← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
4/1/26: Russia Breaks Cuba Blockade, Kristi Noem Husband Scandal, Fmr CIA On Trump Bungling Iran War
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- [00:00]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human
- [00:04]
Krystal Ball
hey guys, Sagar and Krystal here.
- [00:06]
Sagar Enjeti
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show.
- [00:13]
Krystal Ball
This is the only place where you
- [00:14]
Robert Baer
can find honest perspectives from the left
- [00:16]
Krystal Ball
and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
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Sagar Enjeti
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 inbox.
- [00:30]
Krystal Ball
We're we need your help to build the future of independent news media and
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Ryan Grim
we hope to see you@breakingpoints.com A Russian oil tanker is being allowed by the United States to dock in Cuba, President Donald Trump said over the weekend, making this the first shipment of oil to the government since early January. It'll take about a month to refine and distribute the fuel, and it's estimated to account for roughly a one month supply supply. It's unclear if Trump has ended the oil blockade or simply allowed this ship to come in, but the effect of it has been devastating to the island. Cuba's health care system continues to face extreme hardship amid the US Oil blockade, so I was recently able to tour two hospitals in Havana in the midst of nationwide energy blackouts. In the footage here, you'll see a journalist colleague of mine, Liz Oliva Fernandez, a Cuban reporter based in Havana for the independent news organization Belly of the Beast. She helped set up these visits, and if you're interested in news from Cuba, check out their newsletter@bellyofthebeastcuba.com Now Cuba has long been known for its focus on healthcare and education, and until recently its health outcomes mirrored or exceeded those of developed countries. In 2015, President Obama declared the decades of embargo a failure and move to normalize relations with Cuba. With Trump in office, not only did we revert to the old policy, Trump severely tightened it. In 2019, he implemented new sanctions, making it harder for banks to do business with Cuba, harder for tourists to visit, and allowed Americans to sue based on claims from the 1960s. Just before leaving office, Trump added Cuba to the state sponsors of terrorism lists, which made it that much harder for them to do business with anybody or access credit. President Biden then left the designation on through nearly his entire four years, tightening the noose even during COVID now. The night before we visited William Soler Pediatric Hospital, the entire island was plunged at 7:30pm into a blackout. The Hospital had a generator, which takes a little time to kick in now. At 5:30am the next morning, power was restored to the hospital. Thankfully, before the generator had run out of fuel, we spent a few hours with nurses, doctors, their patients and their parents. So this is a depressing segment, but stick around for the end because I promise it gets better. We'll be joined in a bit by Fernandez, the reporter you saw there, and by Brace Belden, co host of the True Anon podcast, who joined us for the hospital visit. You won't want to miss the update to this saga that he'll have to offer. So we met with anesthesiologist Altheo Fernandez. So this here, this is my footage, which is not as good as the footage you're going to see from the Cuban videographers that were with us. This is a baby named Eric. And Dr. Fernandez is describing for us how when he, when the power goes off, they have to kind of rush to the babies who are on these ventilators, lift up that little device there, reach in and kind of hand pump things until the generator power kicks in and they can get the machines up and working because, you know, you can't, you don't just kind of pump oxygen. You have to, you know, be, you have to be kind of, you know, calibrated about how you do it. Too much is not good, Too little is too little. Obviously not good either. So let's, let's roll a little bit of the footage from the trip that brace Liz and I made. So here is, here's Liz talking to a nurse at the hospital, asking in those five or seven minutes between the time when the power goes out and the generator comes on, what are you thinking? And the nurse is saying, and I'll post these on Twitter so people can watch them in full and listen to them in Spanish. She's saying, even when we don't have babies on ventilators, we react instinctively. We're like, oh my God, we have to rush to the babies. And then they realize sometimes, oh, there's no, there's no ventilators currently. And now here's Dr. Fernandez saying that two years ago when they lost power, the generator did not kick in and they were operating on a five year old boy. And he says, we happen to be with an Australian doctor at the time. And so they pull out their phones and he said, the Australian doctor is just absolutely freaking out because this is not the kind of thing that western developed country surgeons, surgeons are the biggest cowboys on the planet. Turn off the lights on them, a lot of that confidence goes right out the window. So what he says here is that there was a operating room in a facility nearby that did have light and power. And so they took this five year old boy, covered him up and then moved him to this other operating room. And he's describing how difficult that makes him. He's the anesthesiologist. How's he going to monitor? It's already extremely harrowing to do anesthesiology for a five year old in the best of conditions. Now you're unplugging him, moving him, but they had no choice. He also said it massively increases the risk of infection and sepsis and on and on what he's saying here. And while you're doing all this, you're under your own personal stress of living like every other Cuban lives, which is very little capacity to get food, electricity and such yourself. And so let's start now. We have one more clip that we want to get to. But first wanted to bring in Liz Alivo Fernandez from Belly of the Beast and Brace Belden from True Anon. Liz Brace, thank you so much for joining us.
- [06:39]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
Thank you.
- [06:41]
Brace Belden
Good to see you all again.
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Ryan Grim
Nice to see you too. So, yeah, so the day before we had gone to a separate hospital and met with another physician who described how they had previously bought this 3D printer from a German company to try to make the kind of unique medical devices that they were unable to import from. One of them was an $80 screw that he described another is, you know, if you're going to do a jaw surgery, removing a tumor from somebody's jaw, you have to then replace the jaw. And described how the sanctions and the terror designation made it such that even though they were able to buy the 3D printer in the brief window of kind of normalization, then when they reached out to try to get spare parts for it and a tech to come out, the German company said, nope, forget about it. So then the next day, Sunday, we went to this pediatric hospital. It's under the best of conditions. It's always devastating emotionally to visit a pediatric unit. But Liz, I wanted to get your reaction to what we saw in the two separate wings of this pediatric unit. And compared to how things have been over the last five years as things have really tightened and then previously during the liberalizing period where Cuba was actually allowed to trade with the rest of
- [08:09]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
the world, well, for me it's really devastating. I, I think like before I start this journey with Belly of the Beast and start to go deep inside of the sanctions. I'm a Cuban journalist, so I supposed to be no more the sanctions that I did in the past because I grew up talking about oh, the blockade is the blockade stopped Cuba to have this. But it looks like it's so metaphoric. It's like it's everything but it's nothing you can touch it. It's barely tangible. And then like working with Belly of the Bees and looking inside of the impact of the sanctions on the Cuban people and you see these cases, that's everything that changed completely your mind. Because I think like that step, first step to understand how the sanctions affecting the Cuban. Because if you say oh, the sanctions is affecting Cuba but then you say like it's affecting this baby to have access to the medication or this affecting this family that are struggling to get the surgery for his kid that Cuba used to practice in a day by basis but then in from a day to another they stopped doing because they run out of resources. If you talk to doctors in Cuba Havana, everyone's going to say oh, the things start to go worse after the COVID 19 pandemic. But of course because in 2019 the United States government, that was the Donald Trump first administration started to implement new sanctions and screw the tools to the Cuban government to try to suffocate the country in general. So I remember in 2019, September was the started the oil, the block oil blockade that started to sanctions oil tankers that were coming to Cuba to bring oil. That was the beginning of all these journeys. Just it wasn't just January 20, 2026.
- [10:13]
Ryan Grim
Right.
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Liz Oliva Fernandez
And in May they also start to, to do like a, like a tourism. So everything start to stop in Cuba and you can see the impact of from a day or another one. But you see that it's getting worse and worse and, and I feel bad because I don't know what is the moment that this is started to going better again.
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Ryan Grim
Right, right. And so brace we bring you in for a second. So when we went to the hospital on, on that Sunday morning, we, we first went to the neonatal unit but speaking of shortages, they had so few gowns that only Liz and I, if you notice in that some of that footage that Liz and I are in there because they didn't have enough gowns for you and your producer Stephen to, to join us. But then as we were kind of in the neonatal unit, they found a couple more. And so when we went to the more adolescent unit, you were able to join us, talk a little bit about you know, what, what, what Your reaction was to seeing the, that adolescent unit?
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Krystal Ball
Hmm.
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Brace Belden
Man. Yeah. Like you're saying, it's, it's. I don't think it's ever pleasant to visit a, a pediatric unit anywhere. But this was. It was, it was, it was very difficult to go in there because. And first of all, they had a kind of amazing nurse to patient ratio. Looked like there was about two nurses in every room. But the thing that we heard from everybody that we talked to is they just didn't have basic things that you would consider, like the building blocks of trying to get somebody better. So, like, for instance, if you're sick in there with an infection, they might have some antibiotics, but they might not exactly have the antibiotics that you need, but you need some antibiotics, so you'll take these ones. You know, the Cubans are sort of admired, I think, by Americans for their improvisation. But the thing is, they should have to improvise. Like, you should be able to get, you know, tubes and bedpans and bags for medication, the medication itself, but. But they can't. And so the first thing that I noticed with it, it seemed well staffed, and it seemed staffed by very competent people, but they didn't have very basic tools. And, you know, from, from what I was understanding, this is like where the best hospital in Havana, which means that really the best in Cuba. And I just kept thinking, like, wow, if they don't have that stuff here, they really don't have anything anywhere, like in the provinces.
- [12:39]
Krystal Ball
And on that note, let's go ahead and roll this clip. This is gonna be a vo. I want to get all three of your reaction to this posted on Monday. The Russia breaking of the blockade. We have a Russian tanker carrying 100,000 tons of crude oil that arrived in Cuba. So you can see a little bit of this on the screen if you're watching massive tanker pulling up to the port in Havana. So having seen what you saw just what, a week and a half ago now, what expectations do we have about how. Ryan, maybe I'll just start with you. This will change the situation on the ground.
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Ryan Grim
Well, I think it's a lifeline, but it remains to be seen how quickly it can be distributed. Liz, I'm curious. When do people expect that some of the shortages might be lifted as a result of this and for how long?
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Liz Oliva Fernandez
Well, actually, I think that, of course, as you said, that this is good news, but that's not the solution. The solution is just Cuba being able to trade and to buy oil. Whatever. We don't need to go so far until Russia is just part of the way. We just can't buy it in Venezuela. United States, I don't follow, actually. What is the goal? Because at the beginning they say, well, we're going to terminate the country. We don't care about nothing. We are going in and we're going to destroy everything. And then Trump say, okay, we are going to allow the Russian oil tanker to go in and whatever wants. But it's unclear what is this is going to work. And also it's like, why we need to ask the United States permission to do like a normal trade with the rest of the world, why they need to threat countries like Mexico. Don't sell oil to Cuba. This is crazy. And also the situation that we have now is not just because the lack of fuel or oil is going beyond that. It's like Cuba has been stop to have the capacity to buy raw materials that we need to produce the medications that we need inside of Cuba. We need to think about that. Cuba is a country that used to produce the 60% of the medications that we consume inside of Cuba nowadays, none. You go to a drugstore empty. You go to a hospital. They don't have IEPs for patients. They don't have syringes, they don't have truckers. This is crazy. We are talking in a country that is able to create medication for lung cancer that is actually effective. We are talking about a country that is actually.
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Ryan Grim
And we lost you for a second, which is, I think, indicative of the difficult kind of Internet and electrical situation there. So as we continue through. As we continue through this adolescent ward of the intensive care unit, we met a boy named Carlos. And I want to talk to him, talk about him briefly. And we met his mom, Omni Ellis, who was in the room with him. His dad was with him as well. So let's roll this next clip and then want to talk about where we've gone since. So this is his father talking about a child here. So Carlos has cystic fibrosis, which is why he's on the ventilator here, which is. People know this is a degenerative lung condition that if you have. And Brace knows more about this. If you have the right kind. You never have the right kind. But if you have a certain kind of cystic fibrosis, there is medication for it called trikafta that is extraordinarily effective. And so the parents had understand that this medication is what the boy needs to be able to survive. He lives about an hour and a half outside of Havana. He'd been brought to this hospital. He's been given palliative care here, which effectively means they're doing the best for they can. Doing the best they can for him to make him as comfortable as he can as he withers and dies. He was down to 44 pounds when we met him last Sunday. But a boy that was still full of life and a full life ahead of him. If he could just get this treatment, which his parents know exists in the past, as the Dr. Fernandez had said, medication that isn't produced in Cuba, they would buy it and import it, but they're just completely out of hard dollars at this point from the 2019 tightening of the economy around them. And so this is where we bring brace in. So, Bryce, you are familiar with this condition.
- [17:45]
Brace Belden
How so? Cystic fibrosis is basically the only condition that I'm really familiar with, because when I moved into the apartment that I live in now, my neighbors across the street had a little boy. I think it was like, he was 4 at the time. And. And my office is right next to the. I guess the hallway or like, whatever, the foyer, whatever the place between our apartments. And I would always hear him coughing. And he'd be coughing like an old ass, man. Like, very loud, very deep cough.
- [18:14]
Ryan Grim
This boy was doing, too.
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Brace Belden
Yeah, exactly. And so I was like, what's wrong with the kid? And they're like, oh, yeah, cystic fibrosis. Which I didn't. I knew that it existed, but I didn't really know about it. And. And they're like, yeah, like, you know, it's sort of a shorter life expectancy. And then I just sort of blew my mind. I was like, this kid's gonna die. So I learned a bunch about it. And, you know, I became friends with my neighbors. I hung out with a kid, with the parents a lot. And then a couple years after moving in, there was a new medication that came out, or they told me about it before, but it became available called trikafta. And they were like, this is. They had a party. Once he got prescribed it, you know, like, it was a. It was a giant, big neighborhood thing. And then he just became, basically within like, a month, a normal kid, like, running around, lets himself into my apartment frequently, plays with, picks up knives that I didn't even know I had, runs around, chases his sister with them. But he's like a normal, very, like, energetic kid. Whereas prior to that, he had been just, like, always sick, always home from school, kind of underweight and just coughing all the time. And, you know, cystic fibrosis is a, you know, I'm not an expert, but from what I understand, essentially your body just gets filled with mucus and it's not just your lungs, it's other organs. You know, you mentioned that Carlos was £44, which is quite low for a nine year old boy. It's because your body can't really absorb nutrition because mucus is literally clogging your organs. And so a lot of what happens is people die essentially because repeated lung infections and then either just like the closing of the airways, like you really, you literally choke to death on your own mucus and, and this, you know, this horrible scarring in it. And with trikafta, it's kind of a miracle drug. I'm not really sure how it works, but, but it, you know, again, I'm not a doctor or anything, but it essentially, it really, it clears out a lot of the mucus. It's a very thick mucus. It clears it out and you have to keep taking it. But it can extend the life expectancy from anywhere. I mean, people with cystic fibrosis can die in their teens or maybe their 40s at the latest. It appears now, I mean, it hasn't been around long enough that you can actually have a normal lifespan with them. So it really is like the difference between, I mean, yeah, life and death for people.
- [20:38]
Ryan Grim
And so the parents are well aware of this. The medical staff was aware that he, he needed this. So what. So how did, so did you talk to your neighbor when you got home? Like, what was the, what was the upshot there?
- [20:54]
Brace Belden
Well, yeah, well, so she was showing us those boxes of trikafta and I took pictures of. I know what that is. Like, I'm like, I know that medication and I mean, it sucked being in that room. It, I gotta tell you, I mean, not to be. Whatever. I know this isn't exactly the question you asked, but I was just like, I, you know, I talked to a lot of people. I've been in a lot of bad situations, I guess throughout my life. This was like the first time where I was just like, I was just crying in there because I'm like, dude, this kid is dying and if he had been born 100 miles from here, he'd be just fine, you know, and, you know, addicted to Minecraft or whatever. And I was just like, jesus Christ. And so that, I mean, the whole, the whole. I was in a pretty sort of down mood the entire time, but that really sort of spun me up. And so when I was able to get back to the US the next day, I called my neighbor. I'm like, dude, this sucks. And he was like, well, our. We actually, we have a bunch of trikafta. And, and because their kid is aging out of this certain dose that he's on and it's actually his weight is increasing too much and they're like, we have like a bunch of boxes of it. And so I went crazy. And through read from Belly of the Beast and through a bunch of people's help, I was able to get those boxes down to Havana. I guess I got back on Monday and they were in Havana on Thursday, which is good. They were at the hospital. But the thing is too though, the kid is. And they're working. The parents sent an update yesterday, the meds are working and the kid is. I mean, again, he was in palliative care, which means he's going to die. And with the meds he's able to. And he was on this breathing thing that I think is probably in the videos.
- [22:44]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
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Brace Belden
And you know, it's because he has this tube in his lung. His lung is basically collapsed, but they can't really do surgery because it's filled with his mucus. It's a horrible situation, especially a nine year old boy. And, and with this they should be able to either operate or, or clear it out.
- [23:03]
Krystal Ball
There he is.
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Brace Belden
Yeah, there he is. Spider Man Js, which I got to say, he even looks in this a lot better than what we saw.
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Ryan Grim
Yeah, yeah.
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Brace Belden
Because he looked like a drawing of a sick kid. Like his eyes are all shallow. He's on a thing. You know, he's got this, he's got like a, basically a cup in front of him that he's like, he has to expectorate into. And the cost that this kid was doing, we were there for one of his coffee attacks. It's like, you cannot imagine a child making that sound like that is what is. So I guess I kind of have, I guess what you might call a manic episode after I got back, because I was like, this is insane. But it's crazy because there's only like 150,000 doses, or excuse me, doses, diagnosed cases of cystic fibrosis. I think worldwide there's more people with it, but who are officially diagnosed with it. I think there's maybe about 40,000 in the United States. And I'm like, Jesus Christ, what a coincidence. My neighbor's kid has that and they have this exact medication. And so I was like, well, you know, what are you going to do. You got to get this down there. But the problem is, and this is the thing, so he's going to need, I think, longer term care, which is possible. All the stuff that, that I'm going to describe is possible. And it was possible until recent history for Cuban doctors at that very hospital to do. But because of the blockade, like the scarring in his lungs, the pain, his pancreas, I think isn't working so hot. All of those things that would be treatable are not as treatable or treatable maybe at all because of the US sanctions and the US blockade tightening in place since 2019, but of course since the beginning of the embargo. And so this was a direct thing when we were standing in that room and we're watching this child die. And you can't help but think, my government, Marco Rubio and Donald Trump, this is the intended result of this. And I was talking to nurses there and I was talking to Doc, I talked to everybody I talked to in Cuba. My basic question was, how do you get to work in the morning? There's no fuel. You might, you know, Havana is a regular city. It's a normal city. I think this is, people maybe exoticize Cuba a little bit. This is 90 miles of key West. Jimmy Buffett, this, this is like a, people take the bus to work, people have cars, people do these things. If you're a nurse taking care of this, K, you don't know if you're going to be able to get there in the morning because maybe there's no bus. There probably isn't a bus. And so this, this is the, all these cascading effects to where that end up with this child not being able to get care, let alone the medicine, because of not only the, the, the vicious blockade that, that Trump and Rubio put in, but also this new oil blockade. And so this is like, you know, you're standing there, man, and I know it affected you too. And you're just looking at this kid dying and his parents, the desperation that was coming off of his parents. And I don't mean to diminish them in any way. I think it's the desperation that anybody with a child or even without a child would feel in this situation. You're like, I can't. There is, there is something out there that will save my child, that will let him live as close to a normal life as is as he can. But I am being prevented from getting it because of rules put in place by a billionaire real estate developer from New York. And one of the most South Florida. Yeah. One of the nastiest Miami Cubans there is.
- [26:31]
Ryan Grim
And for a. And for a very deliberate and precise strategic purpose. Like that's. That's what I want to underline here, backing up what. What Liz was saying earlier. The goal here of hurting regular Cubans, like the goal of killing Carlos rather than allowing him to live, is to make his family that survives angry at the government so that they then go into the streets and overthrow the Cuban government and replace them with a government made up of people from Miami that we believe is a better government to be the most generous. That we believe is a better government
- [27:14]
Krystal Ball
that's favorable to the government that created the conditions that hurt your son.
- [27:17]
Ryan Grim
Right. So the immediate ones, the specific. There is a purpose to making it so that Carlos dies. And it's to make.
- [27:26]
Krystal Ball
It is.
- [27:27]
Ryan Grim
Make people angry.
- [27:29]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
And it is. And it's complicated, I think like then because again we are talking about one of the main hospital pediatric hospitals in Havana where they have the best care. Can you imagine this right in the place they just Batansas or Baracua Guantanamo Santiago de Cuba, like for their province, countryside, rural areas that there are more Carlos over there, but other with other diseases that are able to be fixed in this 21st century. And it's crazy that they can't have the medications that they need.
- [28:05]
Ryan Grim
I think one last.
- [28:07]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
The most of the people are angry in Cuba. But the most I think like the general feeling is frustration is frustration because why we need to deserve it under these conditions. And I think like the doctor Alio said something that is stuck with me. It's like. And he put the example of the 100 bucks. It's like if a country only have 100 bucks, they need to be sure that they can help in the most of the people, the majority of the people with this only 100 bucks. And Carlos and other kids and other teenagers and other mother fathers. There are other people that have also specific disease that the Cuban government used to buy medication just for them. And now they just. They need to do triage. Okay, we need this specific amount of money who we are going to save with this. And just so sadly Carlos can get into the list because as Bryce said, it's just a few number of people that have the disease. So this is crazy. So people get sad, get frustrated, get angry. But it's frustration because okay, this is a medical side. But then the doctors and the nurses have to come back home to don't have electricity, so blackout so that they don't have gas. So they can cook. So they don't have anything. They don't have running water because there is not electricity, of course, to pump in the water. So this is the same people who needs to be focused the other day and needs to be rest to save other children's and other families life. This is crazy. And they need to go through all this and they say why? Who is responsible for this? I can't think about the US Government. I can't blame with them because they are too far away from us. They are too far away from our life. We need to blame our own government because they need to give an answer. They need to do something to change these situations.
- [30:17]
Ryan Grim
Right? They're the ones you're interacting with on a day to day basis. Yeah, exactly.
- [30:20]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
Exactly right.
- [30:22]
Ryan Grim
So we're gonna, we'll keep up with this. And. You know, I'm so grateful to everyone who was able to like come together and get Carlos this medication. It absolutely should not have to come to this. And the kind of, the relief on the face of his mother and father kind of is, you know, spells out to me the depravity of denying it. He'll probably, you were saying, need to go to the country of Colombia to get some treatment, which is possible and we're going to, but we'll keep up with this. But ultimately what the country needs is just to be able to do normal business and trade. But thank you, Brace, co host of the True Non podcast, Liz with Valley of the Beast. Thank you so much for everything you're doing and for being here.
- [31:16]
Krystal Ball
The Daily Mail dropped a midday bombshell yesterday, revealing we can put up on the screen that Kristi Noem's longtime husband. I think they've been married for 34 years. Her high school sweetheart was reading what was leading what the Daily Mail described as a quote, secret double life. The rest of the headline is gnomes cross dressing husband Brian the pouting, busty bimbo photos and trove of explicit messages. Trove is not an understatement. The Daily Mail has its hand on all kinds of screenshots showing what appears to be a very clear fetish for Kristi Noem's husband. Again, this seems to have been happening while she was the secretary of the Homeland Security Department, who is like putting balloons up his shirt, sending pictures of himself with like cartoonishly large breasts to women who apparently he was also into having cartoonishly large breasts. He was paying them money. I mean, up to potentially $25,000. And this is all coming out now,
- [32:26]
Ryan Grim
Christine, what does he do where does he get his money?
- [32:28]
Krystal Ball
He's an insurance guy. That's his background. So Kristi Noem responds. Yesterday, after the Daily Mail drops this in the middle of the day, quote, Ms. Noem is devastated. This is her camp's response. The family was blindsided by this, and they asked for privacy and prayers at the time. That's what her representatives told the New York Post. Now, Trump also reacted to this. Gonna Skip ahead to E5, he told the Daily Mail. Wow. Well, I feel badly for the family if that's the case. That's too bad. Why does it matter that Trump and Kristi Noem responded in this particular way? Well, it's interesting because as salacious as this story is, this is the Homeland Security secretary who was clearly vulnerable to blackmail on an enormous scale. When these pictures are being sent with her husband's face in them, it's not as though he was trying to hide himself, hide his face. Some of the women he interacted with, apparently he was paying and interacting with, said that they figured out who he was. They talked to him about it. They asked him. One of them said, she asked him about Corey Lewandowski and his wife having an affair, and he said, well, there's nothing that I can do about it. So if Trump and Noem had no idea about this.
- [33:47]
Ryan Grim
Wait, one of the sex workers he was engaging with, who was like, E4.
- [33:53]
Krystal Ball
Did you see this?
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Ryan Grim
No.
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Krystal Ball
Mark Caputo reported how he was. He got a tip. So Mark Caputo is the Trump White House reporter over at Axios. He's in Florida. He said, quote, yeah, I got a weird lead. A Source texted me February 13th. They said an immigrant sex worker, possibly in the country illegally, wanted to go public about Noem's husband using her services online. It was vengeance for DHS's immigration enforcement. I couldn't land the interview. Caputo posts a screenshot of his back and forth with that source. He says, sharing, because folks sometimes wonder how reporting works here. I would have needed to talk to the accuser and verify the info the way the Mail did. When we use anonymous sources, they're credible. Sometimes it means someone else gets the story. For what it's worth, I understand yet another media outlet had been shown these pictures last year, but declined to run them. A woman then, quote, tweets another post, and Caputo points to it, saying, when this news broke, I recognized him referring to Brian Gnome as one of my clients, because I've never seen a, quote, sissy sub have bigger knockers than him.
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Ryan Grim
But where did. Where is it? Where do they say that the sex worker asked him about the affair between Lewandowski and.
- [35:07]
Krystal Ball
That's in the Daily Mail story.
- [35:07]
Ryan Grim
That's in the Daily Mail story. Got it. I thought I had seen that somewhere. Yeah. So that's the other thing. Yes. You could blackmail her over this. You could also blackmail her over this, like, widely discussed, years long affair with this, like, de facto chief of staff or maybe like whatever you want to call Corey Lewandowski. Why she even still married? Like, just, she's clear, like, follow your heart with Corey.
- [35:34]
Krystal Ball
Like, it's all very weird. And Corey's married to a 911 widow, by the way. It's just a really gross and sad situation. And they've been publicly cheating on their spouses at GOP events for years now. Everyone knows about it. Trump apparently thinks it's hilarious. But that's the reporting from behind closed doors. I think the Daily Mail has also gotten that reporting. Might have been the New York Post. But either way, Ryan, the national security implications of this are not, like, it's not insane to be like, did you have any idea? I mean, now they're saying they're totally blindsided by this. Trump claims to have just learned this from a Daily Mail reporter. I mean, that's the implication of Trump's reaction. I don't know that that. I mean, it seems almost impossible for the DHS secretary's husband to be sending pictures of himself like this and to have it not be known. It looks like from the screenshots, it's on WhatsApp, it seems really wild that that wasn't known at all by his wife or at all by the government.
- [36:32]
Ryan Grim
Well, it's only a national security issue if you think that the Department of Homeland Security has anything to do with actually securing the homeland.
- [36:38]
Krystal Ball
Yes.
- [36:38]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And I've seen no evidence of that. They do a lot of things. None of them seem dedicated to that mission.
- [36:46]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, well, they have powers.
- [36:47]
Ryan Grim
Yes. And she has a lot of horses that she can ride around in those, like, like $250 million ad campaign videos.
- [36:53]
Krystal Ball
Yeah, it's pretty interesting that this is coming out after she leaves dhs.
- [36:58]
Ryan Grim
I know it took this source a while to get it published, but absolutely wild story.
- [37:07]
Krystal Ball
What's going to happen to the Shield of the Americas? Because isn't that what she's in charge of?
- [37:11]
Ryan Grim
That's right. She's the special envoy for Central and South America, which is amazing because I think Central and South America take their traditional morality a little bit more seriously, apparently, than our traditional moralists here in North America. So that'll be interesting to see how they react to this sheriff and Lewandowski going around.
- [37:33]
Krystal Ball
I mean it could be another problem for the stories of corruption that have surrounded Kristi Noem over I would say like the last five plus years. Roughly the last five plus years of her career are, it's constant and that's usually where it's where there's smoke, there's fire type of situation. Like it's every several months it's like there's a possible corruption story coming out of gnomes orbit. You know, connections that contracts are going to people who are political, politically connected,
- [38:04]
Ryan Grim
personally connected, righteous gemstones to life.
- [38:08]
Krystal Ball
That's really well said. Oh my gosh, that's very good. And so it's not, it wouldn't surprise me if there's more reporting that comes out suggesting that in recent weeks this was known to the Nome family and the government. Obviously if reporters are sniffing around, it's. That wasn't getting back to the Homeland Security secretary. I mean she was just replaced last week.
- [38:33]
Ryan Grim
She should have just said, as everybody knows, we have an open marriage.
- [38:36]
Krystal Ball
That would have been much more.
- [38:37]
Ryan Grim
Leave us alone would have been much more. Okay, cool.
- [38:40]
Krystal Ball
Yes, Ryan, should we move on to Bob Bear?
- [38:42]
Ryan Grim
Let's do it. All right. Joining us next is Robert Baer, former CIA case officer of more than 20 years turned author and political commentator. Emily, we pre taped this interview yesterday. He said he doesn't actually get up in the morning which.
- [39:04]
Krystal Ball
Okay, nothing but respect for that. Nothing but my dream.
- [39:08]
Ryan Grim
Yes, I aspire to that. And so Bear is a highly respected kind of CIA case officer who is unusual in the sense that he knows of what he speaks in the sense that he's been all over the world. He's been an undercover officer we talked about earlier in the show. He was made famous for a little while because they tried to us I believe tried to prosecute him for attempting to assassinate Saddam Hussein. And his defense effective it turned out was I was doing this on behalf of the CIA. Like don't you understand what it's the CIA. Don't you know what the CIA does?
- [39:46]
Krystal Ball
Wasn't Syriana also roughly based on him?
- [39:48]
Ryan Grim
Yes, that's correct. One of his books was turned into Syriana. And the main, the George Clooney character is modeled after Robert Baer now. And so he has, he's kind of like the best that the CIA has to offer in the sense of trying to understand our adversaries and Iran particularly. But that doesn't. And I think I want People to understand that and Iran particularly. But I want people to think about that. As he mentions in our interview, he's only been there a little bit and his understanding of Iran is surface deep, which he would acknowledge. And yet he knows it better than most of the rest of the CIA. The major thing I took away from the interview is just how screwed the CIA is and our intelligence community.
- [40:41]
Krystal Ball
Our intelligence.
- [40:42]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, that. Wow. Like they're just operating based on caricatures and what they read and the propaganda outlets that we finance.
- [40:53]
Krystal Ball
This is dark. Literally and metaphorically.
- [40:56]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [40:57]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [40:58]
Ryan Grim
So we thought it'd be. He hasn't done many interviews over the last many months, but he agreed to come on the show and we thought does not mean any of us agree with everything he said or remotely agree.
- [41:10]
Krystal Ball
So. Interesting. But it was.
- [41:12]
Ryan Grim
Believe that. But interesting to hear, you know, where he thinks this is going. Not, not well for the United States.
- [41:19]
Krystal Ball
Yeah.
- [41:20]
Ryan Grim
Put it that way. And he just, he just, he talks about the Sampson option multiple times, which is also the name of a Seymour Hersh book, which is a reference to this purported Israeli strategy that they would rather basically nuke the world than lose a war. And so that was. That's not what you want to hear.
- [41:43]
Krystal Ball
It's really not.
- [41:44]
Ryan Grim
No.
- [41:45]
Krystal Ball
Nor is his speculation informed speculation, of course, about where the intelligence is likely coming from and how we're. I think this was the most interesting part of the interview from my perspective, is how we're making the decisions that we're making. How are those being informed, what intelligence is informing them and how are we gathering that intelligence? So if anyone would know, it would be him. And CIA folks, even former CIA folks, are limited at what they can say, obviously, and are sometimes still freelancing.
- [42:19]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. But to hear a, a CIA, former CIA. Well, no such thing as former, as they say, former CIA official openly discussing the Sampson option, which again, he brought it up. He brought it up a couple times. That's when you're watching this. If you're not familiar with that fairly common reference, it is the idea that Israel's nuclear strategy includes an option to use overwhelming nuclear force rather than lose something strategically, even if that means the obvious kind of annihilation of Israel.
- [42:51]
Krystal Ball
Well, let's get to it.
- [42:52]
Ryan Grim
Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it.
- [42:56]
Robert Baer
Of course.
- [42:57]
Ryan Grim
So let's, let's start with, from your perspective, what do you think is the thing that the US And Israel, or let's start go with the US Most misunderstood or underestimated when they went into this conflict?
- [43:15]
Robert Baer
I Think it's the determination of the Iranians. I wrote a book about this, that if they were under attack, what they would do is bring down Gulf energy supplies, which could be up to 50% of proven reserves. Now think about that. Let's say you can take proven reserves offline for two, three or four years. It will destroy the world's economy as it's starting to do. And I think what they confused Tehran with Caracas. You just simply can't decapitate the Iranian regime and expect people to pour out in the streets. That's not Iran. I mean, it's so few of these people. I don't know that anybody in the administration has ever been to Iran. They don't, they don't understand who these people are. They don't understand. They're, they're the faithful, if you like. I've spent a lot of time there, not a lot, but enough to see that in a way, Let, let me be politically incorrect. It's a death cult. These people, large segment, are ready to die for their beliefs. You know, you go to the Martyrs cemetery in, in Tehran and it's genuine. And I've spent a lot of time with the Basij and that's genuine. They're going to fight. We can turn the electricity off if we like. We can destroy their desalinization facilities, all of them. We could turn the country into rubble, but they're still going to come back. And I mean, look at, look at the numbers. You've got 93 million people. If you destroy the economy, turn it into a failed state, and you look across the Gulf at a country like Qatar which has only got 350,000 people, who's going to defend the Arab sheikhdoms? I'm not big fans of them, but who's going to defend them? Are we going to keep a fleet in the well? I mean, we can't even boats in the Gulf right now. It's too dangerous. But are we going to keep boats there? And then what do you do? About 93 million armed, desperate people and these fragile countries around again, you take off 50% of the world's oil resource, let's say a Syria like situation where it's total chaos and mayhem, oil is closed down, the effect it will have on the world's economy will look a lot like the Great Depression.
- [45:57]
Ryan Grim
And Emily, I'll jump in one second. Let me just follow up on the, the question of the death cult. The people would rephrase that as Iran's. A lot of people in Iran see this as Existential. Like we are fighting them, you know, from Tampa, from Nebraska, from aircraft carriers that are out of, out of range. They are in their country and they see this as, as an existential fight and are behaving rationally, I think, because I think death cult suggests like a level of.
- [46:28]
Robert Baer
Yeah, it's a bad word. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's not. But I mean, it was. They fought, they lost hundreds of thousand people in the war on Iraq. They were prepared to defend their nation. They have a very strong historical sense. Country that goes back 4,000 years, any number of things. And they're also looking at it is, look, they signed off on the nuclear agreement, jcpoa, and we unilaterally ripped it up. I mean, they were complying with the terms of JCPOA the two times this administration has gone into negotiations with them. In the middle of it, they attack them. The intent, and I think that you see this on the far right in this country, is to destroy Iran for past wrongs. And that goes back to Lebanon, goes to Iraq and the rest of it. But they don't see it that way. I mean, look, look, look at the attack on Ras Lafan. It followed our attack, or the Israeli attack on South Pars. They reply in kind. It's a tit for tat. And they've always done this. And it's not a question of, you know, defending the Iranians. This is who they are. This is our enemy. And we're so bad at misunderstanding our enemy, what they'll fight for and what they won't. I mean, you go back to Vietnam, we had never understood North Vietnam, just American history. We refuse to believe that our enemies have grievances, whether legitimate or not. And so we are fighting their grievances. But in all fairness, let's say to the CIA, it doesn't have anybody that's been to Iran understands the Iranians, those people have all retired. They've gone away. Same way with State Department government, Farsi speakers, very few of them. The ones the Iranians we know are exiles. You can never trust exiles. As Machiavelli told us, you can't trust them. So it's a black box we're going into. And I cannot tell you right now who's going to give up first. It could be the Trump administration, it could be the Iranians. We don't know that's the problem. I mean, what could happen in this next week is what should really worry us.
- [48:56]
Krystal Ball
Well, Bob, I wanted to pick up on that point because something interesting happened in the Beginning of March, where Lindsey Graham had made recent trips to Israel, came back, told the American press Israeli intelligence would tell him things that US Intelligence was not telling him, which is fascinating and suggests that some information planted to Lindsey Graham is then going into Donald Trump. So what do you believe? Who is giving Donald Trump information on Iran? That is. That's basically the information he's basing his own decisions off of. What do we know about that? What. What can we surmise about that?
- [49:33]
Robert Baer
Well, I think what's telling is that Trump yesterday said, we don't know whether Mushtaba the son is alive or dead. I mean, that tells me we don't know much about the country. It's one thing for the Israelis to target Iranian nuclear scientists because they all have smartphones, they've got apps. You've got cameras in Tehran that can track people. You can track any cell phone. They do a brilliant job at it. I mean, they really do. But the assembly of experts and the people who are making the decision are offline. I've spent time at Qom. These people do not do smartphones. It's very medieval. On top of that, you have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has this mosaic defense, and that's command and control is not vertical. And they know what to do. And they don't need orders, they don't need communications. And they do it because they've been planning for an attack like this for a long back to Reagan, back to the Iran Iraq War. They've been planning for a long time. We, in the meantime, have ignored them. And the Israelis don't understand the country. I love the TV show Tehran, but trust me, they do not have Mossad officers wandering around. Staff officers. Tehran, it's too dangerous. When I was there, I had an Iranian ID card, and I was stopped. My group was stopped every 15 minutes. We were checked for our IDs, and they're very good cards, too. They're not reproducible. So the Iranians, I mean, the Israelis are depending on mek, the resistance group, the Iranians, you know, criminals, and the rest of it. But that doesn't get to the heart of the Iranian regime, which is very much rest. Opaque to us. So if the Israelis are saying, hey, we decapitate the regime, it's a shot in the dark for them. They don't know. And, I mean, the Iranians, probably. Khamenei wasn't even really the Grand Ayatollah. He didn't have the. The chops for it.
- [52:02]
Krystal Ball
The.
- [52:03]
Ryan Grim
The.
- [52:03]
Robert Baer
The dissertations and the rest of it, he wasn't recognized as one. He was effectively the spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Now, the people making the decisions in the mosques are, you know, we don't know what they're up to. You know, we just, we just don't. When I went to Qom, I, I, I debated in Ayatollah. But I can tell you right now that I didn't walk away from that debate or from going to come debating other people smarter of what they would do. And in my limited experience in Iran tells me how little the American government knows. You just simply cannot pick this stuff up from academic papers and the rest of it. It doesn't work that way.
- [52:51]
Ryan Grim
So the Israelis, you know, really have leaned into this assassination, assassination strategy. You're the perfect one to ask about that. You're the author of the Perfect Kill, which, you know, you've got in there. I think it's called 21 Rules for Assassinations or something along those lines. Like, when you, when you think about those rules and your, and your career as a CIA case officer, how do you assess the effectiveness of kind of US Israeli assassination program, whether it's Hezbollah, Hamas, or, or now as it's rolling out in Iran?
- [53:28]
Robert Baer
Well, when I wrote the book, it was, it was, I, like, I write so much, so much is obvious. Had we assassinated Hitler, had he be, had he been assassinated early on in the war, we would have saved a lot of bloodshed. But what we're seeing in Lebanon is the Israelis have assassinated, you know, the leadership of Hezbollah, all of them, people I know, Mughnia, the rest of them. But now they're in the middle of, they're in a quagmire in southern Lebanon because there was a second and third tier of people that may be more effective than, than the people they got rid of. And I'm, you know, they assassinated Khamenei, but we don't even know where their son's alive. I mean, I could see the Iranians knowing he's dead, died in that first attack, yet carrying on with this whole idea of martyrdom and spirit. So I think, I think, you know, the proofs in the pudding and assassination in terms of Iran and Hezbollah is not effective.
- [54:32]
Krystal Ball
The Israeli outcome is if there's regime change. What we know is that they're not concerned so much about utter chaos engulfing Iran. They actually see a weak Iran as a benefit to Israel, even in the long term from public reporting and statements and the like. What can you tell us about how true that actually is? So if we take Israel's argument at face value, is it actually true that Israel is safer in the long term with Iran mired in, in chaos? Or does the factionalization actually create an enormously difficult, enormously dangerous situation the likes of which we haven't even seen so far?
- [55:12]
Robert Baer
I, you know, Israel lives in a bad neighborhood. And, and I don't think at the end of the day, chaos in your border, on your borders, is going to turn out to be profitable. I mean, it was, you know, if Oslo had worked, they'd have been better off. And now you are going to, once you destabilize, let's say Saudi Arabia, let's take a scenario that tomorrow we hit Kharg island, the next day the Iranians take out op cake, shut off 7 million barrels a day, take out water supplies. You're going to have an Arab world that's going to fall apart, including Jordan, on their border. And what do you do with all of these people, you know, armed, and you're pushing into chaos? And I'm not. That's not the best solution. Now, what destroyed any chance of a peace was the 7th of October, of course, which was horrific for the Israelis. And they are responding to it, and this administration is still responding to it. But look, Hamas is still in place in Gaza. The west bank is not getting any better, it's getting worse. And Jerusalem is, and Israeli society is becoming less secular by the minute, which isn't good for, it's not good for Israelis because a lot of Israelis just going to pick up and leave the ones that can. And you're going to have this very small state which is ultimately indefensible if the population is cut way down and you have all this craziness on your borders. So, I mean, we are really into unchartered waters here. You don't take value of what Netanyahu's done. You just see what forces he's reacting to. And then you take the forces that the Iranians are reacting to, and you have two immovable forces here at loggerheads, and the entire world will pay for this. I see these numbers from hedge funds in New York about what this is doing to derivatives in the petroleum market. We've yet to feel it, and there's no turning back right now. It can't be fixed. And if, and if Iran controls Hormuz and turns it into a toll booth and keeps Arab oil from leaving or highly taxed, it's a new game.
- [57:50]
Ryan Grim
What's your sense of, if you listen to Trump or Hegset, the Rubio. Now, the US Is just cleaning up and really showing them who's boss. What's your sense of who's winning this war? Strategically at this point, I still think
- [58:03]
Robert Baer
it's the Samson option. I think that if it continues, Iran will become a failed state. It'd be like Somalia or Syria. Whether ethnic problems, civil war comes to this, I can't tell you. It's unknowable. So I don't think anybody's winning in this. The point is, the IRGC is in place. It's calling the shots. We don't know who the second tier commanders are. The third, we don't know how devoted they are. And trust me, these people, the irgc, are tough people. I mean, they have no sense of humor. When I was in Tehran, I went and knocked on our embassy door and said, let me in. This guy comes, this officer comes out, he says, go away. You know, I didn't give up. So I pounded against, I'm an American taxpayer. Let me in. I want to see her property. And he just slammed. They are very, very serious, as we know. And they. They mow people down in the street. I just don't see them giving up. I mean, these people are still. They live by grievances that when the prophet's grandson was murdered, that's foremost in their lives. You know, I just don't see him giving. You know, even if. Even if we do take out Khark, I would imagine no one's going to dare surrender.
- [59:35]
Ryan Grim
Well, have you noticed the kind of meme war that Iran has been waging? The jokes have been asymmetrically kind of in favor so far, actually, of the Iranian government. This time they seem to be laughing all the way to Sampson here.
- [59:53]
Robert Baer
Oh, yeah. I mean, they've been. Look, here's the problem. Uranian actors from 79 on blamed us for the Shah. Yes, we participated in the corruption, but nothing we did do deserved our embassy being overrun. And then there are various terrorist acts that they've conducted that the military hasn't forgotten. They did the Marines in 83. It was them, not Hezbollah, it was Iran who. Who organized that. And I could go on and I could just inflame, you know, with all attacks that we know they did and they took the hostages. It was Iran, not Hezbollah. So we have our grievances, but now they're meeting. But the Iranians have this deep sense of justice and injustice, and they think that they're the receiving end of an imperial United States. They look at Israel as an imperial state, essentially run by the United States. You know that's not true. But the way they look at it in the street is that we are calling the shots in Tel Aviv. It, it's the way they look at the world and they say, you know, there's some sort at the end divine justice or it's secular too. And you know, when I talked to the Basij about suicide bombings in the Iran Iraq war, they said, no, you people, you have it wrong. It's not because of 72 virgins and they wear the little white keys. It's because you agree with one of your soldiers rushing and dying to take out a machine gun nest in World War II. We're the same way. These people are not stupid and they know what they're doing. And what, and what they've been hitting the aluminum facilities in the Gulf and the rest of it, it's pinpoint strikes and damage it's going to be doing to the West. You look at the Islamic State and they just slaughtered the for slaughter's sake. The Iranians are much more focused and have a plan.
- [62:07]
Ryan Grim
What is the off ramp for Trump? Where does this, what's the best case scenario here? What's the worst case scenario?
- [62:13]
Robert Baer
The best case scenario is he says, look, we changed the leadership. Everybody's been assassinated with the bad guys. We can deal with these guys and we're going to come to, he's going to declare victory and leave. That's the best solution. I don't think the Iranians are going to surrender to the demands. I don't think Hezbollah is going to surrender. I think that's going to keep going on. So the best is declare victory and leave. We set them back 20 years in their industry and the rest of it. But on the other hand, if they control oil coming in and out of the Gulf, anybody looking at the numbers, economically, it'll look like they won.
- [63:00]
Ryan Grim
All right. Well, Bob, thanks so much for taking some time. Really appreciate it.
- [63:03]
Robert Baer
Of course.
- [63:05]
Krystal Ball
Well, that's going to do it for us on today's edition of Breaking Points. Please do go to breakingpoints.com to get a premium subscription. Support the independent journalism that we're doing here on the show. Help us keep getting guests like Robert Pape and Bob Baer, also that Cuba segment. Ryan, thank you so much for bringing this reporting back.
- [63:21]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And if you want to support either Belly of the Beast, the Cuban news organization, US Based, but Cuban, Cuban powered news organization, Cuban journalists, you can do that. Or the TrueNot podcast, we're on the
- [63:36]
Krystal Ball
cusp of 2 million YouTube subscribers. So please, please do go ahead and sub on the YouTube channel if you haven't done so yet. We appreciate it. Crystal and Saga will be back in here to tomorrow. We'll see you on Friday's edition of the show.
- [64:05]
Liz Oliva Fernandez
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.