjeti
Because he'd been in this for too long. Um, but he. So he then does try to implicitly use it against Gates, as Gates suggests here, that, like. And because he's got the paper trail, he's got him.
- [71:20]
Krystal Ball
And apparently. So some of what we've gleaned from the files is, you know, in the context of, like, Leon Black and what is it, Steve Tisch. It seems like Epstein has these young women in his orbit and, you know, pays for their, you know, their dentistry and dangles a modeling career or whatever, and then he, like, farms them out to his rich, depraved, quote, unquote friends. And so they. They are trafficked, like, directly by him. What it looks like with Bill Gates is that these women, as far as we can tell, did not come directly from the Epstein network. But nevertheless, Epstein found out about it and realized, like, oh, this is an angle I can work. You know, this is some. A piece of information that can be useful to me in the future. And, you know, lo and behold, years later, when Bill Gates tries to. Is probably under pressure from his wife and tries to pull away from his relationship to Epstein, that's when Epstein writes this memo to himself of, you know, oh, well, here's all the things I know about this dude and that he definitely wouldn't want to come out, including that he contracted some sort of STD from one of these Russian women and didn't want his wife to find out, so was trying to, you know, use Epstein to procure antibiotics to slip surreptitiously to his wife is what Epstein wrote in the memo to himself. Anyway, so we haven't gotten confirmation specifically from Bill Gates on that particular part. But, you know, this would seem to confirm some key aspects of what Epstein was memorializing there to himself.
- [73:00]
Saagar Enjeti
And what a couple of people who knew Epstein told me was that it was very hard to get rid of them. And these are not people who had, like, problematic relationships with him. So they were doing some self justification. But people who knew. Knew him and knew his. Knew his world, that. That it wasn't as easy as, like, he wasn't taking the hint. You know what, Jeff? I don't think we're going to be buddies anymore. I don't think we're gonna hang out anymore. It was much more of a mafia thing. Like, oh, no, no, no, no. That is not how this goes. Like, no, we are still involved. You are not getting rid of me. You can see that in the Leon Black emails that the New York Times and others reported on, that Leon Black can't get rid of him and ends up continuing paying millions of dollars to him going forward. And so Epstein, along the way, knows he's going to be. He's not going to let this person get away. And so what do you do along the way? You build up enormous amounts of compromising information so you don't even have to use it. Although it does appear that he used it with Gates. Just. Just them knowing that you have it means that it's. It's easier then for these men to just continue be like, okay, you know what I can't get out of. It's going to. It could blow up my entire life if I try too hard to extract myself from this relationship that I know I should not have gotten in. And then on the flip side, you're like, I do have a lot of fun with him. The island's nice. And all the depraved things that we do, we do kind of like those things.
- [74:36]
Krystal Ball
So, yeah, and he introduced me to this person, and that person, I made this deal with him, and he's helping me with my Nobel Peace Prize aspirations. Apparently, in the context of. Of Bill Gates, that was something that.
- [74:49]
Saagar Enjeti
Which he would be the guy. He, like, knew that he knew the Norwegians, and he had. Yeah, like, he blew up the entire Norwegian, you know, political system. So, yeah, if he's gonna help you get your Nobel, so incredible.
- [75:02]
Krystal Ball
Yeah. And people, you know, some of. Some of the skeptics will say, like, well, if all these people, like, knew about this world and, you know, all this way he was operating, surely one of them would have come forward and blown the whistle. And it's like, when you dig into each of these relationships, you understand why no one did. Because if you're Bill Gates, you don't want your wife to know that you had these two affairs and that you got an STD and tried to slip her surreptitious antibiotics. You're not, you know, you're not looking if you're just daily to have the emails revealed where you're saying, hey, I had a Great time with Snow White. And maybe the next Disney princess I should try on is Beauty and the Beast. You're not really excited about that stuff coming to light. So it's mutually assured destruction, and you keep your mouth shut because that's what's best for you.
- [75:43]
Saagar Enjeti
Yeah. And lots of people over the years, whether it's Maria Farmer or Conchita Sarnoff or, like, Tina Brown, like, Like, plenty of people, like, tried to blow the whistle throughout.
- [75:52]
Krystal Ball
That's true.
- [75:53]
Saagar Enjeti
And there's. There's no mechanism for accountability within elite circle. So if you come out and say, like, there's no, like, calling the police. There's no, like, I'm going to press charges through this vehicle that we. That we have. It would be assumed that you have some. You're either a gold digger or you had some business deal that went south with Epstein. That isn't our business. So you guys sort this out. There's no way to actually hold people in these elite circles accountable. And so I've seen a lot of people complaining that this is becoming a moral panic. Like, okay, let's say it is. Then set up a system of accountability for the elites. If you have an elite class that is immune from any accountability, do not complain when the public produces its own mechanisms of accountability against them. I saw Graham Platner picking up and making that argument, which is, I think, exactly the one to take out of this. This class should not exist.
- [76:55]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, and that's. That's my point about, you know, that I was kind of jokingly making about cancel culture, which is a form of vigilante justice. Like, if you don't support mob justice in that way, which, you know, is definitely not the ideal way to go about things, then you have to support some sort of actual accountability, and not just with regard to the Epstein class, but, you know, going back to the Iraq war, lies into the financial crisis, and nobody goes to prison. And the just absolute impunity that elites seem to operate with, we just. We haven't had that. So you don't be surprised then when people resort to, like, mob online cancel culture and digital vigilante justice, because that's the only chance that they have of seeing any of these people held to account.
- [77:40]
Saagar Enjeti
Yep. Democracy or barbarism, no justice, no peace. Like these. These cliches exist for a reason.
- [77:47]
Krystal Ball
And that's right.
- [77:48]
Saagar Enjeti
Some moments, they have more fire behind them than others. Right now, the fire is burning.
- [78:12]
Krystal Ball
This is an I heart podcast, guaranteed human.