Will Epstein Files Take Down the British Government?

Summary

Pod Save the World – Episode 506

Title: Will Epstein Files Take Down the British Government?
Date: February 11, 2026
Hosts: Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes
Special Guest: Nilou Tabrizi

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Episode Overview

This week, Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes dissect a week dense with global political controversy, beginning with the explosive Epstein-Mandelson scandal destabilizing the UK government. They analyze major electoral upheaval in Japan, precarious U.S.-China-Taiwan relations, mounting corruption concerns in the Trump administration, and the charged political mood at the Winter Olympics. The latter part features former Washington Post investigative reporter Nilou Tabrizi reflecting on mass layoffs gutting foreign coverage at legacy news outlets, and the implications for global understanding.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. UK Political Crisis: Epstein Files and Keir Starmer’s Future

• Context: British PM Keir Starmer faces immense pressure to resign after fallout from appointing Peter Mandelson—whose extensive ties to Jeffrey Epstein have recently come to light—as UK Ambassador to the U.S.
  • Mandelson was dismissed following release of communications postdating Epstein’s sexual assault conviction and revelations he passed sensitive government information to Epstein.
  • Starmer claims Mandelson lied during vetting.
• Parliamentary Response:
  • [11:20] Keir Starmer, responding to Parliament:
    "I want to make sure this House sees the full documentation so it will see for itself the extent to which… Mandelson completely misrepresented the extent of his relationship with Epstein and lied throughout the process… Sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed it."
  • Facing calls to resign from figures like Anas Sarwar (Scottish Labour).
  • Labour’s popularity sinking—Starmer’s approval now worse than Liz Truss at her nadir.
  • [14:52] Ben Rhodes:
    "He’s got like a dead man walking vibe."
• Analysis:
  • Mandelson’s appointment seen as emblematic of Starmer’s strategic choice: purge the Labour left, tack to the center, cozy up to “globalist” Blair-era figures.
  • Starmer’s woes are not just the Epstein shadow, but evidence of a failing political strategy.
  • [15:31] Tommy Vietor:
    "We don’t fire anybody. But look, Morgan McSweeney is central… orchestrated this centrist [strategy]… and where Peter Mandelson comes in."
  • Internal collapse: “two chiefs of staff, four directors of comms, eleven ministers lost in 19 months.”
  • European public anger at both domestic leaders and America (US favorability at record lows)—possibly fueling more aggressive European pursuit of Epstein-connected figures.

2. U.S. National Security Scandal: Tulsi Gabbard and a Suppressed Whistleblower Report

• Story: Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has been accused of suppressing a highly classified whistleblower report, sparking bipartisan concern.
  • Nature of intelligence: NSA intercepted foreign intelligence discussing someone close to Trump, with possible Iran links.
• Analysis:
  • [24:37] Ben Rhodes:
    "It’d have to be pretty alarming for someone to do this, I think."
  • Trump’s chaotic “friends-and-family” style foreign policy enables backchannel influence and possible foreign manipulation.
  • [25:58] Jon Favreau:
    "All these lawyers, former aides to Trump, are setting up cottage industries trying to sell you a pardon."

3. Japan: Historic Election and a Hawkish New Era

• Context: PM Sanae Takaichi calls snap election, wins massive supermajority.
  • LDP now controls over 350 of 465 lower house seats.
  • Takaichi now has near-unchecked power—her win is personal, not party-driven.
• Potential Moves:
  • Amend Article 9 of postwar constitution (renouncing war), increase defense spending, possibly reshape the balance of regional power.
• Regional Risks:
  • [32:55] Ben Rhodes:
    "We're at a time when people want strong leaders… And she kind of sensed that mood. Now, she's very conservative… It's a little worrisome because if you've got this flashpoint in the Taiwan Strait and you start to have a more muscular Japan, that's going to freak out the Chinese."
  • U.S. pressure on Japan and other allies to re-arm is dovetailing with rising rightwing nationalism—a development with historic echoes and significant risks.

4. US–China–Taiwan Tensions, Jimmy Lai Case, & Trump’s Beijing Visit

• Developments:
  • Hong Kong: Media tycoon Jimmy Lai sentenced to 20 years—effectively silencing press freedom.
  • Taiwan: U.S. prepping unprecedented arms sales package ($20 billion), overshadowing Trump’s planned China trip.
  • [41:08] Ben Rhodes:
    "I don't think Xi Jinping would let Jimmy Lai out of prison… It might have been earlier… but all his moves suggest a guy… moving at a deliberate pace but only in one direction…"
  • Chinese retaliation expected (military exercises, diplomatic freeze) but unlikely to cancel Trump visit.
  • Taiwan now "the flashpoint" in U.S.-China relations.

5. Olympics: International Mood, Cheating Scandal, and American Unpopularity

• Notable Moments:
  • US Vice President J.D. Vance booed at opening ceremony ([48:22]).
  • Trump personally attacks US skier for mild dissent.
  • Tabloid story: rumors ski jumpers injected hyaluronic acid into genitals to “game” suit size for advantage—probably false but indicative of the absurd rumor mill.
  • [48:22] Ben Rhodes:
    "At an Olympics in Europe, we're kind of like the bad guys…. Our JD Vance is getting booed… As an American, that should make you uncomfortable."
  • Norwegian biathlete uses medal ceremony to confess to cheating—on his girlfriend.
  • Modern Olympics require athletes to endure not just physical, but heavy political scrutiny.

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Interview Segment: Nilou Tabrizi on the Demise of Foreign Reporting

Context:

Former Washington Post reporter Nilou Tabrizi discusses mass layoffs at the Post, which gutted foreign desks and eliminated much of its international reporting capacity.

Key Points

• Layoff Shock:

  • [61:42] “We started to hear rumors… nearly all foreign bureaus would be shut down… But everything that happened was so much more severe than any of us prepared for.”
  • [63:02] “We were told, after this meeting, you’re going to get an email… if your position is eliminated… And I was one of the more than 300 people that got an eliminated email.”

• Loss for Journalism & Global Understanding:

  • Middle East team, Ukraine team, Russia correspondent all gone.
  • “Names that, for me, were the byline definers of the Washington Post are no longer there.”
  • “There’s people that took the risk to speak with me for work that I have to hit pause on now.”

• Broader Implications:

  • Devastating ripple effects—not only reporters but local staff, fixers, translators.
  • [68:42] “I don’t even think we’ll be able to grasp that [loss] until some real consequences come out.”
  • Foreign reporting “is a team effort,” requires resources, training, and editorial oversight.

• Bezos Factor:

  • [71:53] Ben Rhodes: “It’s poor leadership. It is really hard to know… Someone who owns our paper could fund it. That’s been brought up several times.”
  • Newsroom culture and collaboration at the Post “really harmed by this action.”

• The Future:

  • With only a handful of global organizations (NYT, WSJ, BBC) able to maintain bureaus, and more foreign coverage shifting to independent/online at great risk, “healthy competition” and depth in international journalism is rapidly disappearing.

• On Iran’s Mood:

  • Trauma is overwhelming; political violence and repression leave everyone affected, living in “completely unprocessed trauma.”
  • [77:16] “Everyone I speak with just says they can’t even form thoughts… Population of people who are in deep trauma and grieving and feel increasingly stuck.”

• Where to follow Nilou:

  • On X (Twitter): [@ntabrizi]

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Select Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• Keir Starmer in Parliament: [11:20]
  • “Sorry for having believed Mandelson’s lies and appointed it.”
• Ben Rhodes on US political culpability: [15:31]
  • “The point is that we don’t fire anybody.”
• Jon Favreau on Trump era rumor-mongering: [25:58]
  • “All these lawyers, former aides to Trump, are setting up cottage industries trying to sell you a pardon.”
• Ben Rhodes on Taiwan tension: [41:08]
  • “Taiwan is the issue that we’re going to be paying a lot more attention to over the next year or two.”
• Ben Rhodes on US image at the Olympics: [48:22]
  • “We’re kind of like the bad guys… As an American, that should make you uncomfortable.”
• Nilou Tabrizi on layoffs: [63:02]
  • “We got these cold emails and there were people that have been there for 27-plus years of service… also laid off in this subject line email. So it was really… ungrounding.”

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Episode Structure & Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 02:50 | Show proper begins, banter, episode overview | | 05:25 | UK: Starmer, Mandelson & Epstein scandal | | 14:52 | Starmer’s political prospects, Labour collapse | | 19:39 | Broader European reckoning with the Epstein files and anti-American sentiment | | 21:04 | US National Security: Tulsi Gabbard, NSA, whistleblower saga | | 30:47 | Japan: Election earthquake and PM Takaichi’s new era | | 38:04 | China: Military shakeups, US arms to Taiwan, human rights issues | | 46:00 | Olympics: US unpopularity, ski jumping cheating rumor, athletes’ political exposure | | 60:46 | Interview: Nilou Tabrizi on Washington Post layoffs, Iran, missing foreign coverage | | 80:00 | Outro banter, preview next week |

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Tone & Language

Throughout, hosts remain characteristically sharp, irreverent, and passionate about both the absurdities and dangers of the moment. Sarcasm and wit abound, but undergirded by serious discomfort at the state of democratic institutions, media, and America’s international standing.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode offers a front-row seat to governmental implosion in the UK driven by the depth and repercussions of the Epstein network; a granular look at how press freedom and accountability are on perilous ground in the U.S. and beyond; and the unnerving way stubborn old-school street politics, authoritarianism, and international animus are colliding with new realities—from Tokyo to London, Beijing, Tehran, and the Olympics. It also delivers an urgent guest perspective on the existential crisis facing foreign journalism, and details the stark loss to public discourse the global community faces when those stories go untold.

Recommendation:
If you want to understand why the world feels so unsettled, why press coverage is sparser every day, and how much real political accountability (or the lack thereof) can reshape the global order, this episode is essential.

Transcript

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Tommy Vietor]

Exist if it wasn't for President Obama. My career wouldn't exist.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know. Yeah, who knows where we'd be? Man, I remember like when I got.

[Tommy Vietor]

The job with Edwards, I was choosing between that and going to work at.

[Jon Favreau]

Club Med as a geo, which meant basically you trip kids while playing street.

[Tommy Vietor]

Hockey or basketball or whatever.

[Jon Favreau]

But as you all probably know, we've.

[Tommy Vietor]

Been inspired by President Obama and his work inside and outside of office. So we're excited to announce that the Obama Presidential center officially opens this June.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Tommy Vietor]

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[Tommy Vietor]

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Athletic center, a theater, a media lab.

[Tommy Vietor]

And a branch of the Chicago Public Library.

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A collection of brand new commissioned art.

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

It's a very special place.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'm excited to see the Obama Presidential Center. Hopefully get out there for like, I don't know.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, go see it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Plan your [e-mail] and sign up for exclusive updates and special offers. The Obama Presidential Center Bring Change Home.

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[Jon Favreau]

Welcome to Pod Table World.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'm Tommy Vitor.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Jon Favreau]

Ben.

[Ben Rhodes]

Hello.

[Jon Favreau]

From New Zealand.

[Tommy Vietor]

I think it's 21 hours difference here. It's a little.

[Ben Rhodes]

What time is it there?

[Jon Favreau]

So it is. Where's my phone? It is Wednesday, February 11th at 11:07.

[Ben Rhodes]

So you're like way ahead. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

So you get on the plane. I got on the plane at 10:30 at night in LA time and then you land on Tuesday. So you just like thanos a day.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yep.

[Jon Favreau]

And Monday never exists.

[Ben Rhodes]

If you come back, you'll get it back.

[Jon Favreau]

You get it back. On the way. On the way back, you. Yeah, you get it back. But it's like basically the easiest way to think about it. It's like negative 21 or you guys are 21 behind me. But in practice it's as if you're three hours ahead. So I'm just treating you like you're in New York and I'm in la.

[Ben Rhodes]

That makes sense. Well, I mean I hope you have been able to lick your wounds out there. There's not a lot of people talking. Patriots. Drake, May.

[Jon Favreau]

I was wondering if you're going to get to this. So I did pack one sweatshirt and it is a Patriot sweatshi. Luckily it's pretty warm in New Zealand and Australia this time of year, but yeah, it's tough.

[Ben Rhodes]

Hey, you made it and you have a 22 year old quarterback. I think you'll be back. I think he'll be fine.

[Jon Favreau]

Listen, you know, just be grateful you made it there, I guess. Apparently the whole Patriots didn't play any one good strength of schedule thing. They had a point.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, that. That kind of bore out. That kind of bore out. I mean you had the bo. Knicks go down. I mean but hey, you know, you, you got there, you got. I'm a Jets fan. Like we haven't smelled the super bowl since before I was born, so.

[Jon Favreau]

No, you're. You just watch former quarterbacks win Super Bowls. Shout out. Sam.

[Ben Rhodes]

I know, I know. One of my. One of our guys. Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Ben, did you see this morning? Or maybe it was yesterday, who knows. When it was Trump threatened to close down the Gordie Howe bridge between Michigan and Ontario.

[Ben Rhodes]

I did two social posts.

[Jon Favreau]

I want to read you a verbatim quote and tell me if this sort of vibes with the intelligence you read About China back in the day.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Prime Minister Carney wants to make a deal with China which will eat Canada alive. We'll just get the leftovers. I don't think so. The first thing China will do is terminate all ice hockey being played in Canada and permanently eliminate the Stanley Cup. Are you aware of Xi Jinping being in support of, like, a hockey genocide?

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm not. Nor am I aware of Trump being commissioner of the National Hockey League. But maybe, you know, if the Canadians want to be smart about it, you know, Wayne Gretzky's Super Maga hanging out with Trump all the time. Maybe they should just rename the bridge the Wayne Gretzky Bridge, and then they keep it open. I don't know.

[Jon Favreau]

That's a pretty good idea. Gordie Howe was a badass.

[Ben Rhodes]

He was a badass. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

All right, so we got a wide range of topics today, kind of befitting our 21 hour time difference. We're gonna start in the UK, where Prime Minister Keir Starmer is facing calls to resign based on his administration's association with Jeffrey Epstein. Accountability must be nice. We're also gonna tell you about a landslide election in Japan and how those results could permanently change the constitution and character of the country. Trump's got a big trip to China coming up in April. We'll explain how two major issues in the US China relationship are threatening to derail that visit. We're also going to update you on these reports we talked about last week about the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, suppressing this super duper top secret, only allowed one copy in a safe whistleblower report. So since we talked, Congress finally got a copy of the thing, and then some details have leaked out in the media. And then finally we're going to check in on the Olympics. We got the cheers, the boos, the cheating scandal that somehow involves inflated penises but not sex. So we'll unpack all that. One, the scandal that's rocking the Olympics.

[Ben Rhodes]

Scandal for our times, if ever there was one.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes, indeed. Metaphorically rocking, that is. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. What are we going to hear?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I talked to Nilou Tabrizi, who's been on before, she's was actually just laid off from the Washington Post, where she was an investigative reporter focused on Iran, wrote an extraordinary book about Iran.

[Jon Favreau]

Well, nothing's happening there, so it's a good time to kind of. Well, that's less insight into that.

[Ben Rhodes]

Exactly. I mean, her being fired at this moment actually points to the Absolute absurdity of what they just did there. But we talked about how that went down, what it was like, literally, like, you know, how did they laugh, all those people? What's going to be lost with all these foreign desks going away, where international news coverage might be going in this period of consolidation and layoffs. The Jeff Bezos of it all. And what it's like to feel like you've been laid off by a guy that could have lost the change in his couch that would have paid for the Washington Post for the rest of his life. And also her impression of what's happening in Iran based on her conversations with sources. So really important conversation. People should check it out.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. The marketing budget on the Melania movie could have saved what, like the entire forum heroes, basically for several years. So. Yeah, that's great. Well, I'm excited to listen to that. I'm sorry that that happened to her. Obviously, we here at POD Save the World cannot replace, like, major media institutions like the Washington Post, but I think that story is a sign that they are billionaires are not coming to save us. So if you want to help support independent, progressive media, you know, thanks for watching the show. Thanks for subscribing. Subscribe if you're watching on YouTube, subscribe if you're listening as a podcast. But if that's not enough for. If you want to, you know, do even more and become a supporter of crooked media itself, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It really is the single most important thing you could do to help us grow as a company. You get lots of bonus content. You get ad free episodes. You get a lot more if you just go to crooked.com friends for more information. We have experienced explosive growth over here, Ben. People are calling us the bad bunny of podcasting. If you want to dip into that.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Little mini scandal from over the weekend. It's like people that are mad about the super bowl half down show just like, just mute it.

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't have to watch. It was also like an absolute banger and. And a very worldo halftime show with the end with all the Americas. Yeah, I had a little tear in the eye on that one.

[Jon Favreau]

It was cool. It's like watching like a movie. It was just like.

[Ben Rhodes]

It really was well and actually interesting. Yeah, it was like I grew up in New York where there are 2 million, I think Puerto Ricans. And so I, I like. I was like, oh, yeah, like that. Some of that was familiar to me. But then it was just so deep in that culture. It was pretty extraordinary. To immerse in it like that.

[Jon Favreau]

So anyway, yeah, shocked that Trump was mad about it. What a surprise.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, what a surprise. Well, a Kid Rock show is, you know, I'm sure that's great.

[Jon Favreau]

I love people were people were tweeting out like lyrics from his songs that are like about, you know, suck on my balls this or that. It's like, okay, have fun. You're a Christian. Halftime show, everybody.

[Ben Rhodes]

Little Turning Point USA content there.

[Jon Favreau]

Kid Rock hasn't been cool for 25 years, if ever. Okay, so let's start with the UK because while our president has faced no consequences for his decades long close personal friendship with disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, there are growing calls for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to resign over his government's ties to Epstein. So some quick context just to catch everybody up here. Until late last summer, the British ambassador to the US Was a guy named Peter Mandelson. Mandelson was once a top aide to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, though Mandelson had a rocky career that kind of was waylaid by repeated scandals. But despite that checkered history, despite the fact that it was pretty well known that Mandelson had a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Starmer still made him the ambassador to the U.S. now, Mandelson was ultimately fired from that post last September after the House Oversight Committee released a bunch of emails between Epstein and Mandelson that showed they remained closed even after Epstein had been convicted of soliciting sex from a minor. I think he was emailing him about crashing at his place, like while Epstein was in jail or on whatever cushy jail he had in Florida. And then, though, things got exponentially worse for labor after that latest tranche of Epstein files released by DOJ that revealed that Mandelson was forwarding Jeffrey Epstein's sensitive government information. We talked about this last week, but it was genuinely shocking stuff. Secret details about the US and UK response to the financial crisis, internal memos that went to then Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Much more. So Starmer now says that Mandelson lied to him and lied to his team during the vetting for the job. Keir Starmer was pressed on this question of what vetting was done with Mendelssohn during Prime Minister's question time. Here's a bit of that answer. And then there's another clip from Starmer apologizing to victims at a separate event. And then you'll hear Starmer's even more defiant tone on Tuesday.

[Keir Starmer / Anas Sarwar (UK Politicians)]

Can the Prime Minister tell us did the official security vetting he received Mention Mandelson's ongoing relationship with the paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, Prime Minister. Yes, it did. As a result, various questions were put to him. I want to make sure this House sees the full documentation so it will see for itself the extent to which. The extent to which, time and time again, Mandelson completely misrepresented the extent of his relationship with Epstein and lied throughout the process, including in response to the due diligence. Victims of Epstein have lived with trauma that most of us can barely comprehend. I am sorry. Sorry. Sorry for what was done to you. Sorry that so many people with power failed you. Sorry for having believed Mandelson's lies and appointed it. There are some people in recent days who say the Labour government should have a different fight, a fight with itself instead of a fight for the millions of people who need us to fight for them. And I say to them, I will never walk away from the mandate I was given to change this country. The fight coming up in politics, the real fight, is not in the Labour Party. It's with the right wing politics that challenges that, the politics of reform.

[Jon Favreau]

So Morgan McSweeney, who is Keir Starmer's now former chief of staff, took responsibility for pushing to select Mendelssohn for that job. McSweeney has since resigned, but the question is, will that be enough? And really, will members of the Labour Party decide that this is their moment to push out Keir Starmer and make a leadership change that many of them already wanted? Because Labor's approval rating has basically been heading in a line straight down since the last election in 2024. According to the Economist, Keir Starmer is now the most unpopular prime minister in their recorded history. His net approval rating is worse than Liz Truss at her lowest, though. Ben, she was defenestrated after only 49 days. So maybe it's not a fair comparison. Anas Sarwar, the head of the Scottish Labour Party, called on Starmer to resign. Here's just a bit of what he had to say.

[Keir Starmer / Anas Sarwar (UK Politicians)]

The situation in Downing street is not good enough. There have been too many mistakes. They promised they were going to be different, but too much has happened.

[Jon Favreau]

Have there been good things?

[Ben Rhodes]

Of course there have, many of them.

[Keir Starmer / Anas Sarwar (UK Politicians)]

But no one knows them and no one can hear them because they're being drowned out.

[Jon Favreau]

That's why it cannot continue.

[Ben Rhodes]

Keir Starmer is a decent man and.

[Jon Favreau]

It is no secret that I have.

[Keir Starmer / Anas Sarwar (UK Politicians)]

Always got on well with him and he has dedicated his life to public service. I have also dedicated myself to public service and I need to decide what I'm willing to accept and what I'm willing to tolerate.

[Jon Favreau]

Okay, so Ben, so far, like, the top labor ministers are all sticking with Keir Starmer and backing him publicly. But this challenge is not really about Jeffrey Epstein. It's about, for Starmer, it's about getting the economy going, demonstrating a clear vision to voters, convincing the rest of the Labor Party that you're the guy for this moment. And I have to say, like, it feels very hard to see how he's going to write this ship and serve out a full term. Like, he might survive this near term issue, but, like, I don't know, man, he's got like a dead man walking by. But what do you think?

[Ben Rhodes]

I agree with you. And I think it's worth kind of doing the brief journey to how we got here. And first of all, it's interesting, and Alex and I talked about this in parts of America, Tommy, but the fact that Keir Starmer wasn't even in the Epstein files.

[Jon Favreau]

I know, right?

[Ben Rhodes]

And yet he may be taken out by one person who's in the files, Mandelson. And all these Americans are evading all this accountability, including a current president and maybe a former president. I wish we still had a system where shame and transparency, you know, not that the British system is perfect by any measure, but at least that there's still some gravity there.

[Tommy Vietor]

I know.

[Jon Favreau]

And like Howard Lutnick, like the Commerce Secretary, he made up a story about ties on TV and then went to fucking Epstein island, was doing business deals with the guy. Yeah, like fire your Commerce Secretary. No one gives a shit about the Commerce Secretary. Continue.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, no, but that's the point, right? The point is that we don't fire anybody. But look, Morgan McSweeney is central to this whole thing. And I've met Morgan McSweeney a bunch of times. And so I met him right when Keir Starmer became leader. And this guy was like the David Axelrod. He was the absolute political strategist, dictatorial political strategist at the Labour Party. And he orchestrated a very successful, for his purposes and Starmer's purposes, reorientation of the Labour Party. So it's coming out of Jeremy Corbyn. They'd taken a left turn. They basically purged all the Jeremy Corbyn people, made a big show of purging some anti Semitic elements, tacked to the center, rebuilt bridges to the kind of Blair class of the Labor Party. And that's where Peter Manelsen comes in, because he's the quintessential version of he's not a leftist, he's an operator. You know, he's a guy that is, you know, Mr. Globalization. Right. And all the way to the worst.

[Jon Favreau]

Parts of Jefferson knows all the bankers, has lots of contacts. Exactly. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so where this all comes together is that Mendelssohn as ambassador reflected, like, poor judgment. You should have looked a little harder at him. But it also reflected a choice that Starmer made from the beginning about how to govern, which is to take that kind of cautious, always look over your right shoulder, tack to the center, befriend the globalist approach. And the kind of Peter Mandelson politics that became, I think, to a lot of people, at least, what Keira Starmore is projecting. So it's both the immediate scandal, it's also the fact that this was the play they made. It wasn't just that Mandelson was ambassador uk, they kind of took on that approach to politics, and it's worked out horribly for them. And the reason I agree with you too, Tommy, is that if he was as strong in the polls and he was doing well, I think he could survive this. But ultimately, he's in the toilet with his numbers. And what happens in the UK is they have these by elections. These are kind of our version of off your local elections that are kind of bellwethers for where the public mood is. And if labor gets absolutely pasted in one or succession of those elections, then I think you might see the final dam break and Starmer have to go.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, and they've done a lot of the shuffling stuff, like, I think his communications director. Starmer's communications director also quit on Monday. The Economist noted that in 19 months, Keir Starmer has lost two chiefs of staff, four directors of communications, and 11 ministers. So they've been doing the kind of internal reshuffle thing. It ain't working. And to your point, they campaigned on taxes not going up. It's clear they can't really keep that promise. They campaigned hard as an effort to sort of defang the right wing on stopping the small boats and cutting down immigration. They haven't been able to deliver on that in part because you can never kind of outright wing the right wing. And so I think I saw Starmer's approval rating is now at 23%. Right. Oh, by the way, Ben Axios had a list of, like, European leader approval ratings. Macron is at the bottom with 16%. Friedrich Merz over in Germany is at 21%. Keir Starmer's at 23%. But then also I saw YouGov did surveys tracking Europeans opinions of the US and more than 60% of the population of Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Great Britain now have an unfavorable view of the US that include 72% of Germans and 84% of Danes. So you have these unpopular European leaders and then populations that are starting to hate America and it's just none of this feels good. Also, by the way, police are also now investigating whether Prince Andrew broke the law by sharing other documents with Epstein. So back onto your accountability point. It's only seemingly happening in the uk. There's zero accountability back home. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I think though that that combination of there actually being accountability in Europe and their hatred of America these days I think is going to motivate really aggressive investigations into the Epstein file. Follow ups. Right. Including of the Americans in it, some of whom do business in Europe. And so we may be in this kind of strange position where the most aggressive legal and journalistic follow through on the Epstein files, including related to Americans, is going to happen in Europe because they're pissed over there. That's one thing you take away from all those polls is people are pissed. And Epstein kind of is the worst version of American hegemony, let's just say. Right. Just monster who's also got this network of powerful people. So that's something to watch too. Not just what happens can curse. I mean, what you can hear him doing is something he should have done for the beginning, which is trying to pick a fight with Nigel Farage and just make it a choice essentially. But he's not a particularly combative guy. He's not comfortable in the culture wars. He's been very defensive, as you say, on immigration. Not sure that will work for him. We'll see. Maybe it will. Maybe he can write the ship. But I do think either way, this kind of European anger among publics and elites is going to probably motivate them digging deep on, on what they can.

[Jon Favreau]

Find on Epstein, 100%. Because in fact what you're also seeing is, you know, like the Danish Prime Minister, Metta Fredriksen, her approval rating is up because she told Trump where to shove it. Right?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

So good for her. When we're unpopular over there and you're seeing polling like leaders benefit in the polls from seeming tough in, you know, the, in confronting Trump, like we know where this is going to go. One other update, Ben. So last week we did this big section on Tulsi Gabbard, the director of National Intelligence she had been in the news a bunch because she was weirdly, like, on the scene at the FBI's rate of the Fulton county election office in Georgia, which was very weird. Turns out Trump told her to be there. And then there was this mysterious Wall Street Journal report about Tulsi blocking a whistleblower complaint from being sent up to Congress, in part because it was highly classified, but also seemingly because of politics. So since then, the intelligence community's inspector general has turned the report itself, the whistleblower report, over to Congress. The so called Gang of Eight, which is the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, chairman and ranking member in the House Intelligence Committee, then the Speaker, House Minority Leader, Senate Majority Leader and Senate Minority Leader, all of that access to it. There's also been some news reports about the substance of the whistleblower report. The Guardian says the NSA intercepted a conversation between two individuals connected with a foreign intelligence service talking about someone close to Trump. Now, the, the sourcing in this story, the Guardian story, is a lawyer for one of the whistleblowers. And bizarrely, Ben, like, the lawyer initially told the Guardian that the call was between a foreign intel person and a Trump aide, but then had to, like, clarify that he misspoke. So it's all a little weird. And then the Times kind of followed up on that and they said it's not clear where the individuals are from, but that the discussion itself involved Iran. And the report, the whistleblower report was drafted around when Trump was considering whether or not to strike Iran. So maybe that gives us some more sort of visibility into this thing. The Times also says, like, there's a debate about the underlying value of the intelligence or whether these intel people were gossiping or spreading disinformation or what. But it does seem pretty clear that Gabbard screwed up either unintentionally or intentionally by not getting this report over to Congress in the timeframe required. And while there may have been some complexity to it, given the level of classification and limited reasons to distribute it, she also passed a copy along to Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff, which suggests there was some political ass covering happening. So, I don't know, man. What do you make of this as we're getting these little drips of information? Anything like, any clarity?

[Ben Rhodes]

No clarity. I mean, we could jump to the conspiracy theorizing. There's heavy Steve Witkoff vibes in here. Maybe not a Trump aide, but he's involved in Iran. I don't know, but we don't know. We don't know. We don't know. Here's what jumped out to me, Tommy. First of all, people should know. Sure, the NSA vacuums up all these calls, and I presume that Trump's NSA is probably even less restrained than the Obama nsa, which got in a lot of hot water. But it's very unusual for there to be a complaint like this. So in other words, presumably, incidentally, there might be collection that involves an American with foreigners or foreign intelligence services or governments. There's nothing unusual about that. It'd have to be pretty alarming for someone to do this, I think. So. That's one point.

[Tommy Vietor]

I agree.

[Ben Rhodes]

The second point is that Trump's style of decision making and the kind of loose nature of having this inner circle that encompasses people in government and out of government kind of lends itself to this kind of problem. Because I actually have talked to people in foreign governments who deal with the Trump administration. And what they do is because there's no formal process that works. Right. Like just having the meeting with Marco Rubio or the State Department doesn't work. You just start calling people that are in Trump's orbit. You know, you're calling Wyckoff, you're calling Jared, but you're also calling, like, somebody you know is going to Mar a Lago next weekend.

[Jon Favreau]

Hey, Roger Stone.

[Ben Rhodes]

You're calling fucking Roger Stone, or you're calling Steve Bannon or people who you think get in the door to see Trump, you're calling Tucker Carlson, you know, and it kind of lends itself to this, you know, we've talked about. It lends itself to corruption. It also just kind of lends itself to, like, potential malign influence. Right? Where, you know, you're, you're trying to court some foreign intelligence service or government is, you know, this is our guy. Let's go to that guy. And, you know, you know, meanwhile, maybe they're doing business with that guy, too. You know, like, this whistleblower complaint is probably indicative of much bigger problem that is obviously going to be the case if this is how you conduct foreign policy. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

And we're seeing this play out in the domestic realm, too. I mean, there's all these guys, lawyers, former aides to Trump, that are basically setting up cottage industries where they try to sell you a pardon.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Jon Favreau]

You pay them a million bucks and they'll get to the right person to get whoever pardoned. Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former head of state who was convicted of trafficking 400 tons of cocaine to the United States. Sure. You know, nothing's off the table here. So you're right. This does. It's a weird story. You know, Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, is, like, playing it down, saying it's no big deal.

[Ben Rhodes]

He plays everybody unless he did the right thing.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, real straight shooter there. But I don't know. Hopefully we'll learn more. This is one of the things where, like, the fact that it's classified, I think kind of leads to so much more lore. Like, maybe if they could just put it out, it might be.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's probably.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, I'd love to know.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think the big deal is what it says probably about how business is done, you know, which is this murky. You know, there's a reason you have process. There's a reason you want the people who deal with foreign governments to be employees of the United States government. You know, there's a reason you don't want your Middle east envoy to have a son who's in the crypto business doing huge deals. Right. Like, all these things lend itself to this kind of. This kind of, you know, ambiguity.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah. The Wall Street Journal had a piece out, I think, yesterday about, like. I forget what the total was. Like 1.4 billion has been made by the Trump family from their crypto businesses with, like, Zach Wyckoff, Steve Wyckoff's son, in charge of it. So, yeah, there's a lot of avenues for corruption.

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[Jon Favreau]

All right, Ben, let's turn to Japan, where Prime Minister Sana I take Ichi's gamble to call a snap early election to consolidate her power turned out to be a staggering success. So take Ichi's party, the ldp. They won this historic victory on Sunday. They picked up more than 100 seats outright, which means the LDP has about 316 seats on their own. And then with their coalition partners, they now control over 350 of the 465 seat lower house of the National Diet, which is Japan's legislature. So Takaichi basically pulled a reverse cured armor here. She got like when she became prime minister, she barely got enough support from within the party to get the job. But then 100 days later, she calls this election and she delivered her party a super majority through it. And the win was because of her, not because of the LDP's popularity. The LDP as we've talked about before, they've basically ruled Japan since 1955 with two brief kind of interruptions. But after former Prime Minister Shinzo abe's resignation in 2020, the party's been a bit of a mess. They've had a bunch of terrible candidates for prime minister and they've been losing support. And so what Takechi did is she seems to have almost single handedly revived the party and in the process destroyed the traditional opposition parties. They just got crushed in the polls. And so the question now is, what is she going to do with this power? Takei has talked about drastically ramping up Japan's defense spending in Japan's defense industry. That's an option. She's talked about amending Japan's constitution, In particular Article 9, which renounces war and codifies Japan as a pacifist nation. That language was basically written by the US and imposed on Japan in 1947 after World War II. She's also talked about major spending to juice the economy and drive growth. So we just don't know. I guess we'll now wait and see what she decides. Maybe it'll be a hybrid, maybe it'll be parts, not other parts. But the thing to know is that basically no one can stop her. Not the opposition in Parliament, not her own party. Ben, what did you make of the results? And how she ran and what it means for the balance of power in Asia and the partnership with the U.S.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, it connects back to what you said about the prime Minister of Denmark, right? Because take Ichi, and we said this at the time, she got into this fight with the Chinese and she doubled down on it. And that nationalism played well. We're at a time when people want strong leaders who seem like they're standing up for national interests. And so she's another case in point, and she's on the right, but I think frankly, you could be on the right or the left if, you know, people want to see kind of strong leadership. And she kind of sensed that mood. Now she's very conservative. And then that leads to what the ramifications of this are. And look, I mean, Japan has been in its constitution, a nation dedicated only to having self defense, not having any militarism, given its past and given the US Role in drafting that constitution. But it also has had this kind of building set of complicated relationships in this neighborhood. It would take a long time to unpack why. But you know, I think the, from the outside in, from the Chinese or South Korean perspective, for instance, it's that Japan didn't necessarily atone for its wartime sins in the way even that a Germany has. You know, the runes are still raw. But at the same time, from the Japanese perspective, the Chinese Communist Party has been stirring up anti Japanese nationalism for a long time. And it is virulent. I mean, I see some of this stuff, and so it's gotta be kind of scary to have this giant country next to you that is getting stronger and stronger and is part of its identity, is kind of hating Japan. And at the same time, the US Is not the reliable security guarantor that it has been because Trump, while he hasn't really singled out Japan this time around, can you really trust that the US Is going to be there to defend you against China? And so I think there are some natural things that we're building over time in terms of the security dimension in the region, in terms of the US alliance, and then along comes the Margaret Thatcher of Japan, and I think we're going to find out what it's like. And while I think some of this was inevitable, and she may also think maybe I can jumpstart growth by putting a lot of money in defense, I don't know. But it's a little worrisome because if you've got this flashpoint in the Taiwan Strait and that's what got her in trouble with the Chinese in the first place. She said that that was important to Japan's defense. And you start to have a more muscular Japan, that's going to freak out the Chinese. And it just adds to the tinderbox feeling of geopolitics right now.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, that was one of my takeaways too. I mean, look, just in terms of what she could do, you know, she could take steps that make the prime minister more powerful. Right. Like she could change it so she has more power during a crisis. She could lower the bar for future constitutional amendments. She could just sort of like add clauses to the constitution that recognize the self defense provisions of the military. There's sort of like sort of smaller, more incremental steps she could take than the ones I kind of laid out at the top. But like, I had the same reaction you did, Ben, which was, you know, the FT mentioned that like the Beijing warned Takichi against, quote, retracing the road of militarism. And as you said, like, obviously the Chinese are more than a touch hypocritical here. But it does worry me that one of Trump's like core policy things is pushing countries like Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan to invest more in defense spending. Right. As we are seeing a rise in these like right wing parties in these countries. It's like, I don't know guys, this could end very badly. We've seen it before.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, that collection of that access has not always been the best in the past, but I think that the foreign policy, sometimes people don't appreciate that success is just the absence of worse things happening. And if you look at Northeast Asia, you've got like nuclear armed North Korea divided from US aligned South Korea, emerging Chinese Communist Party superpower in Beijing, Japan. Like there's been stability somehow among those countries in the sense that there hasn't been a war and economic growth has been allowed to explode and people trade even if they, you know, don't like each other. And now if, if all of those countries are turning, you know, with the exception of South Korea for now, in this kind of direction. I don't know, like, can that hold for 10 years? I mean, because, you know, she's got beef with the Chinese, but I'm sure the North Koreans too, and vice versa, you know. And so if the US is kind of receding from this role of being the kind of security guarantor and we're so big and present that nobody will mess with it if we're kind of pulling back from that, the concern is there's opportunity maybe in having a Different balance of power in the world and new rules. But the downside could be giant vacuums and the road of militarism, to quote Chinese propaganda, leading to uncomfortable destinations.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, and a couple of weeks ago, we talked about Xi Jinping's purge of all the senior leaders in the Chinese military. And. And again, for what? What folks, you understand there is like the pla, the Chinese military. It's not like the country's military. It's the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party. So you're not necessarily elevated because you fought hard or bravely. It's like you. You greased the right guy, you bribed the right official, so you could have people with, like, zero fucking actual military experience at the top of the organization who don't really fully understand the horrors of war at a time when you have this rising military in Japan. And, yeah, like you said, like, sometimes you don't get a lot of credit as a leader for the dogs that kind of didn't bark or the problems that didn't arise during your tenure. But what you outlined could be a big one. Speaking of China, Ben, so there were two stories out of China that we wanted to flag. The first is Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai was sentenced to 20 years in prison under the National Security Law that China imposed on Hong Kong back in 2020 after the huge protests in 2019 and 2020. So this sentence, Jimmy Lai's sentence is the longest sentence ever given under the National Security Law, and it probably means he will die in prison unless something changes. He'd be, like, you know, late 90s when his sentence technically ends. The prosecution is clearly politically motivated. It's an effort to shut down his newspaper, Apple Daily. It's an effort to just crush any lingering hope for press freedom in Hong Kong generally. So that is very bad. The second story is about Taiwan. So the Financial Times reported that the Trump administration is pulling together another really large arms package for Taiwan that includes some big ticket items like Patriot missiles. Back In December, the US approved an $11 billion arms sale to Taiwan, which was massive then, and they say this next package could be nearly double that size. The number they quote in the story is up to 20 billion. The FT says when Xi Jinping talked to Trump on the phone last week, he raised this, and they quote sources in the story saying that Beijing has warned the US that the arms sale could derail Trump's visit to China in April. So, Ben, I found this confluence of issues interesting because I think you and I have said on the show, we both Assume Trump only cares about economics and getting a trade deal with China. However, in the past, he has promised to get Jimmy Lai out of prison. He actually said it would be easy to do so in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, who now has kind of gone quiet on the subject. But, like, you know, it's put up or shut up time. And the question is whether Trump will spend any political capital pushing Xi on Jimmy Lai or any other human rights issue during this visit. The cynic in me does wonder, Ben, if, like, China gives Jimmy Lai 20 years so they can cut a sentence down to five or 10, and Trump can call that a win and they still have their guy in jail, but put that aside. But this arms sale to Taiwan, it does feel like a much bigger hurdle and kind of harder to unwind given where the Republican Party is and given the congressional role in arming Taiwan. So I don't know what was your read on what's happening here and whether this actually creates some real turbulence for Trump as he heads to Beijing in April?

[Ben Rhodes]

I think it does. And first of all, we should say Jimmy Lai is a hero, and he's rich enough that he could have gotten out of there at a certain point and lived a certain kind of life, but he stuck by his newspaper and his principles. Interesting contest to Jeff Bezos, by the way. Jeff Bezos was not at risk of going to prison at all. Jimmy Lai gave everything up for what he believed. All we were asking Jeff Bezos to do is, you know, keep funding something. I mean, it just shows a difference. It's notable. I don't think that Xi Jinping would let Jimmy lie out of prison. I mean, if I had to bet on it, because he's a hard ass, you know, I mean, he's, you know, that's. He just purged the military, he's quashed dissent in Hong Kong. I think he wouldn't want to be seen to be even doing a favor for Donald Trump in this kind of human rights space. Like, it's a space where there's usually a slam door. I hope I'm wrong, but my sense is that that wouldn't be in the offing. It might have been earlier at the beginning of the Trump administration, but now, I mean, I think Xi's. All his moves suggest a guy internally and externally who's moving at a deliberate pace, but only in one direction, you know, and that's. That's a fairly confrontational direction with the United States on certain things. That leads me to Taiwan. Like, I think Taiwan is the issue that we're going to be paying a lot more attention to over the next year or two. I mean, it has not featured yet, but it is the flashpoint. You know, they, they continue to shovel these weapons out the door to the Taiwanese. Trump probably likes arms sales for a variety of reasons. They do, you know, provoke Beijing. And in the past, the way that the Chinese have dealt with that is, yes, sometimes by canceling meetings. Never a presidential visit, though that would be a huge signal if they actually did that. I don't think they will, but what they tend to do in response is they'll do some like really aggressive military exercises around Taiwan. You know, they'll fly over their airspace or fly missiles over their airspace or, you know, have like an armada that is uncomfortably close to the Taiwanese land and that always can risk getting a little scratchy. Right. And so I think that's what we're going to see is like this kind of a bit of a spiral. Unless Trump just chooses to kind of throw Taiwan overboard and agree to some formulation that essentially abandons them in terms of the US Coming to their defense. Either way, I think Taiwan is going to be something that we're talking about more and more over the next year or two.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, definitely one to watch as we head into April in particular.

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

Finally, Ben. The Winter Olympics are happening in Italy as we speak, so the host cities are technically Milan and Cortina, although the events are really happening all over northern Italy. Breezy Johnson won the first gold medal for the US and downhill skiing. US Figure skaters won gold in the team competition in part thanks to the quad God, Ilia Malin.

[Tommy Vietor]

Did I say that right? I don't know.

[Jon Favreau]

Two great names.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Quad God and Bree Johnson.

[Ben Rhodes]

My daughters were into the quad God.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, Quad God. I mean, that's his.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, because he can do these jumps that nobody else can do, you know.

[Jon Favreau]

Like, that's fucking wild. There's also been some heartbreak. Lindsay Von she was trying to come back at age 41 and trying to compete with a torn ACL. I do not understand how you do that, but had this horrible crash and had to be airlifted off of the course with the tibia fracture. That was tough. Speaking of painful things to look at, Vice President J.D. vance was booed when his face was shown on the stadium big screen at the opening ceremony. But he is not mad about it. Ben. Speaking of not mad, Donald Trump decided to personally attack a freestyle skier named Hunter Hess for Daring to say that he doesn't agree with everything happening in the US at all times. Basically love all the free speech absolutists in the White House. And then finally, we have to talk about this ever growing cheating scandal that is turning the sport of ski jumping upside down. So the German newspaper Bild reported that ski jumpers were allegedly injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid to enlarge them. So this is how this scheme would work. Ski jumpers wear special suits. They are specially made based on the size of the individual athlete's body, including the crotch area. So those measurements are determined by a 3D body scanner and they're taken in front of a doctor so that the total size of the suit matters though, because even a small amount of additional fabric or material on the suit can create more drag and more lift and help you fly farther. So the theory goes, you inject your junk with this acid. It's like lip filler, basically. It swells up. You get fitted for a bigger suit with more surface area. You go further. Now, this story is probably total bullshit. And the junk juicing would have had to happen like months ago when the suits were made. So we can't go out and test it now. But it is one of those stories that is too good to fact check. Ben, I have not had the Olympics on the last couple of days because I was on a plane for 7 trillion hours and now I'm in a time zone I can't understand. But what events are you watching?

[Ben Rhodes]

First of all, I feel like this last segment is getting edgier and edgier with each passing week. One thing on the JD Vance, and then the Olympics. It is weird and important that we at an Olympics in Europe, we're kind of like the bad guys. We're like what the Soviet Union used to be when they showed up at these places. Our JD vans is getting booed. Our athletes, poor athletes are having to answer for ice. And actually most of them are saying the right things. But that's like, you know, as an American, that should make you uncomfortable. You know, I mean, any other time I was on the US delegation to the closing ceremonies at the London Olympics and you know, they were cheering for American athletes. Like, you know, they were cousins or something, you know, so that was a little jarring. Yeah, I love the Winter Olympics because like I watched. I found myself watching curling.

[Jon Favreau]

I love, love a little curling.

[Ben Rhodes]

And trying to explain that to my kids was like an interesting journey. But I like the idea that there's still these Subcultures of people around the world that do like one thing obsessively, and then every four years, like you get to see their excellence at it.

[Jon Favreau]

Bobsled is the same way. Right? It's like. And well, the better athletes over the bobsled, I mean, you're sprinting as fast as humanly possible and shoving a heavy ass sled, but it's cool as hell.

[Ben Rhodes]

It is. And you know, I watch figure skatings on a lot my asses. I didn't want to watch Lindsey Vaughn because I had a sense of foreboding about the ACL thing. Freaked me out. But on the ski jump junk scandal, besides being physically uncomfortable thinking about it, I'm bad enough with like injections to begin with in my arm. I don't know what to. I mean, it just. It is interesting how performance enhancing drugs that used to just be like, you know, professional wrestlers juicing steroids or, you know, Mark McGwire, they seem to get like. As the rules to capture them become more aggressive. There's always some new frontier, you know, and this may be the final frontier, though I can't think of one beyond this to tell you.

[Jon Favreau]

Junk juicing. Yeah. Usually the juice shrinks the junk. There was a Norwegian team that was caught, I think, tampering with their suits to fly farther. So there is some precedent here. I feel like we're all getting clickbaited, but it's just too fun not to talk about it.

[Ben Rhodes]

Or they're leaking this so that people think that they've got bigger junk.

[Jon Favreau]

There you go. Yeah, I mean, that's why, you know, that's why both of us were recruited for ski jumping. There wasn't. Did you see this? Do you see this Norwegian athlete today? I can't say this guy's name. I'm not even gonna try.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, the guy who admitted his guilt. Yeah, yeah, this dude.

[Jon Favreau]

Sturla Holm. Lagrid. I don't know, it's one of those names where the two of the vowels are attached. So he won the bronze in the 20 kilometer biathlon. Then he used his post win interview to disclose that he cheated on his girlfriend and was heartbroken and wanted to get her back. Here's the quote I told her a week ago. And it's been the worst week of my life. I had a gold medal in life and there's probably a lot of people out there who look at me differently now, but I only have eyes for her. Sports has taken a bit of a backseat these past couple of days. Yeah, I wish I could Share this with her. I'm not ready to give up. I hope that committing social suicide might show her how much I love her. A social suicide there. I think it's meaning, like, baring his soul on Norwegian tv. That's one way to give a speech.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, you know, it's interesting. These athletes, this is like the one moment, you know, every, you know, maybe in their lives that they're gonna have a camera pointed at them in a large audience and some choose to, like, have political protest. And this is a different choice. But, but to me, that's what it reinforces. Like, what, what do you say if you get one shot to, to make some announcement to the world and. I don't know. I, I, I, I, I, I'm curious if there's any follow up on this story, because I'm, I don't know if. Yeah, yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

This is like the Will Smith slap of Olympic speeches. Also, dude, you won the bronze. You know what I mean? You're like, yeah, yeah. You're stealing the shine from other people. This woman must be so pissed. She's like, you're, you're Erin.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, now, yeah, now you're embarrassed. It's like the Reynolds pamphlet in Hamilton. Now I sound like a total lib, but you're just, just publishing. You're just kind of humiliating this woman all over again in front of the whole world. I don't know, it seems like weird judgment. I will say I love that event. And when I like the idea that you're going to ski and shoot things and, you know, so that's the Winter Olympics. That's the kind of stuff I like. These kind of sports that make no sense.

[Jon Favreau]

Is that one of the ones where you, like, you cross country ski, isn't it? And your, like, heart is exploding, then you lay down, you have to, like, shoot it.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think that's what it is. I mean, I could be wrong, but I think that's what it is.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And, and I, I love that sport because, like, who invented that? Like some, some Finns fighting off the Russians or something.

[Jon Favreau]

That's exactly right. Yeah. It was like dudes up in Finland battling, like, Soviet troops and the trees in World War I. Oh, we should.

[Ben Rhodes]

Make this a sport. You know, like, Jurgen's really good, you know, you know.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, man. Yeah. I love the Olympics too, man. It's fun when you're, like, with a group, you know, the kind of like, nationalism. The juices get flown, you get a good usa, USA chant going. It does just suck. Like these Poor athletes are being asked. They're up, they're doing press conferences because they have to. They're getting asked political questions, they're trying to offer like really measured responses. And then the President of the United States fucking unloads on you. Probably because you saw a tweet from Jake Paul or something. What are we doing?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, what are we doing? Come on. I mean, Jesus, it's just like everyone's.

[Jon Favreau]

Just got to be mad about fewer things. Like I will vote for a presidential candidate that promises to like not tweet about the halftime show at the super bowl to ban gender reveals. Just like a couple, like, just to shut up after like 8:00pm, you know, like, no, like white nationalist videos about the Obamas where you like turn them into monkeys. Like, how about that? That's like all I'm asking for.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I had tell you, Tommy, like, it got me thinking about. I mean, I thought this before too, but we've got the Olympics here in LA in two years and Trump is going to be the fucking president and that thing is going to be a nightmare because he's going to be like on his way out. Mad King Rosebud moment for Citizen Kane. What should be a really exciting thing to have the Olympics coming to Los Angeles. I have this foreboding about, you know.

[Jon Favreau]

I do too. Yes. I mean, he's got the World cup and then he has the Olympics. You know that like that asshole is going to like crash the podium when some American wins a gold medal and just like stand up there and like take it from them and assume that he actually won the 100 meter or whatever, like Maria Machado them.

[Ben Rhodes]

He'll be in a war, like a Twitter war with a men's basketball team the entire time or something.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, we'll bomb Canada halfway through it. That's an uplifting clothes. Well, look, I love the Olympics. Very fun talking with you from all the way over here. I will not be on the show next week because I don't even remember why. I think the logistics were flying back that day or something. But Ben's got a great guest host lined up for you. Do you want to announce it now or are you guys holding that?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. We're going to miss you, Tommy. But we've got a great guest host, Ayman Moyldine, who, you know, Ayman, just unbelievably smart about the world, about the Middle east in particular. I'm sure we're going to be able to cover a lot of that ground. So we'll miss you. But I'M going to be here and yeah, I mean, I'll be in Munich this week for the Munich security conference. So we're. I will be bringing some Euro gossip back with me.

[Jon Favreau]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

To the worldos I'll be. I think I'm going to like substack through this Munich security conference too, you know, impression.

[Jon Favreau]

I love it. I love it. I was actually whatsapping with the, with a German lawmaker who is the one who is interviewing AOC at the Munich Security Forums. She's all pumped and it'll be great. I'm glad you're doing that.

[Ben Rhodes]

By the way, great choice for guests aoc, some props. I don't know if you saw her. She's been throwing haymakers. So she stood up for the Cuban people. I don't know if you saw her pointing out. She basically pointed out unbelievable humanitarian crisis that we are creating. You know, whatever you think of the Cuban government, why is it normal that we are just like starving people to death collectively punishing these people as part of this kind of regime change strategy? She took a massive whack at AIPAC after that New Jersey race. So I like this AOC moving into our space. She's usually been domestic. I like World O aoc.

[Jon Favreau]

She's great. She's really smart. She's one of the best speakers we got in the party. All right, well, that's it for the news portion of the show. Thank you guys for listening. Thank you for enduring this time change. But stick around after the break. You're hear Ben's interview with Nila Tabrizi about getting laid off from the Washington Post. Like what that experience was like what we're all missing out on now that the Washington Post is no foreign news coverage. So very important conversation. Don't miss it.

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Nilou Tabrizi]

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[Ben Rhodes]

Okay, I'm very pleased to welcome back Tipad Save the World investigative reporter and author Nilou Tabrizi. She's also co author of the book for the Sun After Long Nights, the Story of Iran's Women Led Uprising, which we've recommended before, but truly, especially given what's going on in Iran, everybody should pick it up. But Nilo, so good to see you. Thanks for joining us.

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yeah, great to see you.

[Ben Rhodes]

Okay, so let's just start with the big event in your life, which is you were part of the massive layoffs at the Washington Post. Sorry, we're sorry for you for that and we're sorry for the world for not getting the reporting of you and your colleagues. I mean, to just begin, I guess there was some sense something was coming. Were you still shocked by that this happened to you at the scale of this kind of describe the lead in to that event?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yes. So while I was reporting on a story about a massacre in Roche in Iran, that's when I started hearing about these big layoffs that were coming. This was, you know, two and a half weeks ago, three weeks ago, we heard they were coming. We started to hear rumors and we had heard at first that, you know, management went to the head of the International desk and let them know that they were shutting down, you know, the Middle east team, nearly all of the foreign bureaus would be shut down. And we had heard that Peter Finn, who's the head of International, who's been a mentor to so many at the Post, that he said, I'd rather be laid off than be a part of this plan. And so that started to trickle down. And so we started to put the pieces together just with people talking in the newsroom and we learned, you know, that sports likely was going to get cut, International was going to get cut. But everything that happened was so much more severe than any of us prepared for. I mean, I was on the investigations desk. This was not a desk that was supposed to be cut or any of the rumors that we were hearing. And, and we lost a good number of people on my desk as well.

[Ben Rhodes]

So how does this happen? I mean, so there's just, just practically speaking, you're all called onto some zoom and they announced these layoffs and then you're packing up your desk. I mean, is it, was it just a sense of the rug being pulled out from under you? And how did they, how did the person who did this explain why they were doing this?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yes. So the run up to the leadoff was really shocking. So I had my last story published in the newspaper on a Tuesday. It was about the buildup of vessels and aircraft in the Persian Gulf. So we're in a really precarious time. We get an email that evening that everyone has to be on a Zoom at 8:30 in the morning, Wednesday morning and we are told not to come into the building and that there's going to be a significant restructuring and refocusing. And so all of these set off Alarm Bell Bell's early zoom. Not being told to come into the building. And the way it was presented to us, it was a 30 minute Zoom call where Matt Murray, our executive editor said that there had to be a significant reshuffling of the post. Still unclear. Even when I think about that call, I don't really understand. I don't really understand the vision or what they're trying to do. And then our HR rep came and we were told after this meeting you're going to get an email from us that will let you know if your position is eliminated or retained. And I was one of the more than 300 people that got an eliminated email. And this is, you know, layoffs unfortunately are part of our business. Right. This has happened. I was laid off from Vice 10 years ago and it really pains me to say the way I was laid off from Vice was so much more humane than what I just when I experienced at the Post because advice we were called in. It was also a mass layoff. Our entire team was laid off. But I had the opportunity to, you know, look at who was laying me off and actually be able to speak and have a conversation. But we got these cold emails and there was people that have been there for 27 plus years of service that were also laid off in this subject line email. So it was really. Yeah, it was. Has felt completely destabilizing and has been very ungrounding and it's. I'm lucky. You know, I'm a US based employee. I'm a member of the Post Guild. So you know, I have some type of protections and, and things like that and then have the safety of the guild. But I'm really concerned for people who don't, people who are international staff that are not US based employees, contractors, translators, drivers, all of this different local staff that supports our reporting. I mean this is something that's being felt for so many people and also it's a horrible look in the industry. You know, other companies can look at this and decide that they may want to follow suit.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, what's the. Yeah, I mean, give us a sense of the scale of what was lost in terms of foreign coverage. That's obviously what people come to this podcast for. What is being lost with those bureaus, both in terms of the reporting and the ability to get stories and communicate what's actually happening in places around the world. And also, like you said, I imagine the ripple effects are beyond the people laid off. It's the local fixers and it's the local stringers that maybe not show up on the balance sheet. But if the, if the farm desk is gone, that's probably hundreds of other people that are gone too, right?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yes, we're still trying to understand that exactly how many people are affected. But this is a huge loss for our industry for people who read our paper. I mean, so many important policymakers read the Washington Post. And so I think the ripple effects will be, you know, will be felt all over. So they cut the entire Middle east team. They cut, they cut the Ukraine team. So we had two, we had reporters that were there. We had Francesca Abel that was based in Russia. She was our Russia correspondent. She was also cut. I, I like names that for me were the byline definers of the Washington Post are no longer there. Like, I had come to the Washington Post from the New York Times because I loved the coverage of the Post and I loved, you know, Louisa Lovelock, Loveday Morris, Kareem Fahum. Like, I could go on people that have really inspired, inspired me. And we are all, you know, worse off not being able to read this reporting. And even right now, I mean, the area that I specialize in covering, Iran, it's a really confusing moment. Right. This is a story that is really important. It's in flux. You know, even the last story that I did about Iran was our extremely high traffic driver to our paper. It was a really high, high read, well circulated story. And we're still in the middle of what's on, going, going on there. And so for me, there's people that took the risk to speak with me for work that I have to hit pause on right now. And that that's something really difficult to tend with.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, actually, I want to ask you about that because, you know, yes, people might think this is terrible. There's just, there's already been a consolidation of a lot of farm bureaus. Right. Like the LA Times used to have them. You know, the Baltimore sun used to have them. Right now it's basically the New York Times has them and the Wall Street Journal. But to your point, I read the Washington Post when I was in the White House. I read an intelligence report. It taught me something that was going on. Or your book, which kind of grew out of, I'm sure, reporting you're doing at the paper. One of the reasons people should read it, what's so extraordinary about it is you see these protests in Iran, but you don't really know what's going on there. Or even people, Iranian, Americans, and maybe they can talk to their family, but you found literal journalists who would collaborate with you, take risks on the ground to get this story. And I read this, your reporting in your book and I'm like, well, I understand this movement, the women life freedom movement, you know, much, much better with much greater nuance and understanding and motivation than I would just kind of formulating an opinion based on what people have in X, you know, like, and so what, what, what do you think the texture is of our ability at a time when things are so complicated around the world? How much are we losing with these kinds of layoffs?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

I mean, I don't even think we'll be able to grasp that until some real consequences come out from the fallout of this really short sighted and horrific decision. I mean, for example, if we just look at Iran reporting, right? That's mostly what I was doing at Visual Forensics. My colleague Yegone was the Iran Bureau. Was, yeah, our Iran correspondent based in Turkey. She too was laid off. So both of us were laid off during this incredibly pivotal moment of reporting, right? I mean, over 6,000, close to 7,000 confirmed deaths of protesters in Iran that were killed in this latest uprising. This number will continue to climb. We're still trying to understand more about people who were killed, what the future of the Islamic Republic looks like. Like this is a really tenuous moment for, for Iran and we don't have anyone there, Right. We haven't had anyone based in the country since my colleague Jason Rezaian was unjustly imprisoned and it was his 10 year anniversary of being released from Evin Prison. And so we've had to figure out creative ways to do journalism from afar and do important accountability based reports. So what that's looked like for me in the context of reporting on Iran over the past month has been verifying extremely grim visuals and being able to take in all of these videos we're seeing from eyewitnesses and actually put together a story or a piece of analysis or an investigation from that. And I'm really crushed that our audience is going to miss out on that. And as well, policymakers who are reading our paper and trying to understand more about what's going on, they don't have access to that anymore. And there's just fewer and fewer places that do this really important work and foreign work on Iran and other countries. Like the pool is shrinking and healthy competition is really great for reporters. There's a camaraderie among reporters and there's also a, oh, shoot, I wish I should have, could have gotten this story. And there's like a really important dynamic that, that is there and once you cut that all off and it's just one or two news news organizations that robustly cover an area, I mean everyone loses in that and that, that's really, really disappointing.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I always felt like when I was in the White House, the, the, the Times Post Journal competition was very useful because they kind of push each other. Well, look, the elephant in the room here is Jeff Bezos. And we don't know what's in Jeff Bezos's head. What we do know that it's undeniable is that whether, you know, some years the Post was turning a revenue, some years it was losing money, but couch cushion money for Jeff Bezos, so what is that? I mean, it's one thing, you would almost understand it more if it was like some family run newspaper that, you know, survived on the revenue and you could then tell yourself, well, these people like literally can't afford it. Jeff Bezos literally could afford to lose, you know, a billion dollars a year running a newspaper. What is your, both your, what is that like to know that there's someone who could have kept these positions and chose not to. And does anybody have any indication as to why that might be? You know, we clearly changed the opinion section to suit Trump, but I don't know why you have to eliminate foreign coverage. Unless maybe, maybe he doesn't want people to know what's going on in places like Iran. I don't know.

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yeah, I mean, I wish I had an answer. I mean, I think that's why really important media reporting is crucial in this moment. I, I've been waiting to see. We have fantastic media reporters at the Washington Post. And I'm having to read about what's, what happened in my own newsroom from competitors. And so that's also something that's really alarming. But I mean, yeah, you're right, it's poor leadership. It is really hard to know. It's just really hard to contend with the fact that Someone who does own our paper could fund it. Right. I mean, that's been brought up several times. But also the leadership that has been in place has just not been sufficient. You know, our, you know, Will Lewis, who was our publisher, those recently, recently left. I mean, he came to the newsroom once in the, in the, in his tenure, he made one speech to the newsroom and generally many of us didn't feel that he was very engaged beyond that.

[Ben Rhodes]

Not exactly Marty Baron, you know who.

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yeah, no, I mean, and that's, you know, the culture of the po. It's a really, really special place. Like when I, it's the newsroom that everyone collaborates with each other and even there really isn't desk on desk trying to out scoop each other. Everyone's working with each other. And that's a really defining feature of the post. And I think that this has really been harmed by this action. And if the. I'm trying to again, read the tea leaves as much as you are, even though I was employed there, I'm trying to understand the strategy. Part of the strategy I'm hearing is, oh, we want to focus on national security. Well, your national security desk is only as good as your foreign desk. Right. Because it's collaborative and our foreign reporters will report out storylines, collaborate with, with the national security desk and do incredible, robust reporting. So I just feel like this was. Yeah, it's, it's hard to make sense of this decision because it feels completely irrational.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I want to ask you about this and maybe this relates to, I mean, I also want to ask you what you're, you know, maybe too early. But if you, if you have thought about what you're going to do, but what the, the point you're making is so important, I want to emphasize it. Sure, you keep the Washington reporters who are reporting on national security, that is, they're calling people like me in my old job or they're getting into the intelligence community. I'm not diminishing that. That's really important. But I used to, sometimes I could feel like, because I was there during a period of media consolidation and I used to find it was interesting that I would have Washington based reporters calling me to ask me what was going on in Egypt. And I'd be like, why don't you call someone in Egypt? I can tell you what we think is going on. But that is such a wrong way of looking at the world, right? I mean, if you only look at Iran, the country you've focused on from the perspective of Washington, it's about our interests, it's about our politics. It's not about people in Iran or even the leadership of Iran. Right. So what do you, where do you, the question I want to ask is, I'm sure you agree with the premise is where is that kind of reporting going to go? Because increasingly there are these kind of independent journalists who are like doing pretty extraordinary stuff online by themselves, but they don't have the infrastructure of a newsroom. There's these smaller, giant, or not smaller, there's a smaller number of giant organizations like the Times, the BBC, there's TikTok, you know, and just, you know, someone in Iran uploading a video that, you know, we can watch. I mean, how do you think we're going to get that non Washington story about the world?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

I think there are fewer and fewer places that we're going to get that from. Right. Like you, you said it yourself. I mean, the Times is reporting robustly and like looking at foreign stories, says the BBC. But that's kind of it now. And doing this type of work is really like, it is a team effort. Right? Because you know, I'm verifying a video, I'm interviewing eyewitnesses, is I'm writing the story. Well, every story that I've worked on has been made better by the people a part of it and by the editors who are part of it. And many international editors who were also mentors were let go. And so, and also, you know, you need, you need safety and infrastructure to do this work responsibly. Right. You don't want to just send people into the middle of conflict zones without any training or any type of safety. I mean, that, that's really dangerous. So this, you know, unfortunately just limits our access to information and makes it really dangerous for people who want to pursue this, you know, individually.

[Ben Rhodes]

And do you have any sense of what's next, your next chapter is or still digesting this?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

I'm sure my Oprah's next chapter. I still, you know, I've, the one bright part of this is that people have been so incredibly kind, like people that I admire, companies that I love have reached out and I've been having great conversations with people. I'm also conscious of the fact that I've been going really full speed for the past year. So I do, I, you know, I do want to continue my investigative work. I want to keep reporting on Iran. I still want to do open source work. There are fewer and fewer open source teams too to do this type of work. But yeah, no, I have some, some Ideas, but nothing set yet.

[Ben Rhodes]

And last thing, I mean, since I have you, just what is your impression of what's happening in Iran? I mean, we know kind of the machinations here, but kind of building on our conversation. Do you have any sense of the mood in Iran at this kind of tenuous point where the protests have kind of generally been quashed? They may be bombed, they may not be. What's your read on the mood there?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Yes, I mean, I can say confidently there's been a little bit more Internet access the past few weeks, which is nice. So I've been able to communicate with sources more. I have never encountered people with such across the board, like just deep trauma that people are living in. I've interviewed people on their worst days, but this is, this is just awful. Everyone that I speak with, that I speak with just says like they can't even form thoughts. You know, one of my sources who's incredibly chatty said next time we talk, maybe I should come up with a list of things I need to talk with you about because my brain can't process or bring in information or another source of mindset. It was the first snow in Tehran a few weeks ago ago, and you could still see blood underneath the snow. Like it's, people are now living in this just, yeah, just like completely unprocessed trauma of the massacres that they have witnessed and have happened to their, their friends and loved ones. Everyone that I know, every source that I know knows at least one or two people who've been killed. And that's just like, it's extremely difficult to process that. So. And everyone that I've talked to has extreme anxiety. They, they say, you know, we're waiting to be bombed at this point. Do you think it's going to happen or do you think it's not? And the other thing that's really difficult is this, this protest moment sparked out of a currency devaluation. Right. But the shut off of the Internet and everything that happened in the last month, I mean, the job situation is even worse. It's not like the currency has leveled out, it's continuing. So by the government just shutting off the Internet, while a lot of people rely on the Internet for their job and their livelihood and that door has been really shut to people. So it's really, it's of kind grim. It's a population of people who are in deep trauma and grieving and feel increasingly stuck and are waiting to see whether or not they're, they're going to be hit with airstrikes well, those are.

[Ben Rhodes]

The kind of stories we need to. To hear, Neela. Where can people follow you in the meantime? Or are you kind of going to be on a social media cleanse?

[Nilou Tabrizi]

No, you can follow me on X at ntabrizi.

[Ben Rhodes]

Okay, well, look, I'm so sorry about what happened to you and your colleagues on like a personal level, but also just kind of a reader level, you know, and my hope is that you will find a way to do the kind of reporting you're doing and the evolving iteration of a media that doesn't just become so inward looking. But if people want more, I really encourage people to pick up for the sun after long nights. You will meet extraordinary people. You will see a protest movement from the ground up. You will understand Iran better, much better. By reading that book. It's really kind of a classic, actually, of a different kind of reporting that I'd seen, which is you collaborating with people on the ground. So thanks for that and thanks for joining us to talk about what I'm sure has been not so great a week for you.

[Nilou Tabrizi]

Awesome. Well, yeah, it's great to chat with you anytime. Thank you so much.

[Ben Rhodes]

Great, thanks.

[Jon Favreau]

Thanks again to Nila for doing the show and. And I guess I won't see you next week.

[Ben Rhodes]

Safe travels. Yeah.

[Jon Favreau]

Hurts my. Yeah, it's. It's crazy, man.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I'm safe. I mean, you'll be safe in Australia and New Zealand. Fun travels.

[Jon Favreau]

Yeah, yeah, fun travels. Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney.

[Ben Rhodes]

I had. I had a great night out in brisbane at the G20.

[Jon Favreau]

Nice.

[Ben Rhodes]

Kind of one of these epic Cody Keenan nights.

[Jon Favreau]

Oh, yeah, I know.

[Ben Rhodes]

Saw the sunrise, my friend.

[Jon Favreau]

Awesome. All right, guys, talk soon.

[Ben Rhodes]

See you.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Tommy Vietor]

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[Jon Favreau]

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[Tommy Vietor]

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[Ben Rhodes]

Look, I need this tour. It's the only place I feel like.

[Jon Favreau]

I can breathe again. Based on the incredible True story Tim I'm Marshall. It's my first tour on February 20th. I just want to write something that helps people. You will never understand what I'm going through. Imagine what God can do again. Whatever you're going through, you're never alone. God is ending fire. And it is beautiful. I can only imagine, too. Only in theaters February 20th. Rated PG.