North Korean “Storm Corps” Deploys to Russia

Summary

Pod Save the World - Episode: North Korean “Storm Corps” Deploys to Russia
Release Date: October 30, 2024
Hosts: Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes
Produced by: Crooked Media

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Introduction

In this episode of "Pod Save the World," hosts Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes delve deep into a series of pressing global developments. With the backdrop of an impending election day, the discussion spans a range of topics from North Korea's military maneuvers to the controversial policies in Israel, election interference, and significant political shifts in countries like Georgia and Japan. The episode also features an insightful interview with Jacob Soboroff about his new documentary on Trump's family separation policy.

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North Korea’s Military Deployment to Russia

Timestamp: [04:45]

Key Discussion Points:

• Deployment Details: The Pentagon confirmed that approximately 10,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to Russia for training, with some already sent to the front lines in the Kursk region. NATO Secretary General highlighted that these troops are moving directly to a contested Russian territory previously captured by Ukraine.

• Storm Corps: The deployed units, known as the "Storm Corps," are elite Special Forces trained for invasions, particularly targeting South Korea. The Washington Post reported that Kim Jong Un has strategically sent these specialized units, aiming to bolster Russia’s military capabilities despite North Korea’s relatively smaller population.

• Implications: The collaboration signifies a potential escalation towards World War III scenarios. Ben Rhodes emphasized the blending of multiple conflict axes—Ukraine, the Middle East, and pivotal regions like Korea and Taiwan—raising global geopolitical stakes.

• Economic and Political Incentives: North Korea stands to gain significantly from Russia, receiving around $2,000 a month per soldier, making the deployment financially attractive despite the inherent risks of sending trained fighters into modern battlefields dominated by advanced technologies like FPV drones.

Notable Quotes:

• Tommy Vietor: "This seems to fall in that bucket. There's also some reporting that, that Russia is providing the Houthi rebels in Yemen with intelligence to help them target ships in the Red Sea. It's just the brazenness in the deepening of these alliances is really something." [07:45]

• Ben Rhodes: "This is blending that axis together. Russia, China, North Korea, Iran kind of form a group of countries... creating a mini little Warsaw Pact there." [07:43]

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Elon Musk’s Communications with Vladimir Putin

Timestamp: [11:24]

Key Discussion Points:

• Allegations: The Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk has had regular phone conversations with Vladimir Putin since 2022. These discussions reportedly included requests from Putin for favors such as restricting Starlink's satellite services over Taiwan.

• Security Concerns: Given Musk's substantial contracts with the U.S. government, including classified Pentagon work, these communications raise serious security concerns about potential breaches and influence operations.

• Misinformation and Influence: Ben Rhodes posited that these interactions could be part of a larger Russian influence operation, aiming to sway public opinion and spread disinformation through Musk's substantial social media presence.

Notable Quotes:

• Tommy Vietor: "This story, though, was wild to me... How you get away with that. I mean, aren't you going to get asked about those contacts?" [12:38]

• Ben Rhodes: "If you look at Elon Musk's track record on Russia, Ukraine over the last year or two, he is floating peace proposals that are eerily resembling of Vladimir Putin's peace proposals." [13:03]

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Israel’s Legislative Move Against UNRWA

Timestamp: [21:00]

Key Discussion Points:

• New Legislation: The Israeli Knesset passed two laws effectively barring the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from operating within Israel’s sovereign territory. This move is expected to cripple UNRWA’s operations in Gaza and adversely affect Palestinian refugees throughout the region.

• Humanitarian Impact: Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for UNRWA, articulated the severe consequences, including the cessation of food, shelter, healthcare, and education services in Gaza. The lack of operational UNRWA would not only destabilize Gaza but also have ripple effects across the broader Middle East.

• International Reaction: Countries like Spain, Germany, and the UK have criticized Israel's move, emphasizing the humanitarian crisis it would precipitate amidst ongoing conflicts and Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.

Notable Quotes:

• Jonathan Fowler (UNRWA Spokesperson): "If this legislation is implemented, it will have a direct operational and legal impact on UNRWA's services in the occupied Palestinian territory... the delivery of food, shelter and health care to most of Gaza's population would grind to a halt." [22:07]

• Ben Rhodes: "This UNRWA law should trigger no military assistance going to Israel based on what's written in US Law." [26:51]

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Election Interference and Foreign Influence

Timestamp: [41:37]

Key Discussion Points:

• Global Actors: The episode highlights increased election interference efforts by Russia, China, and Iran, targeting various demographic groups in the U.S., including swing states and Hispanic voters.

• Technological Advancements: These foreign actors are utilizing advanced methods, including AI, to amplify their disinformation campaigns, exploiting platforms like Telegram and potentially leveraging figures like Elon Musk.

• Political Responses: Host Ben Rhodes critiques the insufficient and ineffective responses from U.S. institutions post-2016, arguing that foreign interference remains a persistent threat due to inadequate countermeasures.

Notable Quotes:

• Ben Rhodes: "It's a world in which lots of people are going to interfere in our elections... it's fair game. Everybody can meddle in the US Election." [46:22]

• Tommy Vietor: "It is real weird. Let's move up this security clearance conversation a bit..." [49:31]

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Georgia and Japan Elections: Implications and Outcomes

Timestamp: [51:40]

Georgia's Parliamentary Elections:

• Results: The pro-Russian Georgia Dream party secured 54% of the vote, gaining an outright majority in the parliament. However, the election faced allegations of fraud, voter intimidation, and administrative misuse, casting doubts on its legitimacy.

• Geopolitical Stakes: Controlling Georgia means dominating the South Caucasus and key energy pipelines. The results jeopardize Georgia's EU candidacy and strengthen Russian influence in the region.

• Local Response: Opposition leaders have called for protests, with significant domestic unrest anticipated due to widespread dissatisfaction with the election’s fairness.

Notable Quotes:

• Jacob Soboroff (Guest): "If you control Georgia, you control the South Caucasus and you control all this middle corridor and also all these pipelines... it's pretty clear that's what's being rejected by huge swaths of the Georgian population." [52:38]

Japan's Snap Election:

• Outcomes: Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s attempt to stabilize the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) failed, resulting in the LDP losing its majority in the lower house for the first time since 1955.

• Contributing Factors: Recent scandals, including ties with the Unification Church and economic stagnation, fueled voter disillusionment. The snap election underscored the LDP’s long-standing dominance and highlighted the urgent need for political renewal in Japan.

• Future Implications: The LDP’s weakened position raises questions about Japan’s political stability and its ability to address critical issues like economic reform and demographic challenges.

Notable Quotes:

• Ben Rhodes: "It's very consequential and there are a lot of brave people in the streets and places like Tbilisi." [55:35]

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Jacob Soboroff on Trump’s Family Separation Policy

Timestamp: [67:14]

Interview Highlights:

• Policy Genesis: The Trump administration's family separation policy was a continuation of earlier proposals, intensified by decades of stringent immigration enforcement. Politicians like Stephen Miller played pivotal roles in implementing the policy, which led to the separation of over 5,500 children from their parents.

• Humanitarian Crisis: Soboroff recounts firsthand accounts of the inhumane conditions faced by separated children, describing facilities as “incarceration centers” with children confined in deplorable conditions, leading to lifelong trauma.

• Lack of Accountability: Despite widespread condemnation and evidence of legal violations, there has been minimal accountability. The Biden administration's efforts to reunify families have been hampered by poor record-keeping and resistance from deported parents.

• Future Risks: Soboroff warns of the potential resurgence of such policies under a second Trump term, emphasizing the fragility of immigrant rights and the need for systemic reforms to prevent repeating these injustices.

Notable Quotes:

• Jacob Soboroff: "This policy was so deliberately harmful to children... it's as American as any other part of American history." [75:50]

• Jennifer Granholm: "We have to see this as part of a strategy to literally deny food and basic materials from reaching Palestinians. And we should name that. That is against American law." [26:51]

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Climate Change and the Upcoming Elections

Timestamp: [65:21]

Key Discussion Points:

• Legislative Progress: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm highlighted significant advancements in clean energy through the Biden-Harris administration’s legislative successes, including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.

• Economic and Environmental Impact: These laws have spurred the establishment of nearly 900 clean energy factories and the development of major projects like North America’s largest wind farm in Wyoming. The U.S. aims for 100% clean electricity by 2035, with a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

• Public Perception and Policy Stakes: The hosts stress the importance of the upcoming elections in determining the future of climate policy, emphasizing the stark contrasts between Trump’s dismissal of climate action and the administration’s proactive measures.

Notable Quotes:

• Jennifer Granholm: "We have about 900 factories that have announced they're coming to America or expanding in America to make solar panels or EVs or batteries." [97:28]

• Ben Rhodes: "It's hard to not be kind of enraged at the fact that we're even contemplating going with Trump." [93:52]

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Conclusion

As the episode wraps up, Vietor and Rhodes emphasize the high stakes of the approaching elections, underscoring how the outcomes could significantly influence U.S. foreign policy, immigration reform, and climate action. The detailed discussions and expert insights provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of the intricate global dynamics shaping today's geopolitical landscape.

Final Thoughts:

• Engagement Call: The hosts encourage listeners to stay informed and participate actively in the electoral process, leveraging tools like Vote Save America’s ballot initiative guides to make educated voting decisions.

• Upcoming Content: Listeners are teased about the final commentary on climate change and an exclusive interview with Jacob Soboroff, promising a deep dive into the human impacts of immigration policies.

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Notable Quotes Summary

• Ben Rhodes: "This Storm Corps... raises the stakes of geopolitics." [07:43]

• Tommy Vietor: "You have to prepare yourself emotionally." [61:53]

• Jennifer Granholm: "We will continue to plant those trees of opportunity to save our planet." [98:38]

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Resources Mentioned

• Documentary: Separated: An American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff and directed by Errol Morris.
• Organizations: Vote Save America (votesaveamerica.com), UNRWA, Simplisafe, Indochino.

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Final Notes

This episode of "Pod Save the World" offers a rich and engaging exploration of pivotal international events and policies, providing listeners with essential insights and critical analysis essential for understanding the complexities of current global affairs. Whether you’re familiar with the podcast or new to it, this summary encapsulates the key discussions and expert perspectives shared by hosts Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes.

Transcript

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[Tommy Vitor]

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Tommy Vitor]

Is this our last episode before election day? We record on election day.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes. I was thinking about that on the drive in, actually.

[Tommy Vitor]

That'll be a highly anticipated episode.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm just gonna. I want everybody to just be prepared for me to be unburdening myself.

[Tommy Vitor]

Me too.

[Ben Rhodes]

Eight years of anxiety on election day.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Also, you guys won't have results on Wednesday. I don't think so. You should listen to us no matter what.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, of course.

[Tommy Vitor]

Otherwise you're just watching Kornaki like, you know, refresh stuff on TV.

[Ben Rhodes]

Refreshing. There are 17 extra votes from Delaware County.

[Tommy Vitor]

I went canvassing over the weekend. Ben or I did a bunch of canvas kickoffs. We did Will Rollins, Derek Tran, Dave Min. It was actually very. It made me feel a lot better. Spent Sunday on the road. Thank you to all the POD listeners, by the way. Came out and did a shift. But if you don't want to go out on canvas, here's the thing everyone should do. Everybody knows. Three friends in a swing state. If you think you know someone in Philly, you know somebody in Georgia, text them, ask them if they're voting. If they're Republican, don't text them. But see if you can get people to turn out who might not vote. See if you can persuade somebody. You know, that kind of relational organizing is so much better than like cold calling.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. I mean, you have to remember that if you can get one person to vote who wasn't going to vote, just one who was going to vote the other way, just one person. The margins are so small. Just think of how many people out there delivering one person might swing the whole election. Think about that. Because I've had friends phone banking. I have some friends phone banking through Vote Save America. I definitely plug VoteSave America and there'll be people who will phone bank for a couple of days, but then they'll get that one person who says, yes, okay, I will vote for Kamala Harris or can get me a ride to the polls.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

I've had people who've had to help arrange that and they feel like they did something.

[Tommy Vitor]

You feel amazing.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, you do one vote. You may have to call a lot of people to get that one vote. But my favorite thing is sometimes I try to play strategist and I have a friend who's bilingual and I said, oh, you should, you should make Spanish language calls to Arizona, you know, because here I am, the strategist. You know, we've got this problem with Latinos, you know, and she said, she calls these people and they're like, can we just speak in English? So, you know, our anxieties are. My anxieties are like infusing even the phone banking efforts I'm encouraging.

[Tommy Vitor]

And we got a lot of anxieties. Yeah, they're just ripping these days.

[Ben Rhodes]

I know. As we were talking coming in, I apologize for being a little tired. I've been waking up at 4 in the morning like every night. And then of course making the mistake of looking at my phone and then.

[Tommy Vitor]

Not going, yeah, we have a rolling ex Obama hack WhatsApp thread who people you guys all know or know of. And that thing starts firing off at about 4am it's not good.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's peak hour.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's not good. It doesn't stop until late, late at night. But, you know, it's like I want the election over so badly, but then we have to live with the results. And I'm not ready for that either.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, let's hope they're the good results.

[Tommy Vitor]

Let's hope they're all good. Well, with that uplifting intro, we have a very interesting show.

[Ben Rhodes]

We do.

[Tommy Vitor]

We're going to talk about why North Korea is sending troops to Russia. Talk about Elon Musk's little like informal chit chats with Vladimir Putin. Interesting story there. Cover the implications of Israel kicking out the key UN Aid agency out of Gaza. Rudy Giuliani's comments at Trump's fascist Madison Square Garden rally about the Palestinians. Israel's airstrikes on Iran over the weekend. Trump's plan to scrap FBI background checks for those seeking security.

[Ben Rhodes]

Crazy story. I can't wait to talk about that.

[Tommy Vitor]

Me, too. Like every once in a while, this is a banger. They really surprise you.

[Ben Rhodes]

This is a banger and I bet everybody missed it because there's so many other things. There's Nazi rallies and stuff. But wait for this one. This is going to be a good time.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, it's a good one. There's all kinds of foreign election interference happening. And then there were some very big, consequential elections in both Georgia and Japan that we will talk about. And then, Ben, I just interviewed Jacob Zoboroff from NBC News. He wrote amazing reports and a book about Trump's family separation policy. That book is now the basis of a new documentary with Errol Morris about the family separation policy and sort of the aftermath and the lack of accountability. It is in theaters now. It's available on MSNBC on December 7th. But it was a good to talk to him about, you know, like one of the truly one of the worst periods of the entire Trump presidency, but how likely it is that that will be repeated if Trump is reelected.

[Ben Rhodes]

And that was 1.0. So the kind of mass deportation they're talking about is the next level of that.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes, that was Jacob's key point, which is like mass deportations is family separation on stairs.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes, yes.

[Tommy Vitor]

So it's only going to get worse. Okay, let's turn to this North Korea news, Ben, because a couple of weeks ago we talked about some kind of like loose reporting that North Korea might be thinking about sending troops to Russia. I think I speculated that it might have been just to like maintain the equipment that they've been giving the Russians. But now both the Pentagon and NATO are on the record talking about this. So The Pentagon says 10,000 North Korean troops are in Russia for training and that some are already heading to the front lines to fight. And the NATO Secretary General says the troops are heading to the Kursk region, which is that piece of Russian territory that Ukraine captured in a surprise operation several months back. So they're going right to the front line. The Washington Post says that Kim Jong Un appears to have sent his equivalent of elite Special Forces unit, including the so called Storm Corps troops that have been trained to invade South Korea. Just for context, I mean, North Korea is one of the largest armies in the world despite not being that big of a country. They've got an estimated 1.2 million soldiers on active duty, hundreds of thousands if not millions more in reserve. But these special Forces members are highly trained, highly specialized professional fighters. You know the videos you see sometimes of shirtless, ripped North Korean guys breaking boards? Yeah, those are the dudes. Yeah, I wouldn't want to mess with those guys. Still, you know, some experts I was reading about, they. They pointed out that these guys are going to have to adjust to the modern battlefield. That includes, like, FPV drones and all sorts of nightmares, but it's a real problem. And Ukrainian officials and South Korean officials have even higher estimates. I think it's like 12,000 or 19,000 troops, though that might be Special Forces guys. And then kind of like enablers, people that do logistics, etc. South Korean intelligence says Russia is going to pay these guys about two grand a month, which is a ton of money in North Korea. So you could see how maybe that makes it politically palatable. Not that Kim Jong Un has to worry about a lot of politics, but, Ben, you like to talk about World War Watch.

[Ben Rhodes]

War Watch. That's where we're going to start.

[Tommy Vitor]

We like to do that here. We keep an eye on, you know, any and all signals that this war might escalate into World War three. This seems to fall in that bucket. There's also some reporting that, that Russia is providing the Houthi rebels in Yemen with intelligence to help them target ships in the Red Sea. It's just the. The brazenness in the deepening of these alliances is really something.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's right. If you look at the world and think of it in terms of three fault lines of conflict. The war in Ukraine, the war across the Middle east, and the war that is not being fought, but the kind of frozen conflict in Taiwan and Korea. Right. This is blending that axis together. So Russia, China, North Korea, Iran kind of form a group of countries. You know, in addition to the troops being provided, they signed this kind of mutual defense treaty between Russia and North Korea. Totally unprecedented. Right. Kind of creating a mini little Warsaw Pact there. And so you hate to see this kind of blending of different conflicts, different military forces. It kind of scrambles the decks and raises the stakes of geopolitics. And then you're like looking at, okay, what does this mean for the conflict in Ukraine? It's hard to say, because on the one hand, if they can replenish their troops, the Russians with North Korean fighting forces who are competent, it does free them up big time because the reports are that these guys might be headed to the Kursk region of Russia where Ukraine has moved in. The Russians did not do what the Ukrainians thought they were going to do, which is divert a bunch of troops from Eastern Ukraine back to defend Kursk. So it may be that if the Russians can just take Kursk back with some North Koreans, that really frees them up in terms of their manpower advantage inside of Russia. That's the kind of optimistic scenario for the Russians. The other side of this, though, is that these guys may be trained, but they haven't fought in any combat at all. You know, they've been doing drills in North Korea and are they going to be ready for kind of these battle hardened Ukrainians who are entrepreneurial with drones and things like that? We just don't know. There are interesting reverberations back on the Korean peninsula too, though, because on the one hand, there's probably a lot in this for the North Koreans. They could be getting food, they could be getting military technology in addition to kind of just cold cash. They could have guys coming home who are now trained in a way that the South Koreans are not. You know, they will have seen combat. And so the risk of them maybe, you know, you've seen this in past world wars. Like, you get some experience in one theater and you come back and you try to, you know, push your advantage closer to home. The downside potentially for Kim Jong Un is where did these guys go? And they, they see what life is like even in, you know, they get.

[Tommy Vitor]

Home, they're like, this sucks. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

They get home, they're like, what the fuck?

[Tommy Vitor]

They want to go back to the front lines.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so there's a risk here. Yeah. Which I haven't seen much written about, and I don't want to be overly optimistic about it. North Korea's incredibly closed society police state. But if tens of thousands of guys start coming home and they just saw that, hey, people out in the rest of the world live differently from here, you know, that could be dicey too. So it's not without risk, but it is definitely a very new and worrying variable that is not getting as much attention as it might otherwise if there wasn't a war in the Middle east and an election.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. And I guess the other question is sort of when, when will it top out? I mean, is 10,000 yen is 19,000 yen? Will they send more? I mean, Russia has reportedly by some estimates, had 600,000 casualties. That includes, you know, dead and wounded soldiers. So that's just an enormous loss for them. And I don't know if they have a. They've been completely reliant on North Korean artillery for a while now. The question is whether how Many soldiers Kim Jong Un is willing to give up. I mean, apparently men are drafted into the military at 17 in North Korea, and they serve for eight to 10 years. So there's just like a lot of bodies in there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And again, it's worrying because there's a scenario where Kim Jong Un decides he's kind of all in with this. And Maybe there's like 100,000 guys that end up going in that scenario, too. Though, if Russia and North Korea are kind of almost melded together in a way, all of a sudden, if Putin wants to cause problems for the west, maybe he starts fucking around in the Korean peninsula in South Korea. I mean, there are all kinds of ways this could go, and most of them are not good.

[Tommy Vitor]

Most of them not good. Speaking of not good, the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk, surrogate for Trump mainly these days, dipshit as Tim, hopping around like a dipshit. That Elon and Vladimir Putin have talked on the phone regularly since 2022, and that Putin has repeatedly asked him for favors, like not putting his Starlink satellite communications service into service over Taiwan. I think the sourcing in the story was like, European, you know, sort of intelligence and diplomatic sources, which was interesting. You have to imagine if the Russians are calling Elon Musk in America, that's got to get picked up by the NSA and others.

[Ben Rhodes]

But European intelligence services, too, though, who monitor communications super closely.

[Tommy Vitor]

This story, though, was wild to me. I mean, look, on one level, like, Elon Musk is a child, and you watch him at that Trump MSG event, Madison Square Garden event, and he just loves the adulation and the eco stroke. And you can imagine getting a call from Putin as that. But also, Elon has something like $15 billion worth of contracts from the US government, including classified work for the Pentagon. I don't know how you get away with that. I mean, aren't you going to get asked about those contacts?

[Ben Rhodes]

So, actually, just to start on that, and we'll come back to this in the security clearance conversation, that's the kind of thing that would get you bounced from having government contracts or security clearances. Have you been in touch with an adversary of the United States? I mean, you and I have both been interviewed for other people's security clearances. Kind of top question is usually like, has this person been in touch with any adversaries of the United States? I can't think of one more than Vladimir Putin. Has he been reporting those contacts to the Biden administration? I can't imagine he has. And the thing to remember here is that, yes, I think Elon Musk, if he can be flattered to kind of be on stage with Donald Trump, who's a fucking buffoon, Putin is a smart guy. He's been around the block for 20 years. Clearly, Musk would be flattered by him. And not to play the KGB card, but Putin's a guy that runs influence operations. He's ran agents very good at this. He's literally himself ran agents. And if you look at Elon Musk's track record on Russia, Ukraine over the last year or two, he is floating peace proposals that are eerily resembling of Vladimir Putin's peace proposals. So Putin, you can see him on the phone. Elon, I really want to bring this war to an end. All that has to happen is this. And suddenly that is on X is on Twitter, and that's literally a Russian influence operation that is reaching hundreds of millions of people, literally.

[Tommy Vitor]

And Ian Bremmer, who's a security analyst in the private sector, had reported or said in his newsletter maybe that Elon had talked directly to Putin. This was, I think, in 2022 or a couple years back, Elon denied it. And then Bremer, I think, kind of just walked away with it. It seemed like at the time that Bremer source might have been Elon Musk. But, you know, something weird happened. Maybe he wasn't supposed to say it on the record, but now it seems like that was all accurate.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And again, the most likely scenario based on the sourcing is some European intelligence service had been picking this up and worried about it and dumped it out. It makes you wonder why they're worried about it. It's because if Putin is able to kind of run influence through somebody who runs one of the most important social media platforms in the world with a huge following, who also, by the way, is emerging as one of the biggest donors to the next US President. Again, not to go all Mullishy Road here, but it is what it is.

[Tommy Vitor]

It is real weird. Let's move up this security clearance conversation a bit because we've been alluding to it. So the New York Times reported that there's a memo circulating among top Trump campaign aides that proposes Trump get rid of the traditional FBI background checks required before his incoming team can get access to classified information, and instead, if he wins, just grant them access to classified materials immediately when he's sworn in. They also want the Trump transition team to use private sector investigators to do background checks during the transition period, not the FBI. This idea is being pushed around by this guy, Boris Epstein, who is this goofball, like low level press staffer in the Trump White House for, I think, literally three months before he quit.

[Ben Rhodes]

Bad Bond villain or something.

[Tommy Vitor]

He's marble mouthed goofball. Then he went and he did propaganda for like Sinclair tv.

[Ben Rhodes]

He wrote like scripts for Sinclair tv. Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

And then he kind of wormed his way into Trump's graces by going fully 2020 election. Lie, big lie guy. So let's talk about the ways this is dumb. So the reason the FBI does these background checks is they have substantial resources to do them, A. And B, if you lie to them, it is a crime. So people are incentivized to tell the truth and take the process seriously. Second, I mean, ultimately the President can decide to give anyone he or she wants access to classified information. So it's just, you don't really need to cut out the FBI here. It's just, it seems like they just don't want the Trump people to have to disclose things. And then finally, it's just worth reminding people because we've lived through a billion news cycles that Trump stole highly classified information, left it by the toilet at his golf club. In 2019, he tweeted out classified photos from a top secret reconnaissance satellite of, I think an Iranian missile.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes, Iranian missile.

[Tommy Vitor]

It looked like a photo from his iPhone of the pdb. And then, remember, Jared Kushner struggled to get a security clearance for months and months and months, then became like the shadow Secretary of state left. The administration got a $2 billion kickback from the Saudis. So these are not the guys you should trust with classified information and no guardrails. Again, Ben, there's so many stories that kind of are jaw dropping, but this one was just, it was still shockingly brazen to me.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, there's a few things about this. First of all, it's not like the FBI clearance process is perfect.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, you and I, you and I have mocked it.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, you and I have mocked, on this podcast, the drug thing, for instance, which is what tied me up in knots for a few months. Anybody who smoked marijuana is of interest to the FBI, but where is it actually useful? There are a couple of things that feature prominently in the security clearance process that people should be aware of if you haven't been through it. The first is, like I was saying, the foreign influence one. And this isn't just about whether you've been talking to Putin. This is financial ties. And so you can imagine that a lot of these Trump grifters Like Rick Grenell, who's flying around the Balkans doing God knows what. Jared Kushner developing real estate in Albania while taking 2 billion from the Saudis. But all these other guys, they're all in bed with these different autocrats and stuff. They wouldn't want their financial dealings with these foreign governments to feature prominently in their investigations because it would raise questions about whether they can be trusted to be impartial. The other thing, Tommy, I kept thinking about is there's a question that seems ridiculous that is asked in every security clearance interview.

[Tommy Vitor]

I know what you're gonna say, which.

[Ben Rhodes]

Is, have you ever been a part of any effort to. Has this person ever been part of any effort to overthrow the United States government?

[Tommy Vitor]

That's a hard one these days.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I would always kind of laugh. Me, too.

[Tommy Vitor]

I literally laughed.

[Ben Rhodes]

And they'd be asking about some nerdy friend of ours, you know?

[Tommy Vitor]

I know.

[Ben Rhodes]

But every one of these motherfuckers that was involved in January 6th actually can't get a security clearance based on that criteria.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's so funny.

[Ben Rhodes]

They've been part of it. So some of this is just them wanting to kind of make it easier to short circuit the process, not deal with the pain in the ass and just get their security clearances. But here's the more insidious thing and the way I think this should be seen as a particularly dangerous sign. I don't even following the transition, but the Trump team has also talked about, and I think they are trying to kind of sidestep gsa. Right. The General Services Administration, which is usually the government agency that kind of manages transition. Yep. And privately raise money with money.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, Yep.

[Ben Rhodes]

To pay for a privately funded transition. That is like a 501C4. Like an organization outside of the federal government.

[Tommy Vitor]

No disclosure.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, one that raises concerns of basically people buying like Elon Musk could give $100 million to transition and pick who's going to be in the government. But more insidiously, this is Project 2025. If you want to know that Project 2025 is real. It's not something that is just in the Heritage Foundation. This is the plan. We are going to set up a shadow transition outside of the government. We're going to get our own people security clearances and come in and fire all the civil servants and replace them with these ideologues. This is a sign that they are going to do the Project 2025 thing.

[Tommy Vitor]

If they win, who's going to do the clearance? Like Blackwater? Like, what are we talking about here, Probably.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, they probably give Derek Prince.

[Tommy Vitor]

But you know, Black Cube your buddies. Maybe they could.

[Ben Rhodes]

No, but you know what? What it'll be. They won't vet these people.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, let's but Google them.

[Ben Rhodes]

But it'll be a fucking boondoggle.

[Tommy Vitor]

Totally.

[Ben Rhodes]

They'll raise all this money. They'll pay someone like Erik Prince tens of millions of dollars. He'll pocket the money. I mean, this is what's gonna happen. Jared's gonna invest in a fucking pyramid scheme.

[Tommy Vitor]

Private executive research company. It just occurred to me, Ben, this has nothing to do with what we're talking about, that if Trump wins, someone is going to write an article about Jared Kushner's secret role in the campaign in 2024 that we didn't know about it. And it's going to make us so angry.

[Ben Rhodes]

Source to people familiar with Jared Ivanka's thinking.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, in like Axios or something.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Okay, get smart. Let's talk about some much worse foreign news. On Monday, over in Israel, the Knesset passed two laws that many experts believe will make it all but impossible for UNRWA to operate going forward. UNRWA is the UN agency that provides aid and other humanitarian services to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, but also the broader region, anywhere the Palestinians are living. The bill goes into effect in three months and it says that UNRWA would not be able to, quote, operate any representative office, provide any service, or conduct any activity directly or indirectly in Israel's sovereign territory, end quote. The bill also bars Israeli officials from working with unrwa, which all raises the question, when this law goes into effect, how will the Israeli government coordinate aid deliveries with UNRWA if they can't talk to them? And if UNRWA can't operate in Gaza, what organization will be willing or able to fill the void, given how dangerous it is? Here's a clip of Jonathan Fowler, a spokesperson for unrwa, talking about the potential impact of this law.

[Jonathan Fowler]

If this legislation is implemented, it will have a direct operational and legal impact on UNRWA's services in the occupied Palestinian territory, a huge humanitarian impact on the people we serve, notably those in Gaza right now, and is likely to expose thousands of the agency's dedicated personnel to harm in Gaza. We are the backbone of the international humanitarian operation. That's not an exaggeration. No other agency can do what it does without working with unrwa. And so without unwra, that operation will completely unravel. And that's just simply unacceptable. The delivery of food, shelter and health care to most of Gaza's population would grind to a halt. And without UNWRA, the 660,000 children in Gaza would lose the only entity able to restart education. So this also putting at risk the future of an entire generation now beyond Gaza. Without unwra, health, education and social services to Palestine, refugees in the west bank would fall apart. And that includes in East Jerusalem. So the enormous human impacts would be terrifying. And there's also potential consequences of that for stability in the wider region.

[Tommy Vitor]

So massive ramifications here. So as we've discussed previously, Israel has accused UNRWA's, some of UNRWA's 13,000 employees in Gaza of either being in Hamas or even directly participating in the October 7 attacks. But you know, the US, many other governments, anyone with a brain has argued that that doesn't justify cutting off the entire agency, given the dire impact it would have. A number of the Spanish, the Germans, the uk, they all criticized the move. And the broader context, as we've discussed over and over again on the show, is that Palestinians, especially in northern Gaza, are starving to death. Hospitals are operating with only first aid type supplies, People are running out of food and water, and Israel is still hammering the area with airstrikes. The Guardian reported that the IDF hit an apartment building in northern Gaza yesterday, killing 93 people, while 40 are still missing. And then just one last piece of this. Diplomats from Israel, Egypt, the US and Qatar have been trying to restart ceasefire talks. The Egyptians floated the 48 hour pause in fighting for the release of a handful of hostages from both sides. But there seems to be no hope that Netanyahu is going to do anything before the US election. But Ben, this unrwa, last week we talked about how the Israelis just no longer seem to give a shit about any humanitarian concerns. This UNRWA law seems to be the biggest sort of turn of that screw.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's right. If you were to add this up, if you take the decision to, I don't know, make UNRWA illegal, you combine it with the fact that aid is just not getting in at all to northern Gaza and the bombardment in northern Gaza. And then by the way, you look at what certain Israeli officials are saying, Ben GVIR hosted some kind of meeting on settling northern Gaza as we talked about. It just feels like this is a kind of coordinated effort to make parts of Gaza, if not all of Gaza, totally unlivable. Like no aid is getting in, these people are not getting food. You have to understand about unrwa, which we talked about months ago when this first came up. There's been this effort to kind of cast aspersions on the entire organization. It's 13,000 people just in Gaza. It's not just aid workers and healthcare workers, teachers. It is embedded in the society. So if you can find a few people and say they are associated with Hamas, that doesn't mean that the entire organization is somehow a part of that agenda. It's an aid organization and a lifeline organization, really, for Palestinians, and nobody can take its place. I think this is the really important part, is that all these other organizations, and we've had people on, they can't have an infrastructure of 13,000 people. And actually the US government was so inept in this regard or so hypocritical in this regard that in part, when we were going along with some of the sunrise stuff, we're like, oh, we'll build that pier. Remember the pier that cost us hundreds of millions of dollars and then broke apart into the sea. That was the proof that there's not some alternative way to get aid in. And so you have to see this as part of a strategy to literally deny food and basic materials from reaching Palestinians. And we should name that. That is against American law. Like the US Law says we cannot provide military assistance to a military partner that is blocking and obstructing humanitarian assistance from reaching civilian populations. This unwill law does that. Like this UNRWA law should trigger no military assistance going to Israel based on what's written in US Law. I'm not predicting the Biden administration will do that, though.

[Tommy Vitor]

No, I'm not either. And there's still, I think, reportedly about 100,000 people in northern Gaza. The need there is incredibly dire. I mean, look, we can't help but talk about the US Election. I mean, our friend Peter Hamby went to Michigan for a reporting trip for Puck News. Talked to a lot of students at Wayne State University, which is like super young, diverse group, A lot of Muslim American, Arab American voters. And he found tons of single issue Gaza voters he's met. You know, he was there for a day talking to random people. I think he found like five people voting for Jill Stein kids saying they want Harris to lose. You know, again, small sampling, but these are normally people you would see as like the Democratic base. Like go TV targets, not persuasion targets, but, you know, just a reminder that Trump has told donors that he would throw pro Palestinian student protesters out of the country. The Washington Post reported that Trump told Bibi Netanyahu to, quote, do what you have to do when it comes to fighting in Gaza and Lebanon. And he also said that Netanyahu should be targeting Iranian nuclear infrastructure with their airstrikes. And then here's Rudy Giuliani talking about Palestinians at Trump's Madison Square Garden rally over the weekend. And the Palestinians are taught to kill us at 2 years old. They won't let a Palestinian in Jordan. They won't let a Palestinian in Egypt. And Harris wants to bring them to you. They may have good people. I'm sorry, I don't take a risk with people that are taught to kill Americans at two. Hmm. Good guy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. It seems to get a couple pops before.

[Tommy Vitor]

Has he been sober since the Bush administration?

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't think so.

[Tommy Vitor]

That's really the question.

[Ben Rhodes]

But, I mean, that is really a grotesque degree of racism taught to kill people, too. That's just the worst kind of racist caricature that is absolute bullshit and is meant to dehumanize. Right. As young as two. And so it's just kind of this dehumanizing rhetoric. And that's Trumpism right there. I mean, they don't see these people at all. And I get the frustrations. And by the way, I share the kind of anecdotal experience that Hamby had of talking to an alarming number of people that want to sit this one out. And I get the frustration, but I do think that not just on Gaza, but on a whole range of issues. Right. There's reasons to vote for Kamala Harris. But, man, that Rudy thing is just a window into just how comprehensively dehumanizing and how they wrap it all up in this other. With the immigrants coming here and saying, nonsense. Jordan's got a lot of Palestinians, you know, millions. Yeah. Rudy, as usual, is not particularly informed on the facts. I hope whatever appearance fee he got is going right to those election workers.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean. Yeah, me too. Shout out, Mike Gottlieb. Shout out. Yeah, that just. That clip was just one of many examples from that event. They're just so far over the line. The rhetoric on immigration is so dehumanizing. I mean, but, you know, just over on this, I mean, I don't know if you saw this story about one of the best known TV journalists in Israel, a guy named Danny Kushmaro who reports for Channel 12 news. He actually helped blow up a building in southern Lebanon. Like, he literally pressed the detonator button. This guy's a journalist. And it's just, you know, we're not. We're talking about the blurring of lines, what people are supposed to be doing, reporting Versus being part of the story. Like, just. It's crazy for a journalist to do in any event. But this is also happening as Israeli airstrikes are killing shocking numbers of journalists in both Gaza and Lebanon. And the Israeli government is shutting down Al Jazeera's offices and labeling, literally labeling members like reporters who are in Al Jazeera, Hamas.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

So just really, really troubling all over the border.

[Ben Rhodes]

I think people just don't want to get their minds around the scale of what's happening. To some extent, Lebanon doesn't register that much attention anymore. Kim Gaddis, who we had on the show, is as good a journalist in Lebanon as there is, is saying that the scale of destruction is worse already than the 2006 war, which is thought of as a pretty big war, this kind of decimation of Lebanese infrastructure, obviously the Lebanese economy. And you're right, the thing about that journalist that I keep coming back to is we've said a few times that part of what is so scary about this war is what does it do to the people who are rationalizing it? You know, what does it do to Israel itself, Israeli society, to be rationalizing this degree of mass destruction and killing in their own neighborhood in Lebanon and Gaza and other places? That's fucking weird that some journalist is detonating a building. I'm sorry, there's no way to say that that's anything but strange and alarming. And I think sometimes, you know, and similarly, you know, there's an inability to reckon with how far right Israel's moved. You know, I mean, just to take our election as, you know, a touchstone, because it's on people's minds. Again, something like, you know, In a Channel 12 poll, I think 69% of Israelis favor Trump, you know, to something in the teens or twenties for Kamala. I mean, that is like a country whose politics have gone their version of maga, you know?

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And look, and worst, in terms of the, you know, the war piece of it.

[Tommy Vitor]

Totally. And we're not trying to be naive here. Like, we realize there's. There's, like, jingoism and nationalism and US Coverage of, you know, wars that we're engaged in. Right. I mean, it happened after 9, 11, and happened around Iraq, but you never saw, like, Brian Williams grabbing the sticks in a. In a helicopter and firing at a target. I mean.

[Jacob Soboroff]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

What are we doing here?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah. Nothing. Good.

[Tommy Vitor]

Real quick before we go to break, just a little programming calendar update here for crooked media. Ben. So switching things up for this final week Start your mornings with what a day. For a 20 minute recap, the biggest headlines from host Jane Costen. Excellent, excellent show. Then dive deeper with new episodes of Pod Save America every day.

[Ben Rhodes]

What?

[Tommy Vitor]

Until the results.

[Ben Rhodes]

Who's doing those are called?

[Tommy Vitor]

I don't know. Me, us, everyone. Maybe we'll just clone Dan. Man, it's going to be long. It's going to be a lot. But look, we're going to have if the legal team if Trump's getting wild with the legal stuff while the strict scrutiny folks jump in and do shows and talk about what's happening there. So keep an eye out. There's me. Lots of podcasts coming out next week. Check wherever you get your pods and on YouTube. And again this year, you know one of the biggest issues on the ballot is climate change. There's a lot of voters who are trying to understand, you know, not just who to vote for, but also very important climate measures that affect the climate we live in. We will help you figure out what props, what ballot initiatives, et cetera, to vote for. If you go to votesafe America and check out the build your own ballot tool, you can learn who and what is on the ballot where you live. You can fill out a practice ballot with just a few clicks so you're ready to go when you get in the booth. And then you're prepared to cast your ballot for climate solutions on or before November 5th. Your vote matters a lot. Go to votesave america.com climate to check it out. Now, this message has been paid for by Votes Save America. You can learn [e-mail] this ad has not been authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Pod save the world is brought to you by Indochino. Look, sometimes you got to go to an event and you don't quite know the dress code and you're like, do I dress it up or do I dress it down? I did do this last week at an engagement party and I decided to dress up. And you know what? I was glad I did. You looked great because everyone else was dressed up. And you just can't go wrong when you're wearing a good suit or a nice blazer because you look good, you feel good. Everyone's going to say, hey, hey, look at you. Well done, good looking guy. 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They look good, they still fit, they're durable, they hold up for years and I don't know, it's a great experience. Easy to do Indochina. I like going into the, into the showroom and actually getting kind of measured there. But then they send the suit to your house and if it fits perfectly, you're good to go. If you need to get it touched up or tailored a little bit more, you can go back in. It's easy to do. This fall, update your wardrobe to quintessential suiting elements with contemporary flair from Indochino. Visit Indochino.com and use the code World to get 10% off any purchase of $399 or more. That's 10% off at Indochino.com promo code World Pod Save the World is brought to you by Simplisafe. If you're like me, the safety of your home and your loved ones isn't just a priority. It is your everything. The problem is old school home security systems only take action when someone is already inside your home. Simplisafe Home Security is changing that with its new Active Guard outdoor protection. It's the only home security designed to prevent crimes before they happen. As you guys know from listening to the show, John Lovett and Simplisafe sure did himself. Super advanced sensors, great electronics. You can turn it on and off. He's not super advanced, no, but he was able to do it himself and then turn it on and off all from his phone. And it's got active guard which is simply saves 247 monitoring agents that keep a close watch over your property and actually stop crimes before they happen. These agents can talk directly to the intruder, sound a loud siren, flash lights, and even alert the police. While other systems only react after a break in. Simplisafe combines live monitoring and proactive protection both outside and inside your home. They should play The Like Trump 38 minute town hall playlist at the Intruder and just drive them insane. Yeah, just blasting YMCA. Little tip for SimpliSafe protect your home with 50% off a new SimpliSafe system plus free indoor security camera when you sign up for fast protect monitoring just visit simplisafe.com crooked world that's simplisafe.com crooked world there's no safe like simplisafe. Pod save the world is brought to you by Delete Me Ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the Internet for anyone to see rather than not think about it? More than you think. Your name, contact info, Social Security number, home address, even information about your family members. It's all being compiled by data brokers and sold online. But now you can protect your privacy with Delete Me, a subscription service that removes your personal info from hundreds of data brokers. Sign up and provide Delete Me with exactly what information you want deleted and their experts take it from there. 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C term for details Also been Over the weekend Israel launched its long awaited retaliation to Iran's ballistic missile attack on Israel. Several weeks ago, the Israeli military said they hit Iran's missile production facilities. They hit a bunch of air defense systems over three waves of strikes. The New York Times reported that the destroyed air defense systems were protecting several sites critical to Iran's oil infrastructure. They also were defending Tehran's international airport in a missile base near Tehran. So Iran's energy and nuclear sites were spared, but the defenses around a lot of important places were taken out leaving them quite Vulnerable. According to Iran, four soldiers and one civilian were killed. And then so all eyes turn to what the Iranians were going to do or say about this. The Supreme Leader offered a response Sunday saying the viciousness of the Zionist regime should neither be overestimated nor underestimated. The president of Iran said they would give an appropriate response to the strikes at some time. Tbd. The response was more measured than past instances, maybe indicating they won't retaliate again or further escalate. It is worth noting, though, Ben, that the reaction in Israel was far less measured. Even Yair Lapid, who is a centrist opposition leader, was critical of Netanyahu for not hitting more targets. And that doesn't even get us to like what the far right was saying. So I'm going to do something strange here, Ben, with the caveat of noting that, like, every time Iran and Israel take shots at each other, it worries me. It's escalatory. It brings us closer to another one of our World War three watches. Yeah, I did think this seemed relatively muted. He basically took out a bunch of infrastructure for the development of ballistic missiles. And then by taking out these Iranian missile defense systems, he basically said to the Iranians, you're naked and helpless now. Think long and hard before doing anything else, because I could just blow up everything you care about. But I don't know. What did you make of what happened?

[Ben Rhodes]

No, I thought it was measured, certainly relative to the other escalation that we've seen in this war writ large. I do think what was new about this from previous strikes is the proximity to Tehran. So it was saying, hey, we're getting closer, we're here. We've broken the seal in the same way that Iran broke a seal in firing ballistic missiles at Israel. But it was clearly calibrated to try to end this cycle. And I was thinking, why? Obviously, Biden has been counseling against hitting oil fields and nuclear facilities. I think also the idf, you know, has had some. There's been some tough fighting in Lebanon, you know, so it may just be a sense of we're in two fronts and do we really want a third? There's another World war watch I want to bring into this.

[Tommy Vitor]

What do you got?

[Ben Rhodes]

So in thinking about how Russia is positioned here, and you mentioned earlier the support that Russia reportedly provided to the Houthis. The Iranian regime is a pretty key ally of Russia's. They're providing all these drones that they're using in Ukraine in that war. And if you were to hit the oil fields or the nuclear facilities that's kind of regime existential. And that's what some of the Israeli right want. Go in and try to change your regime now. I don't know. Does that draw Russian? You know, I mean, we have to start thinking it's a good point. At some point, Putin could, you know, the Israelis could push up against Putin, you know, and so I do think all these things are a little, kind of more connected than we like to think.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, that's a really good point, huh?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it was kind of something that. Because I was thinking about, well, who would, who wouldn't want to see the Iranian regime fall that Bibi might have to think about. And it's actually Putin.

[Tommy Vitor]

New anxiety just dropped. Thank you for that. Very good. Okay, well, speaking of Iran, let's talk about election interference. Another fun topic here for us as we coast into election. So a lot of new countries are getting in on the action this year. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians. Russia is obviously pulling for Trump again. They're doing a lot of their work through disinformation and social media activity, including kind of like cheap fake videos, like pretend students saying that Tim Wall did something to them, just nonsense. But they're also making lots of, like, memes and videos, posting them in telegram, hoping they get disseminated on the right wing. They paid off tenant media, the biggest dipshits in right wing media. They gave them tons of money to make shitty content. There was a big report on all of this in New York Times that talked about the ways, though, that these foreign actors have gotten more sophisticated. So the Russians are now targeting swing states, Hispanic voters, other key demographic groups that we might normally talk about being targeted by campaigns. Iran created a group called Not Our War, which is designed to influence US Military veterans. They're also trying to reach Arab American voters in Detroit, which we were just talking about a key demographic for, for Biden. They must read or sorry for Harris now. So reading Dan's message box too closely here, but it's like a pretty nuanced understanding of American politics. Some foreign governments are using AI to supercharge the efforts, and at the same time, the tech platforms are dialing back any steps to deal with disinformation. And Elon Musk might be the biggest single spreader of disinformation of anyone, including nation states at this point. J.D. vance was asked about all this election interference stuff when he was on Face the Nation recently. Let's listen to what he said.

[J.D. Vance]

Well, look, I think a lot of countries are going to try to manipulate our Voters, they're going to try to manipulate our elections. That's what they do. I think the bigger question is what is in our best interest vis a vis Russia, not what price Russia should pay for putting out social media videos. And I think what's in our best interest vis a vis Russia is in particular for them to stop supporting the Iranians as the Iranians engage in acts of aggression. And I think when it comes to Europe, it's important for the killing to stop in Russia and Ukraine. I don't think that we should set American foreign policy based on a foreign country spreading videos on social media. I think we should set American foreign policy based on what's in our best interest as a United States.

[Jennifer Granholm]

You don't consider that election interference and.

[Tommy Vitor]

Crossing a red line?

[J.D. Vance]

I think it's bad. I think it's bad. But social media posts and social media videos, Margaret, you want us to go to war because the Russians made a ridiculous video or paid for options other.

[Tommy Vitor]

Than war, as, you know, sanctions, other measures.

[J.D. Vance]

I mean, this raises a difficult question, Margaret.

[Tommy Vitor]

Manipulating voters as part of our.

[J.D. Vance]

Everything that we've tried. A lot of the sanctions that we've tried, they've gone off like a wet firecracker.

[Tommy Vitor]

Not sure that's the, that's the term I for anyway. So obviously JD's a slippery little shit. He knows that, like talking about foreign interference, especially Russian interference, makes Trump flip out. So he has to downplay it. But just to like, try to be honest here, I mean, it's certainly the case that any efforts to punish Russia in 20 after 2016 have not deterred them this time. Do you think, I mean, you could argue as a point, right? Like, do you think that any of the responses in 2016 or up until now have been effective?

[Ben Rhodes]

I think the responses that are effective that were used more in the last election cycle were spotlighting the social media campaigns, just trying to inform people, hey, this is Russian state sponsored content. And there was a labeling effort on Twitter, on Facebook last time to do it. You know, I think J.D. vance, what's funny is how far we've come because in 2016 they denied it happened and now they're like, sure, it's happening.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's just a bunch of social media videos.

[Ben Rhodes]

Meanwhile, like most of the campaign and social media videos these days. So it's a big deal. He's minimizing something that is a big deal. He also has this kind of Vivek take where you can tell what he really wants, like when he's talking about using them against Iran. And he kind of thinks we're going to peel Russia off, you know, this kind of white, Christian, anti cancel culture ally or something, where I think he's wrong about that. Russians are all in with the Chinese and the Iranians and everybody else. But no, I don't. So I think, yeah, we can't overstate that. There's some sanction we're going to throw on the Russians that will get them to stop. But I do think that, like identifying it, calling it out, naming it, and even the stuff they did with rt, you know, which was kind of a sanction, but it was essentially flagging, you know, what it is, and then YouTube, you know, take this down or at least, you know, inform people what's happening that's worth doing. But we are in a world in which lots of people are going to interfere in our elections. In part because, you know, after 2016, I was thinking about this. Part of the cost of how that went down is that other countries looked at our national inability to even agree on what happened in 2016 and they're like, oh, shit. I mean, it's fair game. Everybody can meddle in the US Election.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. The Chinese are like, let's just make them light themselves on fire.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

One more concerning, more sophisticated piece of this that we should mention. So a few weeks ago, we talked about a Chinese hack on US Telecom providers that authorities were kind of scrambling to understand. There was a fear that these hackers were able to access basically the tech platform through which US law enforcement and intelligence agencies request data or wiretaps from these carriers. So that means, you know, the Chinese potentially knew who we were monitoring or trying to monitor. It turns out it gets worse. Now we know that this hacking effort, which has been called Salt Typhoon, targeted the phones of Donald Trump, J.D. vance, and parts of the Harris campaign and the Washington Post reported that the Chinese were able to collect audio from the phone calls of one US political figure. So that is obviously a big deal and maybe the tip of the iceberg. I mean, maybe it could be the case that the number of victims is very low, like under 100. Because this access was so good, they wanted to protect it and not, you know, make it easier to get caught or we just don't know more. But Ben, I mean, it just made me think about what protections are in place now for like, campaigns, campaign staffers, candidates. Like, surely these guys aren't using iPhones out of the box from China, are they?

[Ben Rhodes]

I kind of think, Tommy, this stuff is much more widespread and with us than we think there have been some stories in recent days like China tries to hack Trump and Vance, or China tries to hack both campaigns. Well, yeah, every single fucking day. China and Russia are trying to hack everybody, and they're probably getting through sometimes.

[Tommy Vitor]

And we're trying to hack them back.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I think you. Yeah, and we're doing the same thing, probably. And so I think you almost have to presume, you know, you can go the extra mile and be on signal or something like that, but, man, like campaign emails or even, you know, text messages, Like, I think it's probably pretty compromised, man.

[Tommy Vitor]

Scary.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it is scary. I mean, some of our communications in the Awake campaign, I guess, would have been entertaining to a foreign government. I don't know if they would have been illuminating.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I mean, look, the Iranians were able to get access to a bunch of, you know, Trump campaign emails and vetting files of J.D. vance. And none of that. It seems like it was particularly that important or persuasive. But I mean, again, it just. To your point about how far we've come since 2016. Yeah, that would have been shocking in a massive story back then. It probably would have gotten reported in more places, but now people kind of just shrug at it.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And again, I think that's because there was this kind of effort after 2016 to, you know, nobody could even agree on reality. So, you know, people just took with that what they could.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. Speaking of places dealing with Russia interference, let's talk about Georgia. Over the weekend, Georgia voted in their parliamentary elections, and the pro Russia ruling party called Georgia Dream, came in with 54% of the vote, while the opposition parties got 37.5%. So this translates to 89 seats in parliament for Georgia Dream, enough for an outright majority. But there are a lot of questions about the election itself, which observers insist was not free and fair. According to the European Network of Election Monitoring Organizations, there were a bunch of serious violations, including violence against opposition members, voter intimidation, smear campaigns targeting observers, and extensive misuse of administrative resources. My Vote, a Georgian monitoring group, also claimed it had evidence of large scale election fraud. The president of Georgia, a member of the opposition, now called for protests against the results, and people turned out on Monday to demonstrate outside of Parliament. The election was explicitly framed as a choice between Russia and the West. Georgia has EU candidate status, but Georgian Dreams policies have put that candidacy in jeopardy. Some of those policies include refusing to join sanctions against Russia for the war in Ukraine, forcing NGOs with foreign funding to register as foreign agents, and anti LGBTQ Legislation. We spoke with Corneli Kakia, Director of the Georgian Institute of Politics, to get a little more context about why this matters.

[Jacob Soboroff]

If you control Georgia, you control the South Caucasus and you control all this middle corridor and also all these pipelines, Gaza and oil pipelines. And also you control basically Central Asian countries who will not have any other options to transit their, you know, like gas and oil. And more importantly, this is also not good news for Armenia which is a landlocked states. And if Georgia falls basically and the west have to withdrew from the region, as that's the desire of, you know, like regional powers, namely, you know, Russia, Iran and Turkey, you know, that's why they initiated so called three plus three initiative which excludes EU and United States and NATO from the region basically. And then basically you, you will not have any influence in the eastern part of Black Sea, which is becoming very important, especially after end of the Ukraine conflict.

[Tommy Vitor]

So only three countries, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Hungary have congratulated Georgia on these results. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban made a trip to Georgia on Monday. He also tweeted, quote, georgia is a conservative Christian and pro Europe state. Instead of the useless lecturing, they need our support on their European path. Very cynical stuff there. The US and the EU have called for full investigation of the election. On Tuesday, the Central Election Commission said it'll do a partial recount of the results at 14% of polling stations. Ben, I can kind of like squint at this story one way and see, you know, the obvious enduring power of Russia in the region. Or I can look another direction and see a Russia that is so weakened that the pro Russian party in a neighboring country, one that Russia currently occupies 20% of their territory 16 years after the war, has to cheat to win. How do you see this?

[Ben Rhodes]

I think both can be true in a way. Right. It does seem like something happened here. There were exit polls from some media, admittedly opposition affiliated media, that had them winning by a healthy margin. The President cited some of these polls and suggesting that the opposition parties actually got somewhere in the 60s or something in that range, but we just don't know. What's pretty clear here is that they were trying to squeeze through an election result that could then allow them to continue this Russian playbook. They're going to end foreign funding for NGOs, they're going to try to de European. I mean, this is why Orban's comments are so cynical. It's not about moving to Europe, it's about moving away from Europe and towards Russia and kind of becoming Like a mini Belarus or something like an extension of Russian influence in the Caucasus. That's clearly what's happening. The kind of friendly oligarch who is the main decision maker in Georgia. That's what he wants. Kind of probably good for business. But the reality is it's pretty clear that that's being rejected by huge swaths of the Georgian population, not just kind of super Westernized NGO leaders, but there's huge crowds. I mean, in a small country, these are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people coming out. You can tell that this is not the direction people want to go, you know, and eerily kind of reminds you a bit of how Ukraine used to be about a decade ago. And that's, by the way, part of what the pro Russian politicians are saying. It's not worth it. Even if you want to be more European, Putin will never let us. So we might as well just kind of cut a deal with him and be done with it. What I worry about going forward is just how does this country hold together? Because clearly, you know, at least half the country does not want to move in this direction. And you worry about civil unrest, you worry about breakdown of order, and so we'll see what happens. But it's very consequential and there are a lot of brave people in the streets and places like Tbilisi.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, definitely. Two more quick things. So let's talk about Japan. Over the weekend, Japan held a snap election called by the new Prime Minister, Shigeru Ishiba. And it ended very badly for Ishiba and his party, the ldp, which lost its majority in Japan's lower house of Parliament for the first time in many, many years. So the LDP still holds the most number of seats, but not enough to form a majority. So they're not going to scramble in to figure out how to form a government. But just to back up a bit. Ashiba took the reins a month ago from Fumio Kishida, who resigned after scandals left the government's approval rating in the gutter. More on that in a minute. But after that change, Sheba thought, all right, let's capitalize on being the new guy on my momentum. Let's call this snap election, solidify my place here. And it just failed spectacularly. Now, there seem to be a lot of reasons for why the LDP had some campaign finance scandals recently that really pissed off voters. They were basically getting some kickbacks that was bad, especially as prices started increasing. You know, there's inflation in Japan for the first time in a very long time. But Wages remain stagnant. And then after the assassination, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe In 2022, there were a series of investigations into his and other LDP members ties with the Unification Church, which is this, you know, let's be honest, weird kind of culty church that hurt the party standing. And then there's just the fact that the LDP has been in power almost continuously in Japan since 1955, and Japan has dealt with major economic problems for well over 30 years. The short version of that story is Japan had, you know, this huge economic boom in the 80s. American lawmakers were terrified of Japan. Like we talked about Japan, like we do China now, right? They're going to overtake us. Then the bubble burst in the early 90s that led to deflation, economic stagnation, companies, you know, stuck paying down all this debt, people stuck in homes that were steadily decreasing in price every single year, and just the total inability of the government to figure out how to solve the problem. And then on top of that, you have a population that is shrinking and getting older. So I think almost a third of the country is over 65.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, imagine that.

[Tommy Vitor]

You know, that Social Security burden on the younger workforce. So I mean, just incredible kind of mood music and dynamics to this party sticking around that long. But also, Ben, Japanese politics are wild, man. We don't talk about it enough.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, they're very strange, you know, in the sense that the LDP has been this totally dominant force in what is, you know, a democracy. And the one window in which they were out of power at the beginning.

[Tommy Vitor]

Of the Obama years, like 09 to like 12ish.

[Ben Rhodes]

But the opposition was so inexperienced in governing that there were like four prime ministers, remember, in four years. You know, each time we met with the Japanese prime minister, it was a different guy. Jesus. And so that's been. The problem is there's not been this kind of alternative, stable place for voters to go. But what you look at with Japan is it has a distinct culture to it, right? I mean, you know, and if you go to Japan, you immediately are aware of the sense that, you know, there's a very particular kind of approach to politics and society. But the question is, will the populism that we've seen in other places in different forms, can that come to Japan? You know, clearly there's a kind of anti incumbent feeling. Clearly there's a desire for something different. It just hasn't been able to find a home base, you know, so I think what you can take away from this is like dissatisfaction pretty Broad dissatisfaction with the direction of events. What the government's been offering some of these kind of whiffs of corruption across the board, a sense of kind of a ossified party structure in the ldp. What I have yet to see is someone to capture that sentiment and offer a real alternative. And it'd be really interesting to see if there's any opening for some kind of more populist message. And we've seen this at the local level in Japan a bit, but can that kind of take hold and kind of shake up what is clearly a pretty tired system over there?

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, tired system and also just such a unique economic challenge. But I don't know what you do. I mean, I know they're trying all these different ways to sort of incentivize people having kids, but, you know, their, their population challenge is enormous.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, well, one of their answers that they've done a little bit on is, you know, to bring more women into the workforce too, because it was a pretty patriarchal society and just to increase the workforce a bit. But yeah, ultimately you gotta, you know, Japan doesn't let in many immigrants. Right. So that's the other solution is if you're not driving with birth rate, do you open up the door to more migration? I would. You know, as an American, I'm like, that'd be a good idea. But Japan, again, is not that doesn't have a long history of that.

[Tommy Vitor]

Pretty anti. Yeah, last story, Ben. So Ukrainians on Twitter were celebrating a little karma this week. They were sharing videos of what they decided was a burst sewage pipe causing a 17 story high geyser of shit to spray all over a Moscow suburb. Unclear whether it was a sewer or like sewage or dirty water that had broken, but it was definitely disgusting looking and unsightly.

[Ben Rhodes]

I regret seeing it.

[Tommy Vitor]

I enjoyed this too. Very early we're showing these. So Russian authorities claim the fountain was actually caused by Gazprom's process for cleaning gas pipes. And they say it's like, quote, normal and is under the control of specialists.

[Ben Rhodes]

Okay, yeah, sure, yeah, that's normal. Over there you got bigger problems.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, there's a good old Gazprom. Nothing to see here. I don't know. I mean, who do we believe here? The kind of like Nafo Ukrainian disinformation types? Or there was an anti Russia Twitter user who tweeted, this was, quote, the most accurate representation of Russian society and civilizations since Tolstoy's War in Peace.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, I mean, we gotta, we gotta go with the Ukrainians on This one. I mean, I just love the fact that the, the positive stories. No, it's just like a burst gazprom pipeline. Like that's.

[Tommy Vitor]

That.

[Ben Rhodes]

That'd be the good news, right, of what happened.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, yeah. Maybe it was just Tucker Carlson broadcasting from Russia again.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Or it could be like some super covert operation, right? I mean, pretty good demoralizing covert operation if the Ukrainians just get shit geysers all over Moscow. You know, that's a very.

[Tommy Vitor]

North Korea.

[Ben Rhodes]

South Korea ready to bring the war home. Yeah, maybe the South Koreans can help them do that.

[Tommy Vitor]

Just fill up some balloons, drop cigarette.

[Ben Rhodes]

Butts with your trash on it.

[Tommy Vitor]

Oh, my God. These are not funny things.

[Ben Rhodes]

Or watch more balloons with garbage over more places.

[Tommy Vitor]

Listen, we laugh because our future could potentially be quite bleak here in the.

[Ben Rhodes]

U.S. yeah, we have one more week till election day. I'm hopeful.

[Tommy Vitor]

I'm hopeful too.

[Ben Rhodes]

Pamela's going to pull it out.

[Tommy Vitor]

Look, I'm in the 5050 camp, but I'm just sort of emotionally preparing myself, you know what I mean? So am I for like the Rick Grinnell State Department and oh, God, I don't know, Don Jr. At CIA.

[Ben Rhodes]

This would be quite a show if that's the case.

[Tommy Vitor]

We were talking about this before.

[Ben Rhodes]

Can you podcast from prison? I don't know.

[Tommy Vitor]

I don't know.

[Ben Rhodes]

You guys looked into this?

[Tommy Vitor]

We could find out maybe just into your iPhone, maybe like little voice message. We were talking about this a little bit. There's all these kind of like MAGA TV grifter personalities who come out of the woodwork when he's doing well and if he loses, I feel like they will go away. Which one drives you the most crazy?

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I have to say that like, and I think I mentioned you, but to me it's this new. You know, there's all the greatest hits, right? There's like Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller and Bannon and these guys. But to me, this new influx of tech Bros. Elon, David Sachs, you know, people whose names I don't know, but they're like crypto investors and stuff and they're kind of intellectual Zambonis for Trumpism and their own kind of profit interest. Those guys being expert on everything is going to drive me fucking crazy.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, me too. I'm there too. Someone mentioned Harlan Hill who. Who looks like.

[Ben Rhodes]

Looks very punchable. Yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Looks like a six year old put on a bow tie and got booked on msnbc. Bleak. Bleak. Okay, with that, we're going to take a quick break. We come back, you're going to hear my interview with Jacob Soboroff about his new documentary with Errol Morri about Trump's family separation policy and the implications. It tells us about a second Trump term on immigration. So stick around for that. Pate of the World is brought to you by USA for unhcr. Unhcr, the UN refugee agency, responds to emergencies and provides long term solutions for refugees in more than 130 countries, including Ukraine, Syria and Afghanistan. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence and persecution at their greatest moment of need. During the winter, people forced to flee are faced with increased hardships and costs. As temperatures drop, families struggle to meet basic needs like heating their shelters, buying warm clothes and cooking hot meals. Refugees and displaced people are struggling to survive like never before. Funding shortfalls and rising food prices force UNHCR to dial back its life saving aid to vulnerable families around the world. Donor support is crucial to address the need for essentials for millions of families. Without sufficient funding, life saving assistance will be threatened, cutting off a vital lifeline for refugees and displaced people. This is a tremendous challenge for people forced to Flee. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org winter all gifts before December 31st are automatically matched. The credit card companies are ripping you off and you don't even know it. Every time you use your credit card, they charge a hidden swipe fee. It costs the average family more than eleven hundred dollars per year. Really? $1,100. That's because the credit card companies organize banks into pricing cartels. It's like OPEC for credit cards. That's terrible.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

Awful organization with no competition. We have the highest credit card swipe fees in the world and that is just wrong. Thankfully, the House and Senate have a bipartisan bill to fix this problem. It's called the Credit Card Competition Act. It would finally make credit card companies compete like every business across the country is supposed to. So call your senators and representatives and tell them to pass the Credit Card Competition Act. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. I want to take a moment to say thank you to my mother. Oh, she was just here for a couple days. Hannah was out of town. She helped me with the two kids. We got to hang out, spend some time together, see her spending time with the grandkids. It was very nice. Lovely. This month is all about gratitude. And along with thanking family and friends, there's another person we don't get to thank enough ourselves. It's sometimes hard to remind ourselves that we are trying our best to make sense of everything. And in this crazy world, that isn't easy. Here's a reminder to send some thanks to the people in your life, including yourself. Hey. Hey, you. It's me patting myself on the back. That's me patting myself on the back. You're doing great. If you're thinking about starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. Listen, it's a stressful time of year. Sure is. Politics. Seasons are changing, kids are going back to school. Life's different. Talk to a therapist. It'll make you feel better. Give it a shot. Let the gratitude flow with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com crookedworld Go today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L P.com Crooked World joining me today is Jacob Soboroff, an excellent NBC reporter who wrote the book on Donald Trump's family separation policy. It's called Separated An American Tragedy. That book is the basis for a new documentary on the subject, directed by Errol Morris. Jacob, welcome to the show.

[Jennifer Granholm]

Thanks, Tommy, man, good to be here.

[Tommy Vitor]

Good to see you. Long time no see. We first met in Iowa in 2007. We were doing a little.

[Jennifer Granholm]

How I owe you my job. Let me just. I'm gonna jump right in.

[Tommy Vitor]

I was trying to make you tell this story.

[Jennifer Granholm]

It's true, though. I was an election Reform Advocate for WhyTuesday.org, why do we vote on Tuesday? We wanted to move elections from the weekend.

[Tommy Vitor]

Why do we.

[Jennifer Granholm]

No good reason. Don't get me started. But it has to do with farming in 1845. It's a law. It's not in the Constitution. You want just do the pot about this. Because I could speak about this forever and I wanted to. We were asking presidential candidates, do you know why we vote on Tuesday? To see if we could force a conversation about moving it to the weekend or making it a national holiday. So it's an MTV News event, a forum, and Barack Obama is there doing the MTV event. And I see you and I'm kind of on the outside of the rope line and I said, excuse me, sir.

[Tommy Vitor]

Excuse me, 27 year old nerd.

[Jennifer Granholm]

And I asked you if I could have a second to ask him a question about election reform. So you brought me in and I ducked under the rope and I asked Senator Obama, you know, I work for an organization called why Tuesday? We're thinking about moving the elections the weekend. He stopped me right there and he goes, I assume why Tuesday? It was like, instantly it registered with him right away. I assume ytuesday is about moving elections to the weekend instead of on Tuesday. I think we should have all kinds of election reform. He went into a speech where, like, my jaw dropped to the floor like nobody else even knew what I was talking about. I ran into Joe Biden at a cozy coffee shop in Washington D.C. and he gave me a whole speech also. But Obama was like the most memorable. Anyway, it's how I got my job at msnbc. Phil Griffin, the then president of msnbc, saw the why Tuesday reel and in particular loved the Obama interview. And so, Tommy, thank you for my career.

[Tommy Vitor]

I kind of think that you've done some things after that that have led to your career. Do you see Joe Biden at Java Joe's by any chance?

[Jennifer Granholm]

I haven't, not recently.

[Tommy Vitor]

That was the Des Moines Coffee Shop where they did Morning Joe all the time.

[Jennifer Granholm]

Oh, that's right.

[Tommy Vitor]

To see and be seen places. Anyway, this is not why we're here. It's great to see you because you've done some of the most important reporting about arguably the worst part of the Trump era, family separation period. I mean, it was when, according to estimates by the ACLU, more than 5,500 kids were separated from their families. But can you just remind us of all the details, like how did this policy get cooked up and by whom in the Trump administration?

[Jennifer Granholm]

Yeah. So don't take my word for it. I happen to be there and I could close my eyes and remember the days. June 13, 2018, June 18, 2018, Father's Day. That was the height of the family separation policy. But according, when I say don't take my word for it, the George W. Bush appointed judge who stopped the policy called it one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.

[Tommy Vitor]

Wow.

[Jennifer Granholm]

American Academy of Pediatrics called a government sanctioned child abuse Physicians for Human Rights. They won a Nobel Peace Prize. They said it met the United nations definition of torture. Wow. And when it comes to how it got cooked up, it was a policy proposal that had been floated during the Obama administration and it was shot down, my understanding is by Allie Mayorkas, who was a lower level official in the Homeland Security Department at the time. Now obviously as the Secretary of Homeland Security, and Jeh Johnson, who was the DHS secretary, and Tom Homan, especially according to Caitlin Dickerson's Pulitzer Prize winning Atlanta cover story on family Separation, who became the ICE director, acting ICE director under Trump was really one who was pushing this. And so when the Trump administration came in, not just because it had been proposed before, but because of really of decades of bipartisan deterrence based, punitive based immigration policy, and I'm talking about Clinton did the first wave of walls, George W. Increased the size of the Border Patrol under dhs. President Obama deported more people than any president in history. And then Trump, like it was nothing, was able to separate 5,500 children from their parents because the infrastructure was in place and it was something that they had talked about, but nobody in their right mind really ever wanted to touch because of ultimately what it became and what we all saw. But they did it anyway.

[Tommy Vitor]

The thing about it though, that doesn't make sense to me. I mean, besides the cruelty, which is obvious, I mean, the one thing that every immigration advocate will tell you is that people who are willing to cross the Darien Gap, which is like 100 miles of impenetrable forests, no roads, unbelievably dangerous, there's muddy swamps, mountains, river, like your odds of your death are very high.

[Jennifer Granholm]

It's one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, all through cartel held territory, through Mexico to come to the United States.

[Tommy Vitor]

If you're willing to do that, what US Policy is going to deter you once you get there?

[Jennifer Granholm]

Nothing. Deterrence is a failed policy. And that's not some kind of opinion, it's just that's the facts. People continue to come to the United States despite some of the most punitive, cruel. The cruelty was the point is what Adam Serwer coined around the family separation policy at the time, possible things you could do to people coming here to seek a better life and to leave really desperate circumstances. And that's why ultimately, after I witnessed the policy for myself, that's why I wanted to write the book afterwards, because I still didn't understand how does the US Government do something so deliberately harmful to children. And I think Errol Morris, when he read the book, the Oscar winning director shared some of the same questions. And so when we ultimately got connected and talked about the fact that he had read the book, I saw he had tweeted about it and I reached out to him, I realized that he had similar questions that even sort of went beyond where I left off with the book, which is why we decided to make the movie and why we want to be talking about this now of, of, of any time.

[Tommy Vitor]

And so, I mean, but the amazing thing about this story is the Trump administration invited you and other journalists to come see these facilities where they were keeping these children. What did you see? How did it impact you, you know, as a human being and a dad? And why, like, did they want you to see the cruelty and report on it as part of the deterrence, or did they not think it was that bad or.

[Jennifer Granholm]

No, no, no. That was the whole point. It was Katie Waldman, who is now Katie Miller. She's now Stephen Miller's wife. But at the time, lucky gal. Yeah. She was the junior most press deputy for Kirsten Nielsen. And I got a call from her. I tell this story in the movie. I was at a kid's birthday party here in la. I live here. And she said, you got to get down to the border. We're going to do a tour of one of the centers where they're holding the separated kids. And I said, can I go another time? And she said, no, you have to come down right now. So I raced down to Brownsville, Texas. I go inside this massive, I think, 250,000 square foot former Walmart that was converted into a shelter for kids. There were over a thousand boys, 10 to 17 inside. Most of them were there only because they've been taken away from their parents when they crossed the border. And then, like I said, five days later on Father's Day, I went to this other processing center called Ursula, which was sort of the epicenter of family separations, where the separations were occurring. And my first instinct in the facility at the Walmart was, this is incarceration of these children, obviously, but it wasn't what everybody had been. My colleague Chris Hayes was talking about. Jeff Merkley had gone on and said, these children are in cages. And that's not what I saw in that first facility. It turns out I was in. I sort of went in the reverse order. That was a shelter where the kids were taken after they were separated from their parents. But on Father's Day, I saw exactly that. Kids locked up in cages under those Mylar blankets, down on the linoleum floors, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower, and only there again because the Trump administration had decided to deliberately rip them out of the arms of their parents. And the sights and the sounds of it, you know, are still like, they're still with me. And I often think about, if they're still with me, what is it like for the children who will live with a lifetime of trauma after having gone through this? And we're sitting here and I'm talking about this movie, and we wrote the book and I covered it for NBC. But ultimately, really, it's those children, when they're adults, are going to have to tell the story if they want to. And that's, you know, it's as American as any other part of American history. We just saw President Biden, after 150 years, finally formally apologize for Native American boarding schools, the separation that happened there. How long did it take for Japanese internment camps to go on the register of Historic Places and become national monuments? Too long is the answer. How long did it take for us to acknowledge that the United States government sent Jews back to the Holocaust when they were coming here on the St.

[Tommy Vitor]

Louis when it arrived?

[Jennifer Granholm]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is just another chapter in that history and in the moment. It was surreal to experience. And looking back on it now, it fits sadly, so squarely in all of this history, this American history.

[Tommy Vitor]

I mean, you're right that the kids who were a part of this process, who were reunited with their families, are traumatized for life. But it's unfathomable to me that over 1,000 kids still have not been reunited with their families five years later. How is that possible? Where are these kids now? What efforts are being made to right this wrong? This seems like a solvable problem with that number.

[Jennifer Granholm]

The Biden administration, to the Biden administration's credit, after President Biden was elected, he created this task force, the Family Reunification Task Force. I do remember the final presidential debate in 2020. Kristen Welker asked, my colleague, asked both President Biden, then candidate Biden and Trump about where are the 545 kids that are missing? At the time, Trump didn't know, and Biden said it's criminal and we got to do everything we can to find them. Turns out today the number, I think you mentioned 1000, I think the number now is between 1,300 and 1400 kids without confirmed reunifications. The answer is that that task force hasn't been able to track them down because many of them are still in the United States and their parents were deported without them at the height of the policy. And the parents will not respond to efforts. People are literally going door to door in Central America to this day as part of this effort to look for people who were separated in order to try to bring them back under this task force. But the record keeping which we go into in the movie, the record keeping was so deliberately shoddy, this policy was so haphazardly implemented, and I think that that's sort of a generous way to talk about it, that almost by design the point wasn't to put them back together. And you can see emails in the film that show that once reunifications were happening, they didn't want them to be happening. They tried everything they could to stop parents and children from getting put back together. And the results are still in the fact that there's so many parents and children separated today.

[Tommy Vitor]

When you say they, I mean, who are we talking about? And why is this just continued cruelty in the form of deterrence? They think.

[Jennifer Granholm]

I think some of the people, I can give you specific names, but I mentioned Tom Homan already, who's very likely, by the way, the next Secretary of Homeland Security if President Trump, you know, former President Trump, is reelected. Matt Albence, who was a senior official in ICE at the time in the Office of Refugee Resettlement. On the HHS side, there was a guy by the name of Scott Lloyd, who was the political appointee, who Errol Morris interviews in the film and was in direct contact quite frequently with, you won't be surprised, Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller was in direct contact with political appointees, non Senate confirmed junior people making policy and talking to them about what to do. And that's sort of the depth to which the administration had its fingers sort of in all these departments in order to make this policy a reality. When Trump stopped it, it wasn't because he didn't like it or he felt bad about it. He said very clearly he didn't like the sight, meaning the television pictures or the feeling that he had of seeing that watching the kids separated. It wasn't because of some grand humanitarian gesture. And in fact, Kirsten Nielsen has said he tried to restart it on multiple occasions.

[Tommy Vitor]

You also make the point in the film that despite a lot of promises of accountability, there really hasn't been any. There are no hearings under oath, no real effort to dig deeper into what happened. Why do you think that is?

[Jennifer Granholm]

I think because, sadly, people want to know less about the American immigration system. I think it was really easy to, when Donald Trump was president, have a big, recognizable target for your outrage. It wasn't bipartisan outrage in the summer of 2018. It was like a universal outrage. People were in the streets all over the world. The Pope spoke out about this, and it was like there was no person with a moral compass who said, what a great idea, take little kids away from their parents, some of them babies and toddlers, in order to effectuate American immigration policy. And that's why when Biden called a criminal, or Mayor Garland in his confirmation hearing said, I can't imagine anything Worse, I think that the perception was there's going to be consequences for what these guys, mostly guys did. And the reality is, because immigration again became a political issue for this administration and became something about numbers, both in the amount of people crossing the border, but also they were going to give financial restitution to the families that were separated. And President Biden held a press conference and Peter Doocy asked him a question about the number. It was several hundred thousand dollars for the families. And immediately the administration backed down. It all became a political liability and a political football because the administration went back to talking about immigrants as data points on a chart, rather than from a humanitarian perspective, as we all did at the height of this policy, because we saw people for what they were as they were being torn apart from their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. That's certainly not how we have this conversation now. And I think it's largely responsible for sort of Vice President Harris is out there right now touting this immigration bill as sort of the Democrats solution to the, quote, unquote, problem at the border. It's one of the most conservative pieces of immigration legislation in generation and sort of codifies a lot of the stuff that the Trump administration was doing or was considering doing. It's certainly not as extreme and certainly not what the Trump administration wants to do, which is, you know, mass deportation, which is just family separation by another name. But there has been. Alex Wagner said the other night when I was on her show, the Overton window has shifted so much around immigration to the right that the conversation is a completely different one from the height of the family separation policy, which is really sad because I think for a second everybody kind of had an X ray vision about how this country treated immigrants and immigration from a policy perspective. And that very quickly went away when it became Democrats versus Republicans again.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, well, I want to get that in a second. But also in terms of what would accountability look like? Because you could imagine hearings and transparency and more information and just sort of like shedding light on what happened. And I think that's very important. But in terms of, I don't know, were there laws broken? Could someone be prosecuted? Because you saw this with the CIA and torture. You know, the Bush administration's response was basically these people were all following like OLC orders and laws. Right. They were told what they were doing was acceptable. Is it a similar situation here?

[Jennifer Granholm]

That's what the film really grapples with. And it's what Errol Morris is as good, if not better than anybody at doing. He did it to Rumsfeld in his film about Iraq. He did it to all the operators in Abu Ghraib. And standard operating procedure, he does it to McNamara in the fog of war about Vietnam. He sits them in front of this camera, this interrotron device that he's created, and you see into their souls. And so to me, the most revealing interview in the movie is with Scott Lloyd, who was the direct, the political appointee, director of ORR at the time, who essentially, that's what he says. He's like, I was a backbencher. I just wanted to sit there and kind of be a part of this. And ultimately, Jonathan White, a career official who tried to stop the policy, says that these are not my words. These are Jonathan White's. That Scott Lloyd is one of the most prolific child abusers in the history of our country because he allowed his department to be used in this way to do this to all of these children. What does accountability look like? You know, I already said that according to Positions for Human Rights, what they did meets the United nations definition of torture. Several people have tried to stand up an International Criminal Court case around this, and that's gone nowhere. John Mitnick, who was the general counsel of the Homeland Security Department, in a memo that was attached to the memo that Kirsten Nielsen signed to make this a policy, warned her that she would violate the apa, basically, how. How would they make these rules? And that it would violate due process in the Constitution. But they went forward with it anyway. And I'm a. I'm a reporter, you know, I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly seems like they were very well aware that they were running afoul of multiple laws. And nobody has. Has really stepped up. There certainly has not been. You know, I guess I don't know if it would be low hanging fruit, but sort of the obvious question I have is, where has the criminal division of the Justice Department under the Biden administration opened any kind of investigation? And it doesn't look like that at all. No.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah, I can see that. I mean, you're not wrong that immigration is a top issue in this election. It's certainly all that Trump wants to talk about every day. But a question for you about the film itself and the distribution. I mean, MSNBC acquired the film, but it's not airing until December after the election. There was a media reporter named Oliver Darcy reported that the president of NBC opposed airing the film before the election because they were hoping Trump would agree to another presidential debate. Is that accurate?

[Jennifer Granholm]

I haven't. I haven't I haven't heard that. What I, what I know and what I can tell you is, number one, we're in a theatrical distribution run right now. And so I'm grateful for NBC News Studios, who finance the film with Participant and our partners at MSNBC Films, for getting us out into theaters before the election. Will be in like 12 or 13 states between the time the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Telluride and ultimately will air on December 7th. But as far as the air date. Yeah, I'm not going to lie to you. I want this movie to be seen, and so does Ariel, by as many people as possible, as soon as possible. This was a programming decision that the network made. Why exactly they made that decision. You know, it's sort of a question for the front office to answer, not for me. But it's not a secret. My preference would be for more people to see it now rather than later. But. But I'm grateful for anybody that's going to see this whenever they see it, because ultimately, this is an issue that's not going to go away. It very well could happen again under a future Trump administration, but also other deterrence based immigration policies under any administration that wants to implement them because of what the politics looks like. Yeah. You know, in this moment, it's like when Kristen asked Biden and Trump during the debate, you know, why do you want these things to happen before the election? Because they become a part of the zeitgeist in the conversation. And it resulted in President Biden standing up the task force to reunite the families just as much as it put Trump on his heels to defend it.

[Tommy Vitor]

Right.

[Jennifer Granholm]

And I'd like to hear both Vice President Harris and former President Trump sort of directly address this under the sort of pressure that the media can create by running a piece like this whenever they get to see it. And we're out there, I mean, you know, we're pushing this thing and I hope that, you know, come December, people will still tune in and watch it then, too.

[Tommy Vitor]

I think they will. Let's talk about the stakes of the election, because if Trump wins again.

[Jennifer Granholm]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vitor]

He will almost certainly bring back some of the ghouls who created this policy, like Stephen Miller, who was, you know, at MSG the other day screaming about how Americans are for America's, for Americans, I think was his pithy line.

[Jennifer Granholm]

Yep.

[Tommy Vitor]

Congress is supposed to draft laws governing our immigration policy, but they have been unable to get anything done for years. Even this, you know, very right wing bipartisan deal got scuttled by Trump. That means, though, that space gets filled by executive orders, presidential authority overseeing agencies like dhs, and then any legal action that, you know, Democrats or activist groups might take usually wind up in MAGA friendly courts.

[Jennifer Granholm]

Stephen Miller's got his whole America first legal now. He basically has stood up what he sees, I think, as a counterpart to the ACLU's of the world to fight back on a lot of their early attempts by the Biden administration to create what they called a more fair, safe, humane, orderly system. Yeah, they just want to gum up the works any way they can.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. So am I wrong to think, though, that if Kirsten Nielsen is saying that Trump wanted to bring back family separation, I mean, it stands to reason that he would try to bring it back were he reelected.

[Jennifer Granholm]

They're essentially saying that. I mean, I don't think they're making much of a secret about it. I think that what they really want to do is kind of supersize family separation through this mass deportation program. And mass deportation is just family separation by another name. And that's not. Again, that's not an opinion, that's just a statement of fact. Incredible journalist, excuse me, academic professor at the University of Michigan named Dr. William Lopez, who wrote a book, also incidentally called Separated, about interior enforcement in the United States, meaning deportations and such. And what the point that he makes is that, you know, more or less, that is family separation as well. So when you see thousands of people, 11,000, 12,000, whatever it was in the RNC, I was there on the floor holding up mass deportation. Now signs, those signs really mean family separation. How many mixed status families are amongst the 11 million plus undocumented families that are in the U.S. and if you're going to go out and institute the greatest deportation program since 1954, when Dwight D. Eisenhower had this operation where it's a name so racist that I'm not going to say it now, but he deported a million Mexicans and some Mexican Americans under that operation. And if these guys want to grow it by orders of magnitude, it's going to do the exact same thing even worse. So I saw Tom Homan on 60 Minutes on Sunday night. His answer to, well, what if mass deportation separates families? He said, well, all the families can deport themselves altogether. He's talking about American citizens leaving the country. They make no secret that they want to do something like this. Again.

[Tommy Vitor]

You and I were debating before we started recording whether people really understand what a mass deportation means, because you look at polling and it's like majorities are for it, you know, like, I think it's like 56% in, like, the Pew poll. That's. I could be wrong about that. But smart people I talked to, like Carlos Odio, who's a really smart researcher on issues. He thinks that people don't really understand what family separation means in practice, especially when, like, you're pulling the Latino community. But what do you think?

[Jennifer Granholm]

I mean, completely agree.

[Tommy Vitor]

The more we talk about this, though, the more it seems like maybe they do know and maybe a large swath of people really does want to see this.

[Jennifer Granholm]

What I always say is when you talk about mass deportation, you're not talking about simply the worst of the worst criminal offenders amongst that group of millions of people. You're talking about our. Your neighbors, friends, colleagues, co workers, people in your community, people, you know, people perhaps in your extended family. What mass deportation really means. It's a wholesale reimagining of what the United States looks like, what the workforce looks like, what the economy looks like, what it looks like to go to work or to school every day. I don't think that's what people are thinking about when they hear the term mass deportation. I think they think about the doom and gloom scenario painted by former President Trump and people like him, just like they did in the lead up to family separation. Stephen Miller would stand up there. I remember it's in the movie, in the early part of 2016, in the Colorado Ballroom, just absolutely screaming about some of the most heinous crimes possible that could have been committed. And in the instances he was talking about by an undocumented immigrant, that's the picture they want to paint of all undocumented immigrants in the country. And so I think they have successfully convinced most Americans that that is what mass deportation means. Picking up millions and millions of people who are like that. Millions and millions of people like that don't exist in this country. That's not what we're talking about when we talk about the undocumented population here.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yeah. I mean, Trump today was talking about the death penalty for migrants, undocumented migrants who kill cops. He was talking about creating a restitution fund by seizing the assets of cartels members arrested in the U.S. i mean, sure things that I'm sure sound good on, like a policy platform or press release, but, like, in practice, how are you going to do that?

[Jennifer Granholm]

It's a fine line in those conversations between him going from there and then him going to Springfield, Ohio, you know?

[Tommy Vitor]

Right.

[Jennifer Granholm]

And ultimately, that's really what the baseline of the conversation is about. It's about a dehumanization, a fact free sort of telling of the story of immigration in the country by cherry picking certain statistics in order to create a very scary picture of what's going on in the country. And that's what I say when we talk about this. It takes us out of the realm of a conversation about humanity, about people that most, I would say folks in the United States at some point have crossed paths with, if not have close personal relationships with that make us deeply understand what it's like. I think family separation resonated with everybody because we all have kids or were kids or no kids. And I think that in this conversation about immigration, that's also true. We all know or have family that were or have been around people who are immigrants to this country. But we don't make policy based on that. We make policy based on fear. And we certainly have political debates based on it too.

[Tommy Vitor]

Yes, yes we do. Where can people see the movie?

[Jennifer Granholm]

It's in theaters now across the country. I think at this point, maybe between now and election day and about 10 states, it'll be on MSNBC on December 7th. So I hope everybody tunes in after the election and we'll be on Video on Demand after that as well. But for now, go out to the theater. It's fun to go see it in art house theaters. And it's not a romantic comedy, but I would say it's definitely worth going to check out before the election.

[Tommy Vitor]

Not a rom com, but an important story. Jacob, thanks for coming in. Thanks for doing the film.

[Jennifer Granholm]

Thanks, man.

[Tommy Vitor]

Thanks again to Jacob for joining the show and talk to you guys next week.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'd just add Tommy real quick. This Saturday, the last in our election series drops and it is on climate change.

[Tommy Vitor]

And that was the one, I think, that made you the most angry and emotional after recording. Is that fair to say?

[Ben Rhodes]

Stick around to the, the final commentary for me because. But really, actually, when you inhabit the two climate scenarios, Trump and Kamala, informed by a lot of expertise about the tipping point we're at with the climate or already passed with the climate, it's hard to not be kind of enraged at the fact that we're even contemplating going with Trump.

[Tommy Vitor]

Totally agree.

[Ben Rhodes]

Check it out. It's a really powerful episode.

[Tommy Vitor]

It's a powerful episode. It's a great series. Check them all out. They're all sitting in your feed.

[Ben Rhodes]

They're on your feed. No excuses.

[Tommy Vitor]

The least you can do is just listen. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Help us out here.

[Tommy Vitor]

If you want to get ad free episodes, exclusive content and more Consider joining our Friends of the Pod subscription [e-mail] friends. Don't forget to follow us at Crooked media on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter for more original content, host takeovers and other community events. Plus, find Pod Save the World on YouTube for access to full episodes, bonus content and more. If you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping a review. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick and engineer by Vasilis Vitopoulos. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Madeline Herringer is our head of news and programming. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Andy Taft is our Executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Phoebe Bradford, William Jones, Kirill Palaviev and Molly Lobel, who upload our episodes and videos to YouTube.com podsavetheworld.

[I]

Before you go, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is here as part of our anti Doom initiative. I'm Priyanka Arabindi and I sat down with Secretary Granholm to talk about how close we are to running on clean energy. Progressives have made a lot of progress on clean energy in the past decade. Can you walk us through some of those highlights in your mind and the things that really stand out to you as the biggest strides that we've made so far.

[J]

Thank you first of all so much for having me on. I'm so glad to be able to talk about the fact that progressives can really champion that policy is making a difference. And especially with the passage of the Biden Harris Invest in America agenda, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Those laws combined have created an unbelievable explosion of deployment of clean energy across the country. So far we have about 900 factories that have announced they're coming to America or expanding in America to make solar panels or EVs or batteries. 900 communities that potentially have been on their knees and are now seeing hope and opportunity in future facing jobs. This year alone we will be building out 30 Hoover dams worth of clean energy on our electric grid. I mean solar project, wind projects, you name it. The President and the Vice President have this goal of getting to 100% clean electricity on our grid by 2035. We will be at 80% clean electricity on our grid by 2030 and that trajectory will continue to grow. We will see a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions just from these two laws by 20.

[I]

Yeah, it's really extraordinary. Can you, you know, detail some of the effects that this act is having already in these communities?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[J]

Let me just give you some examples. In Wyoming, in Carbon county, which was the site of a coal plant, that county now, because of the transmission investments that we have made and because of the wind farm, North America's largest wind farm is now in Carbon County, Wyoming. And that wind is being transmitted to the places where demand is really high. And they are seeing increased, of course, tax revenues, increased jobs, et cetera. They have been transformed. In Moses Lake, what was an agricultural town in the middle of Washington state, they now have four battery factories that are being built for creating the components for batteries for electric vehicles. Four of them. Hundreds if not thousands of people being employed. I mean, there's so many examples. But across the country, in pockets that you would never imagine, people are seeing opportunity, and that will only continue to grow.

[I]

I know another big part of the Inflation Reduction act are clean energy tax credits. Can you tell us how those tax credits work and how they've helped American households so far?

[Jennifer Granholm]

Yeah.

[J]

For everybody who's listening, who hasn't taken advantage perhaps of these tax credits, this is the time to do it. I mean, these laws are like 10 years long, so there is a longer tail. You don't have to do it immediately. But honestly, if you've been thinking about putting solar panels on your roof, you can get a 30% tax credit off the top to be able to put those solar panels in. If you've been thinking about doing insulation or installing heat pump, it's a great option for many people. Tax credits for solar, tax credits to install EV charging stations, tax credits for all sorts of energy efficiency appliances. So much good news for consumers to lower their costs.

[I]

Definitely. What do you say to people who have written this off or who think it's too late to do anything for the planet?

[J]

And what does that even mean, to be too late? If your garage in your house catches on fire, does that mean you just sit back and watch it and your whole house burn? Of course not. You start to take action to mitigate the damage. Right. And that's what we're doing. So the United States is leading on this, and all of my counterparts, the other energy ministers, they look to what we've been doing. Initially they were like, grumbling because we're getting all of this investment in the United States as a result of these. But now they're starting to copy it, and we're like, great. We want as many countries as possible to take this on and to take it seriously. So you know, the best time to plant a tree was yesterday. The next best time is today and we are going to continue to plant those trees of opportunity to save our planet. And we've been leading and we hope the rest of the world catches up.

[I]

Absolutely. Secretary Granholm, thank you so much for your time.

[J]

You bet. Thank you so much for having me.

[I]

Learn more about our anti doom [e-mail] and to make sure that your voice is heard on everything you care about, please vote.

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