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Pod Save the World
492: Trump Rug Pulls Ukraine
01:40:03
Tommy and Ben discuss reports that Trump’s meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was a disaster, and that his summit in Hungary with Russian President Vladimir Putin may be canceled. They also cover the administration's threats to punish Colombia and Venezuela, including authorization of the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, and other warning signs that the administration is pushing for regime change. They also talk about the rapid return of violence in Gaza since the “peace deal” and right-wing calls for war to resume, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff’s painful interview with 60 Minutes and the lack of a credible plan for Palestinian governance moving forward, an account from a member of the Freedom Flotilla detailing her detention by the IDF, and the story of a journalist who was attacked by settlers in the West Bank. Then they highlight Japan’s first female prime minister and gruesome details published in a memoir by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Finall...
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- [00:00]
Tommy Vitor
POD Save the World is brought to you by Bilt. Nobody wants to pay rent, but if you have to, BILT makes it worth it. BILT is revolutionizing how millions think about paying rent by rewarding their members with points and exclusive benefits around their neighborhood every single month. By paying rent through Bilt, you earn flexible points that can be redeemed towards hundreds of hotels and airlines, a future rent payment, your next Lyft ride, and more. But it doesn't stop there. Built is about making your entire neighborhood more rewarding. You can dine out at your favorite local restaurants and and earn additional points, get VIP treatment at certain fitness studios, and enjoy exclusive experiences just for Built members every month. BILT is turning a monthly expense into an opportunity to earn rewards and discover the best that your neighborhood has to offer. Your rent is finally working for you. Earn points on rent and around your neighborhood, wherever you call home, by going to join built.comworld. that's J-O-I-N B I L T.comworld. make sure to use our URL so they know we sent you. Welcome back to Pod Save the World. I'm Tommy Vitor.
- [01:07]
Ben Rhodes
I'm Ben Rhodes.
- [01:08]
Tommy Vitor
Ben, I saw this video of you, I think from over the weekend that was circulating on Twitter and I just wanted to quickly play it for you and just kind of get your reaction. Let's watch. I'll see if I can get your thoughts on the game.
- [01:20]
Anthony Amore
I hate this team.
- [01:22]
Tommy Vitor
I was born into this and I'm not gonna ever.
- [01:25]
Ben Rhodes
I'm always a Jets fan, but like, I just. I hate this team. That's my feeling exactly. I was born into it. And the funny thing is I was born into being a Mets fan and Knicks fan and the Mets and the Knicks have taken their lumps, but I love them. I hate the fucking jets, but I'll always be a Jets fan. But I like, I hate this team. We have a Trumpy owner, Woody Johnson, who makes all the wrong choices. It is humiliating.
- [01:51]
Tommy Vitor
And you could have been a Yankees Giants fan and just had chips all over the wall.
- [01:55]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I don't regret that at all, though, especially the Met. You know what? I kind of regret not being a Giants fan because it would have been nice to beat the Patriots a couple of times, right?
- [02:03]
Tommy Vitor
5 and 2. By the way, top of the AFCs.
- [02:04]
Ben Rhodes
I will never. Being a Yankees fan is like rooting for like Russia and the war in Ukraine or something. Like, you know, like, these are the bad guys.
- [02:10]
Tommy Vitor
I agree. You know, they are the bad guys. They always will be. It doesn't matter how bad they are recently and how unwilling they are to fire a manager, they still sell.
- [02:18]
Ben Rhodes
I love this. Every year they run back Aaron Boone.
- [02:20]
Tommy Vitor
Aaron Boone. Yeah. Why not? Let's keep them. Thanks for enduring that, listeners.
- [02:24]
Ben Rhodes
Can we say in a more global sense, the Shohei Otani game.
- [02:28]
Tommy Vitor
Oh, my God.
- [02:29]
Ben Rhodes
Fucking bonkers.
- [02:30]
Tommy Vitor
If listen to. Shoitani is the best baseball player that ever.
- [02:33]
Ben Rhodes
Maybe ever. Yeah.
- [02:34]
Tommy Vitor
Played for the Dodgers. What do you pick? It's like six innings, 10 strikeouts and three home runs.
- [02:38]
Ben Rhodes
Three home runs. One of them out of Dodger Stadium. So I don't know what they're doing in Japanese youth baseball, but they're doing something.
- [02:45]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. Apparently not teaching people about avoiding gambling, but yeah.
- [02:49]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. Well, that's another.
- [02:50]
Tommy Vitor
A hell of a player. And we got a hell of a show for you.
- [02:53]
Ben Rhodes
Yes, we do.
- [02:53]
Tommy Vitor
How about that? We're going to talk about Trump's meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last Friday and the drip, drip, drip of reports since then that suggest it was a disaster.
- [03:03]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [03:03]
Tommy Vitor
We didn't know it at the time.
- [03:04]
Ben Rhodes
Just was in private this time, not in public.
- [03:06]
Tommy Vitor
Private disaster. We're going to walk you through all the latest signs that Trump is preparing for war with Venezuela, how things look on the ground in Gaza after the cease fire and how the work on phase two is going, if at all. We're also going to check in with Noah Schnall, who was on the show a couple weeks ago. She was on one of those flotillas that was heading to Gaza. It was intercepted and she was thrown in prison. And we'll hear what that experience was like. Pretty harrowing. Yeah. Ben, you talked to her last week, I think.
- [03:31]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I did. She was. I mean, you'll see, but she was beat up pretty bad. It's a pretty good window into what is going on in Israeli prisons.
- [03:38]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, pretty awful. We're also going to check in with a friend of the show, Jasper Nathaniel, who is a journalist who again, was on a few weeks back to talk about his coverage of the West Bank. And he was in the west bank on a reporting trip with. He was literally chased by a mob of violent settlers that were clubbing people with giant sticks and trying to kill people. It's horrifying stuff. So we'll hear from him about what that experience was like. And then we're gonna tell you about the new Prime Minister of Japan, how Jeffrey Epstein's abuse of young women has sparked multiple international incidents. Thanks to a new book. And finally highlight some devastating but really really important and powerful coverage of the impact of Trump destroying usaid, which, as we said at the time, was going to play out over years.
- [04:21]
Ben Rhodes
Yes.
- [04:22]
Tommy Vitor
And my God, I mean, one of these stories is about Myanmar. I'm not sure. The AP piece. Oh, yeah, I read it, I read it. And it's one of those articles. Look, it's about kids starving. And it stuck with me for days. Hannah was like, what's wrong with you? You kind of seem like off.
- [04:35]
Ben Rhodes
And they're aware of it. I mean, you know, they heard Marco Rubio say, nobody will die because of these cuts. And then, you know, that's not what happened.
- [04:44]
Anthony Amore
Yeah.
- [04:44]
Tommy Vitor
It turns out he is a liar. Yes. And then finally, Ben, you're here. My interview with Anthony Amore. He is currently the director of security and the chief investigator at the Isabella Stewart Gadna Museum in Boston. We say Gadna. That's the site of one of the most brazen and expensive art heist in history.
- [05:00]
Ben Rhodes
Yes, I know about that one.
- [05:01]
Tommy Vitor
There's a great Netflix documentary. I've watched that on it right now. Great documentaries by Colin Barnacle. Mike Barnacle who? Folks probably know from morning.
- [05:08]
Ben Rhodes
Oh, I didn't know that.
- [05:09]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, his kid. Kids, I think. Plural, maybe. Great documentary. Mike Barnacle is a super good guy. People probably know him for Morning Joe, but he was before that a reporter and columnist in the Boston area. Anyway, we talk about this crazy story out of Paris of this daytime heist at the Louvre. And like, what do you do with these jewels? Like you have like a 18th century tiara. Where do you hawk that?
- [05:31]
Ben Rhodes
You melt them down, right? Yeah, I think you melt them down, but we'll see what the spoiler.
- [05:35]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, no, you're right. Like, what's interesting about a lot of these jewels is a lot of them were made up of like thousands of smaller jewels, which unfortunately means it's a lot easier to get rid of.
- [05:45]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [05:46]
Tommy Vitor
So anyway, super interesting. We talked about, like, how these heists go down, who do them, like, what you do with this, where the market is for hard market. Fascinating, fascinating stuff. Okay. But we are going to kick off in Ukraine because last Friday President Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. So Ben and I hopped on the Pod save the world YouTube right after to kind of give our initial reactions. We also talked about Venezuela, the case against John Bolton. Spoiler not good for John. And the new Pentagon press rule. So check out that if you want more content. And please subscribe to Pod Save the world on YouTube because we're trying to catch up to all these right wing accounts that are dominating YouTube right now. But since we recorded that update on Friday, there have been a ton of developments that we wanted to highlight. The first, as I mentioned at the top is it sounds like the Trump Zelensky meeting went about as badly as the infamous one did back in February. The Financial Times got a lot of these details first. Apparently Trump was yelling and screaming at Zelensky. He was repeating Putin's demand that Ukraine give up the entire Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine, never mind all the critical fortifications in the Donbass, and that Russia isn't currently occupying the entire Donbass. Trump just wants to hand that part over to, I guess at some point. The FT said that Trump threw maps of the front line in Ukraine like to the side or like threw them off the table or something. Was like, he said he was sick of seeing them quote this red line. I don't even know where this is. I've never been there was the quote that was reported. Trump also said that Ukraine would be destroyed if they didn't make a deal. And a European official told the FTSE that Trump was just echoing the Russian government's position that what's happening is a special operation and not even a war. So it's like every Putin talking point was being repeated back. So that sounds great. That meeting came with Zelensky a day after Trump spoke with Putin on the phone for two hours. And Trump later announced he would meet with Putin in two weeks in Hungary. Though on Tuesday, CNN reported that the meeting in Hungary might be delayed if not put off indefinitely, because the kind of preliminary preparatory conversations between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart, are not going well. And Ben, you'll like this. When asked to clarify the timing, Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov was incredibly helpful as always. He said, you cannot postpone what has not been scheduled. So argue with that one.
- [07:58]
Ben Rhodes
This cryptic way of talking, it's incredible.
- [08:00]
Tommy Vitor
It's quite effective. So regardless, the outcome was incredibly demoralizing because Zelensky went into the meeting hoping to get a commitment from Trump to give Ukraine Tomahawk missiles, which are massive cruise missiles that can travel up to a thousand miles and would be a game changer in terms of Ukraine's ability to hit targets inside Russia. Here's what President Trump told the press about this issue of territorial concessions by the Ukrainians and, and ending the war in Ukraine while traveling on Air Force One on Sunday.
- [08:26]
Ben Rhodes
We think that what they should do.
- [08:28]
Tommy Vitor
Is just stop at the lines where they are the battle lines. You have a battle line right now. The rest is very tough to negotiate. Let it be cut the way it is. It's cut up right now. I think 78% of the land is already taken by Russia. You leave it the way it is right now. So Ben, like the incoherence of this and like the flip flopping is like kind of become predictable, if that makes sense. Usually just takes one conversation from Putin to kind of changed Trump's mind. But what did you make like now that we've had a couple days to digest all the reports about what happened, what did you make of it?
- [08:58]
Ben Rhodes
I think it's really important. First of all, he is entirely taking Putin's side again. You don't start the negotiation from the premise that Ukraine loses everything.
- [09:10]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, 20% of the stairs.
- [09:11]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, I thought art of the deal would be you at least start with like, okay, maybe you get Crimea and we're negotiating something else or something. So he just consistently reverts to the Putin position. And I want to kind of quickly connect this to Gaza, which we'll get to. But essentially, like I've been thinking a lot about the fact that Trump's quote unquote peace, and I'm putting this in air quotes for people who have not hit the YouTube, is essentially just like the Russians win on their terms and Israel wins on their terms. It's not like some master deal making capitulation. It's just saying that might makes right, the stronger party gets everything they want.
- [09:48]
Anthony Amore
Right.
- [09:49]
Ben Rhodes
And I get to call it peace. I mean, that's frankly actually what happened in Azerbaijan and other places too. But put that aside, the Budapest summit, which we talked about a bit, but it keeps sticking in my crawl too because that too is kind of validating. By going to Viktor Orban, it's first of all upending the fact that Putin's an ICC indicted war criminal. And here's yet another country that is technically supposed to be cooperating with the ICC that is going to welcome him. Second, it's another right wing nationalist strongman. So this is the new world order that we're in here, right? Putin and Trump and Orban, just like it was Trump and Sisi and Netanyahu and blah, blah, blah. But also importantly, Budapest is the Budapest Memorandum is like the stab in the back document to the Ukrainians. And again, for people in the 90s, the United States, United Kingdom, Russia and the United States signed the Budapest memorandum in which Ukraine was promised its territorial integrity and sovereignty in return for giving up the nuclear weapons, and nobody defended that agreement. So he's asking them to fly to Budapest, where they last got fucked on their sovereignty, give away, I don't know, 20% of their country, leave themselves entirely vulnerable to further encroachments on their sovereignty, and declare it peace.
- [11:15]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah.
- [11:15]
Ben Rhodes
And so I think it's hard to overstate just how much you. This whole thing swung from like, he's pissed at Putin. He's finally had enough. They're going to get these Tomahawks and all these other consequences to. There are no consequences for Russia. There's no new military package for the Ukrainians. They lose everything in the deal, and we're going to rub in their face by making them do in Budapest. That's what seems to have happened here.
- [11:37]
Tommy Vitor
You know what? And Trump is too dumb to understand that symbolism, but Putin isn't.
- [11:41]
Ben Rhodes
No, Putin loves that symbolism.
- [11:43]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, of course he does. That's a really good point. You know, it's interesting reading about the preparatory conversations about setting up this meeting in Budapest. CNN reported that basically they. The administration believes that Sergey Lavrov is not really empowered to make decisions, move the process along. Therefore, the conversations haven't been fruitful. But if that's the case, like, schedule a phone call with that person, I don't understand what the guys are doing.
- [12:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And I think that's not quite right. As someone who overlapped for eight years, Sergei Lavrov, because he's been the Russian Foreign Minister for, like, 25 years. It's not that he doesn't know Putin. It's that his job is to go in there and obfuscate and gaslight. So it's not like Sergei Lavrov can't get Vladimir Putin on the phone. It's literally that that's how they do diplomacy. He goes there to just kind of be a dick and to be cryptic and to give history lessons, to wear.
- [12:37]
Tommy Vitor
His USSR sweatshirt or whatever.
- [12:38]
Ben Rhodes
It was exactly like this guy. Yeah. And Rubio is just not in this guy's weight class at all. You know, he's a very savvy guy. He's been around the block, like 100,000 times, you know, and Marco Rubio is just kind of not up for this. None of them are, though, because what is national archivist Marco Rubio even bringing into those meetings? Lavrov knows that Trump. Lavrov read the same reports that we did in the FT and probably got them in intelligence from Europeans that they're listening in on. And Lavrov knows that. Well, Trump just told Zelensky to give away the store. So why would Lavrov negotiate anything in that context?
- [13:16]
Tommy Vitor
Exactly. And also, you know, Christopher Miller at the ft, also, he tweeted that Zelensky has clearly gotten annoyed with Steve Witkoff, Trump's golf buddy turned diplomatic Swiss army knife guy, because Woff continues to view the war as a real estate transaction and keeps repeating these Putin lines. Much like Trump is that the Donbas has Russian speakers, therefore it should belong to Russia. That there are these referendum, and that suggests that the people there want to live under Russian rule. No discussion of how free and fair a vote is when you're under occupation. Wikoff also apparently said that Ukraine needs to hand over the Donbas because it was incorporated into Russia's constitution. To which Zelensky said, look, if Putin amends the constitution tomorrow to add Kyiv, do we have to hand that over too? Like, what are you talking about? And then the broader context, once again, Ben, is we're about to go into winter in Russia is just decimating Ukraine's energy infrastructure, civilian energy infrastructure, specifically, like transmission lines, heating stations, natural gas pipelines. And the goal, obviously, is to leave people without heat or power in the winter. And apparently Russia has managed to, like, kind of modify its missiles and drones to better evade air defenses. And the interception rate in August was 37%, and it's down to 6% in September. This is from the center for Information Resilience in London. Like, think tank that kind of monitors this stuff. So I feel like there was a narrative for a few months, and maybe it was confined to the pages of the Atlantic that, you know, Ukraine was kind of ascendant and the Russian economy was broken quite literally.
- [14:44]
Ben Rhodes
The Atlantic. Atlantic is trying to convince themselves of this for two and a half years.
- [14:47]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. But I mean, I think just like, structurally, there's still some huge challenges for Ukraine that are before we even get the Trump.
- [14:55]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And we should say, though, part of that is because they're not getting anything from the United States, nor have they for a while now. And I guess the one thing I'd just say is, how is it a real estate. If it's a real estate transaction, Ukraine would be getting something in exchange for its real estate.
- [15:12]
Tommy Vitor
Good point.
- [15:12]
Ben Rhodes
They're literally getting nothing. Right. They're not really getting a credible security guarantee from the United States. Like, so it's, again, this form of peace. Like Steve Wyckoff is there to show up and say, you lose, you give up everything. And this is also why the, you know, adulation and constant, like, Foot rubs and celebration of the genius of Steve Witkoff around the Gaza ceasefire is so ridiculous because this, this guy is out of his depth. And even there, like, you know, he, he basically, I mean, we'll get to the Gaza ceasefire, but increasingly it's pretty evident what that was, which is like Israel got their hostages back and they'll just keep doing whatever they want to do. These are not peace deals. These are literally like taking the side of the stronger party and wanting to declare yourself a genius for essentially saying they win.
- [16:09]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. As someone who endured the full 42 minute extended cut of the 60 minute interview with Jared Kushner and Steve Wyckoff, I feel your pain there, but we'll get to that in a second. So also, you know, there've been a lot of developments on the Venezuela front that we should talk through. So just to set the stage again, I read this report by CSIS that says more than 10% of all deployed US naval assets are currently located in the Southern Command or southcom, area of responsibility, that is the Caribbean, Central and South America. Again, I was told that China was the big threat that we had to focus on, and that just seems like a lot of naval assets. The guy in charge of southcom, Admiral Alvin Holsey, recently resigned. There's a lot of reports and chatter that he was not on board with this policy of murdering suspected drug dealers in boats off the coast of Venezuela, and that may be why he left. Last week, the New York Times reported that Trump has secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela, which Trump later confirmed to press as one normally does not do. We'll, we'll hear that sound in a bit. Ben, you flagged the story. The Guardian reported that the CIA is providing the intelligence driving these airstrikes on the boats, but that the aircraft being used to fire the missiles are US military. Which means there should be some disclosure. But when I've talked to Pentagon reporters, they say, they ask, hey, what's the illegal authority for this war? And they just get no response. So that's wonderful. The US military helicopters have been spotted training like 90 miles off the coast of Venezuela. These are helicopters that are usually used by the Special Forces. Apparently nuclear capable B52 bombers are also training off the coast of Venezuela. There's a lot of shit going on. Last week we learned that the US Navy had picked up two survivors from a US Military strike on a suspected drug smuggling submarine in the Caribbean. Then over the weekend, the US released those survivors back to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia, rather than bring them to the US for prosecution. So just to be clear, that does not suggest that the administration has much confidence in the legal basis for these airstrikes. Unfortunately, Ben, A Senate vote that would have blocked the strikes off Venezuela failed last week. Trump was asked about Venezuela policy a couple of times by reporters recently. Here's a bit of what he said.
- [18:10]
Ben Rhodes
Maduro offered everything in his country, all the natural resources. He even recorded a message to you in English recently offering mediation.
- [18:20]
Tommy Vitor
What should we do? He has. He has offered everything. He's offered everything. You're right.
- [18:25]
Anthony Amore
You know why?
- [18:26]
Tommy Vitor
Because he doesn't want to fuck around with the United States.
- [18:30]
Ben Rhodes
Does the CIA have authority to take out Maduro? Oh, I don't want to answer a question like that.
- [18:35]
Tommy Vitor
That's a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn't it be a ridiculous question for me to answer? So on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Marco Ruby is driving this regime change operation. We've been saying that for weeks.
- [18:47]
Ben Rhodes
Saying that for weeks.
- [18:48]
Anthony Amore
Yeah.
- [18:48]
Tommy Vitor
And it sounds like, you know, the way they say we should be like this.
- [18:50]
Ben Rhodes
People online are like, why don't you credit pod, save the world?
- [18:54]
Tommy Vitor
The Journal makes it sound like they're kind of framing it as a counter narcotics thing to like fool the mega base into supporting regime change. Guess we'll see if that works. The Journal also says Trump is on board because he genuinely wants the oil. Again, something we've talked about and we've heard from other people who worked in the first Trump term. So, Ben, like, like you just mentioned, we're kind of like the little annoying liberal Cassandra podcast, like commenting on this. But like every week there's another set of blinking red lights that suggests we're about to bomb Venezuela.
- [19:19]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I mean, sometimes Cassandra's right. And, and look, every piece of this is being aligned for some kind of military operation in Venezuela. Either some kind of special forces bombing, kind of surgical regime change deal all the way up to like some bigger type of invasion. I would say, like a couple other things. This report about the CIA being the basis for these boats that are being blown out of the water is troubling in a number of aspects. Right. One is simply that it's a way to not have to disclose something.
- [19:52]
Anthony Amore
Right.
- [19:52]
Ben Rhodes
Sometimes the US government chooses to do things through the CIA because then they don't have to talk about it. Right. It's a covert action, by the way. It's not, I don't know if it's covert. If the President's talking about it. Right, right. But the other thing I wanted to say about this is, look, I know I've not been there in eight years, but as someone who was like an intelligence consumer for eight years, the CIA, let's just say for the last 30 years or so, has been focused principally on the Middle east, on Afghanistan, on China, on Russia. I'm not trying to like run down like the Latin America branch, but this is a pretty new mission, you know, to essentially be putting the CIA in charge of like being able to identify individual boats to kill people on.
- [20:45]
Tommy Vitor
Wouldn't you think the DEA would run something like this?
- [20:47]
Ben Rhodes
That's. Yes, specifically that. And I'm sure there was like some interagency support that the CIA has provided over the years to drug enforcement agencies.
- [20:54]
Tommy Vitor
There's some reports of drone flights over Mexico, for example, by the CIA.
- [20:58]
Ben Rhodes
I just say this because if anything, Trump used to make hay this. We should not have total confidence that the CIA is so expert that they could simultaneously pick boats like needles out of a haystack to kill the people on the boats and flawlessly execute a Latin American coup, which by the way, they have tried to do many times over many decades. And it usually ends in either a left wing revolution, a right wing dictator, or some protracted civil war, death squads. You know, that's the history, that's the experience here. And so kind of red flags about. They're trying to do this through this kind of weird mix of. I mean, like, it literally feels like Marco Rubio's. It's like a, it's like a play game. He's doing like, I got the CIA and I can blow boats out of the water and I can threaten Maduro and then just the President, United States were so inured to this. But I'm old enough to remember when like George Bush saying bring it on was like a problem for him. He had to like apologize. It was like years. He didn't live it down. You remember that?
- [22:05]
Anthony Amore
Yeah.
- [22:05]
Ben Rhodes
And we literally had the President, United States, talking about regime change and be like, he shouldn't fuck around with the United States. It's like, how does that sound to everybody in Latin America? I mean, we are beyond like their right wing autocratic buddies like Bukele and Milei. We are just got to be losing the entire continent of Latin America by playing into the worst version of ourselves here. So I just see so many warning signs about this thing. And again, like the, you know, the Democrats sometimes are worried, well, what if it looks good? What if he takes Maduro out and it looks strong. Well, putting aside that you should have already learned the lesson that it always looks good the first day. Like Iraq looked pretty good when that statue fell over. And then look what happened. It's also just wrong. And it's all about making Trump more powerful in the same way that his, like, self aggrandizing diplomacy is about making himself more powerful. If you don't see that this potential war in Venezuela is like inextricably linked to everything that's happening at home, you've not been paying attention.
- [23:08]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, it is pretty concerning. I mean, most Democrats voted to block these strikes, but John Fetterman for some reason voted supported. There were a couple Republicans who voted no. It was Rand Paul and I think, I forget, maybe Murkowski. But just to add to the list, Ben, I mean, also on Sunday, Trump kind of lost his mind on Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, the country, not the college. He Trump accused Petro of being a, quote, illegal drug dealer. He announced that the US Would stop all support for Colombia and put tariffs on Colombia. Presumably that includes funding that has been critical to the counternarcotics efforts in Colombia. Trump said Petro better, quote, close up these killing fields, which I guess means like cocaine fields or production factories or something, or else, quote, the United States will close them up for him and it won't be done nicely. This truth social post came after Petro correctly pointed out that the US had murdered people on a boat in Colombian waters in one of these strikes. Also, Petro upset Trump when he was at the UN General assembly for supporting Palestinian rights, basically going to a protest. So I don't know, man, maybe we're adding Colombia to the list now. It's pretty harrowing and I think this.
- [24:15]
Ben Rhodes
Is a huge deal too. First of all, Petro also said, and we'll see, like if the evidence bears out that the person killed on the boat was like a fisherman.
- [24:22]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah.
- [24:23]
Ben Rhodes
So if you're like wondering why, you know, why is Petro so mad? Imagine if another country just came and blew up a boat with some of your citizens on it.
- [24:31]
Tommy Vitor
And Alejandro Carranza, who apparently was on his boat on September 15, he said he had no ties to the drug trade, was his doing. He was out fishing and his boat was adrift. They had a distress signal up and then it got hit.
- [24:43]
Ben Rhodes
How would you feel if that was happening to an American, if some other country just did this? We're so callous about how we look at the relative value of lives in places like Colombia, but also underneath that, Colombia has traditionally been probably our closest partner in South America. We have a free trade agreement with them. In the Obama years, we did a peace agreement with them to end their civil war. For decades, we were a huge provider of security assistance. Some of that didn't go so well. But the point is he is now threatened to invade Venezuela. He's threatened to bomb Colombia. He's threatened to take back the Panama Canal. He's threatened to bomb Mexico way back when he threatened to take over Canada in some way. His view that this whole hemisphere should function kind of like the Central Asian states do when they have to go bend the knee to Putin is really consistent. And whenever Trump is consistent about something, pay attention to it, because I think he's going to do all these things. It's crazy that it wouldn't shock me if he ends up bombing Colombia at some point.
- [25:51]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, and I wouldn't shock me either. And I feel like it's only a matter of time until he starts hitting some targets in Venezuela. Now we'll see if it's some sort of cartel connected, you know, equipment or something or whether it's like military hardware like surface air missiles or something that could be a prelude to a larger invasion, like, I guess we'll find out. Ben it's also just worth highlighting some really great reporting in the Washington Post about the DL Trump cut with Naya Bukele, the president of El Salvador that allowed the US to send hundreds of Venezuelan men to rot in a gulag called Sukkot down in El Salvador. So we've talked about this a bunch on the show. Bukele is credited with drastically reducing the murder rate in El Salvador, and he does deserve some credit for that. But one of the ways he did it was cutting secret deals with these cartels in El Salvador. Basically he was like, hide the bodies better. Don't do this in public in exchange for some political support. And so Bukele, it sounds like, was worried about the cartel leaders that had been arrested by the Trump administration ratting on him. So what he did was Ukele requested that these senior gang members that had been arrested by the US and brought to the US for prosecution be returned to El Salvador. And we so we knew all that. But according to the Post, we learned that Rubio personally cut this deal and did so knowing that some of these gang leaders were informants that who had been promised protection by the United States in exchange for information. So he basically just had DOJ pull the rug out from under these guys, which is now public, which is quite the message to I Don't know, future US intel sources or informants in criminal cases and the rule of law generally.
- [27:28]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And look, I mean, I had the personal experience of being a part of two diplomatic agreements. One, the normalization relations with Cuba, the other, the Iran nuclear deal where Trump basically made liars out of the United States. Right. He just canceled the deals because he didn't like Obama. This is obviously a different level of that, but I do think it speaks to their incredible short term transactional mindset. First of all, look, it's immoral and grotesque to basically potentially send people to their death who cooperated with you. Second of all, it does send this message to anybody. A human intelligence source, an informant, someone in a cartel who wants to help us out. Hey, if I cooperate with the Americans, I might end up getting sold out. That's gonna have a tail to it. But then lastly, I just want to put a pin in this point, which is that Marco Rubio gets this kind of pass sometimes. It's like, well, he must be uncomfortable. Look at him on the couch.
- [28:25]
Tommy Vitor
He's frowning.
- [28:26]
Ben Rhodes
He's frowning. We think he secretly agrees with us about democracy or something. He doesn't. This is who he is. He basically wants to be like an autocrat who's pushing a kind of far right wing agenda that, by the way, like, there is a piece of Miami Latin American politics that is like this. Right. It's the people who did like the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. And I think he's showing his true colors here. He has no problem with someone who talked about democracy for years, has no problem with the worst kind of authoritarianism, provided it's of the right wing flavor. His stuff was never about democracy. It was always about right wing autocratic politics that he prefers to anything else, especially leftist regimes. I acknowledge that. But frankly, anybody. I mean, would you trust Marco Rubio if you were a lula in Brazil? Who? Marco Rubio has personally sanctioned people in the Brazilian government. I mean, this guy's fucking just as autocratic as the rest of them and he shouldn't keep getting a pass.
- [29:33]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And look, whatever values he may have had, he's clearly abandoned and sold out in service of doing whatever Trump wants. Yeah, it is what it is.
- [29:40]
Ben Rhodes
Same as J.D. vance.
- [29:41]
Tommy Vitor
Yep, he is terrible. Pod of the World is brought to you by Sundays. When it comes to dog food, it seems like you have to make a choice. You can either have fresh and healthy, or you can have easy to store and serve, but never both. But you don't have to choose anymore. Thanks To Sundays. Sundays is fresh air dry dog food made from clean ingredients. Recipes are customized based on the needs of your dog size, breed, allergies, activity levels and more. Unlike other fresh dog food, sundaes does not require thawing, refrigeration or preparation because of their air drying process. You just pour and serve. That's it. Sundays was started by Dr. Tori Waxman, a veterinarian who's devoted her life to animals. Sundays always has the absolute highest standards for quality and food and safety. If it's not 100% all natural meat and superfoods with 0% synthetic nutrition, nutrients or artificial ingredients, then it's not Sundays. Every Sunday's order ships right to your door, so you'll never worry about running out of dog food again. And you can cancel or pause your subscription anytime with Sunday's 14 day money back guarantee. So what are you waiting for? Thousands of dog parents have made the switch and reported pups with more energy, better poops, softer fur and fresher breath thanks to Sundays. I can confirm that every dog loves Sundays. They sprint. The bowl when you pour doesn't stink. What else? I don't know. Just good dog food. Easy to store.
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Anthony Amore
Car shopping.
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Tommy Vitor
Oh, just for you. Oh, it's just for you. Find your next ride@autotrader.com powered by auto Intelligence. Okay, so there have been a lot of developments over the last week or so in Gaza, like since the ceasefire, hostage release and Palestinian prisoner release deal. So we're going to kind of walk you through what we know, starting with the humanitarian situation and what's happening with Hamas and then talk about, you know, whether or not this really is a ceasefire anymore. So aid groups say the humanitarian situation in Gaza is still incredibly dire. The World Food Program said on Tuesday that they're currently able to get 750 tons of food into Gaza per day, but that 2,000 tons are needed. So the deal calls for 600 aid trucks per day going into Gaza. But Reuters reported that the Israeli authorities told the UN they intended to limit that number to 300 trucks for some period of time to punish Hamas for not returning the bodies of the dead hostages fast enough. Now, I don't know if that actually happened, but I know it was reported. So it's just like a thing we're all watching. Regardless, access to Gaza remains a big problem. As of this recording, the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza is closed. No crossing to northern Gaza are open where the need is greatest, where there was a famine. And only two crossings are open in the south, which is just insufficient. And meanwhile, eight organizations are. They're working to ramp up the number of distribution points within Gaza as quickly as possible. But that is going to take some time. Now, one silver lining here on the humanitarian front is that the Gaza Humanitarian foundation, or ghf, seems to have collapsed or be collapsing. That was that shady US Israeli backed aid group run by US Security contractors.
- [33:18]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I think of it more as like a Blackwater type organization than an.
- [33:21]
Tommy Vitor
Aid group funded by the US and some other country we don't know about.
- [33:24]
Ben Rhodes
Probably a lot of corruption there. Probably a lot of people making money off.
- [33:27]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And they're repeatedly accused of indiscriminately killing civilians who are literally just trying to get food. So hopefully someday, hopefully that organization goes away and someday that people involved are prosecuted for that disaster.
- [33:38]
Ben Rhodes
Just one quick thing on this. I noticed right before we came in here, one of the leaders of that organization is reportedly going to be on the US Whatever committee monitoring the cease.
- [33:47]
Tommy Vitor
Fire of the Board of Peace.
- [33:48]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe not. The Board of Peace is some other mechanism. So these guys will land just fine.
- [33:53]
Tommy Vitor
That's perfect. On the security front, Hamas has begun to reassert control in Gaza. That includes executing people they accuse of being collaborators with Israel. It means attacking rival clans and militias, some of which have been armed by the Israeli government. Last week we played a clip where Trump seemed to not seem to. He did suggest that he was cool with Hamas killing its rivals and providing security for a bit. But then Monday he struck like a totally different tone after two Israeli soldiers were killed in Rafah. Here's that clip. We made a deal with Hamas that, you know, they're going to be very good, they're going to behave, they're going to be nice, and if they're not.
- [34:29]
Ben Rhodes
We'Re going to go and we're going to eradicate them.
- [34:32]
Tommy Vitor
If we have to. They'll be eradicated. And they know that. So they. They went in.
- [34:37]
Ben Rhodes
They went in, and I don't believe.
- [34:40]
Tommy Vitor
It was the leadership. And they had some rebellion in there among themselves and they killed some people, you know, pretty.
- [34:49]
Ben Rhodes
A lot of people.
- [34:50]
Tommy Vitor
But this is a violent group.
- [34:51]
Ben Rhodes
You know, you probably noticed over the.
- [34:53]
Tommy Vitor
Last hundred years, this is a very violent group of people. And they got very rambunctious and they did things that they shouldn't be doing. And if they keep doing it, then we're going to go in and straighten it out and it'll happen very quickly and pretty violently, unfortunately. So who is we? I mean, they keep saying, no U.S. boots on the ground in Gaza, but who. Who is we that's going to eradicate Hamas also? Hamas was not eradicated after two years of the most brutal fighting anyone could imagine. So what is going to change now? Like, I realize he's full of shit. He talks tough, he's incoherent about a lot of things. But I don't know. What did you make of that, that commentary on Hamas role?
- [35:34]
Ben Rhodes
First of all, I know this is not the most important thing, but it is kind of interesting that he says, you know, you haven't been paying attention for 100 years. Like, Hamas is not 100 years old, not even close. Like maybe, you know, 25, 30 years old. So that's either like, he doesn't know what he's talking about, or he's kind of conflating Hamas with kind of Palestinian in general. You know, like, not that Palestinians are only 100 years old, but like, that's kind of like almost back to the beginning of the, you know, Balfour Declaration.
- [36:05]
Tommy Vitor
Hamas was founded in 1987.
- [36:06]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not. Whatever. It's just weird because there's also, like, look, Hamas, obviously, we don't want to see them in charge. Bad guys. The way he talks about, like, eradicating, there's a dehumanization that seems like it's not just about Hamas. It feels like it's about, like, people in Gaza generally. Like, we don't talk about people like that like there's some disease. You know, we shouldn't. I mean, actually, maybe we do too often in this country. That said, look, I think what is happening is Hamas is prioritizing the re. Establishment of their control over Gaza that is involving retribution against their own. They need to flex. Right? And I think this is the problem. And that's bad. I think that's a bad thing. This is the problem with not having phase two agreed to, though we're seeing the vacuum between phase one and phase two of this peace plan. Because what you would normally want is if you're gonna have some Arab force go in under the actual peace plan, you would want that to happen quicker so that this doesn't happen. If you just let a place that's been utterly destroyed, that has absolutely desperate people and a group like Hamas trying to reestablish its authority, and by the way, a bunch of Israeli backed thugs who are fighting with Hamas, well, this is what's going to happen. And this is why putting the cart before the horse and declaring peace when you didn't have a plan to secure Gaza, absent the IDF version of security, which is just killing everybody there and demilitarizing Hamas. You get this and you also get, by the way, and I know we're gonna talk about it now, but just to kind of segue into it, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza far exceeds anything Hamas has done. But he doesn't seem that angry about that, which suggests to you what really happened here, which is the Israelis got the hostages back. Trump got to have a win and he doesn't really give a shit other than the fact that it makes him look bad, I guess, that Gaza is far from peace.
- [38:21]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. Leo, let's talk about how far off we are on that, that phase two. So, but before that, I mean, like, regardless of, of what you think about the Trump deal, like, it is indisputable that Gaza has been very, very, very violent.
- [38:33]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [38:33]
Tommy Vitor
Since this quote unquote peace deal was cut, Israel is furious at Hamas for not returning the bodies of the dead hostages fast enough. I think there's some reasons for that. And Hamas has accused Israel of violating the ceasefire 80 times. On Friday, the IDF fired on what they described as a suspicious vehicle in northern Gaza and that killed 11 members of the same family, including kids. That car had crossed an unmarked yellow line into an area Israel now controls that had not been marked. Right. So like, again, just like the details, right, you probably should mark where people are not allowed to go before you kill them. Then on Sunday, two Israeli soldiers were killed in Rafah. Israel blamed Hamas, but Hamas said, like, look, we haven't had contact with those fighters since March. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but seems credible given how challenging communication has been in the Gaza Strip and how Balkanized and leadershipless Hamas is after, like the senior leadership has been killed off. But then in response, the IDF hit dozens of targets across the Gaza Strip and they announced they would cut off aid until further notice.
- [39:30]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, now we've seen this move, so.
- [39:32]
Tommy Vitor
We see this before. And like, not surprisingly, the far right lawmakers, like, immediately called for resuming the war. You had Itamar Ben gvir, the National Security Minister, calling for the renewal of full scale fighting in the strip at full strength. Basil Smotrich, the Finance minister, just tweeted, war. Now, the IDF luckily has said they would continue enforcing the ceasefire and allow aid into Gaza, but it's tenuous. So, Vice President J.D. vance, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner, they're all in Israel this week to work on these phase two issues that you just highlighted. In other words, like the hard stuff. Let's listen to a quick clip from, from J.D. vance today. And then I want to trigger you with some Kushner in a bit. It is a focus of everybody here to get those bodies back home to their families so they can have a proper burial. Now, that said, this is difficult. This is not going to happen overnight. Some of these hostages are buried under thousands of pounds of rubble. Some of the hostages, nobody even knows where they are. That doesn't mean we shouldn't work to get them, and that doesn't mean we don't have confidence that we will. It's just a reason to keep council in favor of a little bit of patience. This is going to take a little bit of time. There are not going to be American boots on the ground in Gaza. What we can do is provide some useful coordination. How do you take, you know, the Gulf Arab states, plus Israel, plus, you know, plus the Turks, plus the Indonesians. How do you actually get those folks to work together in a way that actually produces long term peace? The only real mediators are the United States of America. And so that's the role that we're going to play. Interesting that he's actually like, far more reasonable about the timeline for the hostage release than the Israeli government, which is like, we'll cut off aid.
- [41:06]
Ben Rhodes
Well, he comes from the wing of the Republican Party that is actually America first and is probably a little skeptical of Israel. And I think he's over there as the bad cop. And look, I just want to say the cynics, of which I probably was one, were like, well, once the hostages are out at some point, if this Netanyahu government is still in power with this coalition, they'll find some pretext. The fact that they only waited like a few days and that the pretext, I mean, I would have thought like, maybe There's a terrorist attack in a month, and then that's the pretext. The fact that it's only a few days. And the pretext, as even JD Vance acknowledges this, is not about, like, any, like, you know, sympathy for Hamas. It's just about physics. Like, you have the entire place destroyed. Any hostage is inevitably buried in some giant pile of rubble. Like, they know it's physically impossible to be able to return those remains. Even J.D. vance is acknowledging that. Right.
- [42:10]
Anthony Amore
Yep.
- [42:10]
Ben Rhodes
And so what that tells me is that, look, I know that the families of the hostages have a tremendously sincere desire to have their loved ones return to them. I feel like the politicians here seem like they're grabbing a pretext. And, look, I'd love to be proven wrong on that, but it's hard to know how else to read all these airstrikes and aid cuts and crossings closed in response to a pre. Physically impossible demand.
- [42:42]
Tommy Vitor
Right. Which everyone acknowledged would be difficult, including JD Events.
- [42:44]
Ben Rhodes
And by the way, we should acknowledge, too, I'm sorry, but, like, where's the concern about the Palestinian children who are buried under the rubble? Like, I just. I'm getting.
- [42:52]
Tommy Vitor
Like, this is not even worse than that. Like, the idea that, look, I want all those bodies back. They should all be returned, but the idea that not getting them back fast enough justifies starving. Starving more kids is just. No one should defend.
- [43:03]
Ben Rhodes
That's just wrong.
- [43:04]
Tommy Vitor
And also, as you heard there, like, as you mentioned before, Ben, like, a critical, like, essential issue is creating this international stabilization force to go into Gaza to provide security. And there have been a bunch of reports about, like, countries that might allow their troops to be part of this force. The Guardian said Egypt will lead it, along with troops from Turkey, Indonesia, and Azerbaijan. They've also seen Pakistan kind of thrown into the mix of maybe participating. It's the real, like, who's who of human rights violating militaries. But none of these countries are going to send troops until Hamas gives up its weapons. In other words, like, they're not signing up to fight Hamas on Israel's behalf. It's just to be there to fight security. Now, Jared Kushner and Tlikov were treated to a puff piece from 60 Minutes about the deal. Exactly. Look, they deserve some credit, as we've discussed, but they also get tired of saying that. Yeah, look, they also talked about some of the challenges ahead, and I think it's instructive to kind of hear how far away we are on some of these big issues. Let's listen what people call conflicts of interest. Steve And I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world. Our relationships were direct with the leaders of these three countries. And we were hearing that Hamas was positive on the deal. And yet I was reading intelligence reports every day and getting briefings from the CIA three times a day. And those intelligence briefings were suggesting that Hamas was going to say no, none of these things have started the stabilization peacekeepers who were supposed to be from the Arab countries right in the region.
- [44:32]
Ben Rhodes
No, we've started putting out feelers, trying.
- [44:35]
Tommy Vitor
To figure out how to organize it.
- [44:37]
Ben Rhodes
Figuring out what are the tasks, who's in charge of the tasks, and creating.
- [44:40]
Tommy Vitor
A mechanism to start approving it. Ultimately, this will report to the Board of Peace, but there's a lot of work that's. But there is no Board of Peace.
- [44:45]
Ben Rhodes
By the way, when you talk about.
- [44:47]
Anthony Amore
A government.
- [44:49]
Tommy Vitor
And I know this is.
- [44:50]
Ben Rhodes
In the future, but whether it's Gaza.
- [44:54]
Anthony Amore
By itself or a Palestinian state with.
- [44:57]
Tommy Vitor
The west bank, do you foresee it as a democracy or do you see.
- [45:03]
Anthony Amore
It as a government with a strong man?
- [45:07]
Ben Rhodes
Too early to tell. I just being honest. Too early to tell what about a.
- [45:11]
Tommy Vitor
Palestinian state that's in the 20 point plan?
- [45:15]
Ben Rhodes
Well, what the plan says is that there could create a pathway to it. But you know these, what I learned when I got involved is that the.
- [45:22]
Tommy Vitor
Word state means different things to different people.
- [45:24]
Anthony Amore
Israel has become increasingly isolated because of.
- [45:28]
Tommy Vitor
This war, because of the pounding in Gaza. What do they need to do? What should they do to reestablish the good reputation they had?
- [45:41]
Ben Rhodes
Just be exceptional.
- [45:42]
Tommy Vitor
Sounds like corruption. Those are connections.
- [45:45]
Ben Rhodes
You watched all that?
- [45:46]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. CIA sucks. We're putting out feelers about the security force. Doesn't seem like we're quite there yet. State. What state for the Palestinians be best? Israel is the path going forward to stop being a pariah. So look, you and I have talked on the show about how we're a long way off from a two state solution, but I do think it's notable that Kushner, like yada, yada, yada, is.
- [46:06]
Ben Rhodes
Whether to say that's an aspiration, we'll.
- [46:09]
Tommy Vitor
Have a democracy or a, or a dictatorship. And like, look, this a hard problem, but the lack of progress here really worries me. Question, how triggered were you by that 60 minutes clip? And at what point do you think it's fair to say, okay, the peace deal is falling apart, we are back at war and like, how much leash do you think we need to give anyone in this situation where like, look, after a peace deal, there's going to be Skirmishes, there's going to be like embers you have to put out. And that's just sort of how it is. But you have to power through it.
- [46:40]
Ben Rhodes
I mean, first I want to say I don't watch Jared Kushner with audio that much. I feel like if they made a remake of American Psycho as more like a rom com, that Jared Kushner would be like the buddy of Christian Bale.
- [46:55]
Tommy Vitor
Who gets in the face of the mask.
- [46:56]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, he looks like the guy that he talks to after he like, you know. Anyway, put that aside. I mean, the honest question, and this is part of what, why I think, you know, we were, while happy about the ceasefire, skeptical of the word peace. Is that what is actually different thus far from the previous two ceasefires? I mean, we had previous ceasefires where similar numbers, if not more hostages from Israel were returned and Palestinians were returned and the fighting stopped and some aid got in. This one was treated differently, I think, in part cuz the last of the.
- [47:32]
Tommy Vitor
Israeli hostages, I think it was entirely because the hostages all came home, but.
- [47:35]
Ben Rhodes
The 20 is not as many as were in the other tranches. But what is materially different in Gaza today than was in the case between like December and March of the last ceasefire? And so that's, that's. And look, there's more talk about an Arab stabilization force or multinational stabilization force, but that's the first point here, is that just conceptually this thing was presented as a peace deal when it's basically just a ceasefire like the other two. It just so happens that it's the last tranche of Israeli hostages. And if that's the only thing you care about, then you're fine. But if you actually give a shit about what's happened in Gaza and the people in Gaza, then it's not fine because they're still being killed. I mean, shit, that car that got blown up, 11 people killed. Nobody in the IDF is even suggesting that those people who are hamas. Imagine if 11 Israelis just got blown up, an entire family. This would be, we stop American society over it, the nuclear place. And so I think that there's just like this normalization that this trickle of aid getting in, we're killing less people in Gaza and we're having these other conversations, we're still in a limbo. I hope they get to a stabilization force. That would make me very happy because I do care about what happens there. And to your question, I just think we'll know it when we see it in terms of when is this kind of back into conflict? And I think that the Israeli government, if they are smart, what they will do is they will try to bleed this thing out like they're doing now. Like they won't resume full bombardment, 2,000 pound bombs, but they'll just keep pushing the envelope, right? They'll take a few more shots and then they'll have another pretext and then they'll take back some land and they'll slow down the aid getting in. I have another one question. Where are the international journalists? If this is over, if this is peace, how come international journalists can't go into Gaza? What are they hiding? When is that going to be normalized? Right. So I think we've both not seen any normalization of life in Gaza. It's still fully controlled by essentially Israel and then Hamas fighting it out in the streets. And we're seeing these kind of warning signs, not maybe of the full resumption of a bombardment, but of this kind of policy of just squeezing and taking shots and ultimately de facto Israeli control over Gaza and more suffering for the Palestinian people.
- [50:00]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, there's a phenomenal piece in the New Yorker this week. The headline is Gaza's Broken Politics. It's by a Palestinian journalist and writer named Mohammad Mahawash that is really worth reading. That just like lays out in stark terms the challenge, the lack of leadership within Gaza with Hamas decimated, with Palestinian Authority useless, with a generation killed off. And also just the reality that like this is just a plan for occupation of Gaza. There's no Palestinian self determination in this plan.
- [50:29]
Ben Rhodes
And just very quickly you made this point around the peace deal. Look, one of the things, if you're serious about having a Palestinian leadership with credibility, well then maybe you would push to actually get Marwan Barghouti out of prison and try to have the Gulf Arabs build something around him with a bunch of civil society and technocratic type people. It's just one example. I know that's a hard step, but if there's one figure who's not Hamas, who would have the credibility with the Palestinian people to be a part of that effort that's available. And it just, it doesn't feel like there's like a credible plan yet to develop an alternative policy.
- [51:04]
Tommy Vitor
No. And by design.
- [51:05]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, exactly. By design. Exactly.
- [51:07]
Tommy Vitor
Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but before we do, we want to tell you about a new show because you see the headlines, you hear from the nation's most powerful leaders, we watch pundits analyze it all like the jackasses you're hearing from right now. But they're very far removed from everyday people who are caught in the crosshairs of these Trump policies. Not anymore, Ben. Alex Wagner, your friend and mine, Fantastic, great journalist. She's going to step away from the traditional media bubble and towards the folks most affected by our unprecedented times. In her new show, Runaway country with Alex Wagner. She's going to bring you stories from the front lines and from the voices of people who are too often left out of the conversation. You can listen to the trailer now. Tune into the premiere of Runaway country with Alex Wagner on October 23rd. New episodes drop every Thursday. Make sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and to watch on YouTube. Doing double duty now. Also, Ben Crooked con it's two weeks away.
- [51:54]
Ben Rhodes
Can't wait. I'm very excited about it.
- [51:56]
Tommy Vitor
Felt like so far away. We got a ton of great new speakers for the lineup on November 7th. Adam Mockler, Tim Miller, Pramila Jayapal, Jen Psaki, Simone Sanders Townsend. Also, Alex Wagner. Alex Wagner. We had a Worldo exclusive sneak peek of the schedule. Ben and I are gonna do a panel you guys will love. We're gonna be talking about what a progressive Democratic Party foreign policy should look like in 2025. We got Rokhanna with us. We got Yasmine Ansari. Two members of Congress that are some of the smartest, brightest lights, you know.
- [52:25]
Ben Rhodes
What they're talking about, willing to challenge convention a bit.
- [52:27]
Tommy Vitor
Yes. Awesome people. Also, I'm going to moderate a panel on what we can learn from the 2025 elections with some folks who had just either won or lost them. Fingers crossed. So full schedule's coming out in a couple days. Keep an eye out, but if you want to get tickets, go to crookedcon.com that's crookedcon.com act now because we're running out. Pod save the world is brought to you by Rocket Money. Most of us know we should take control of our finances, but it's hard to know where to start. Rocket Money gives you the clarity and confidence to take that first step, helping you cut wasteful spending and take meaningful action toward your financial goals. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money shows you all your expenses in one place, including subscriptions you forgot about. If you see a subscription you no longer want, Rocket Money will help you cancel it. If you've got a goal you'd like to save for, Rocket Money can analyze your accounts to find the best time each month to put extra money aside. Rocket Money will even try to negotiate lower bills for you. The app automatically scans your bills to find opportunities to save and then goes to work to get you better deals. Leave and talk to customer service so you don't have to. Rocket Money has saved users over $2.5 billion, including over 880 million in canceled subscription fees alone. Their 10 million members save up to 740 bucks a year when they use all of the app's premium features. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to RocketMoney.comWorld Go today. That's RocketMoney.comWorld RocketMoney.comWorld welcome back to Listen to your Heart.
- [54:06]
Anthony Amore
I'm Jerry and I'm Jerry's Heart.
- [54:08]
Tommy Vitor
Today's topic, Repatha Evolocumab Heart.
- [54:11]
Anthony Amore
Why'd you pick this one?
- [54:12]
Tommy Vitor
Well, Jerry, for people who have had a heart attack like us, diet and exercise might not be enough to lower.
- [54:18]
Anthony Amore
The risk of another one.
- [54:19]
Tommy Vitor
Okay.
- [54:20]
Anthony Amore
To help know if we're at risk.
- [54:21]
Tommy Vitor
We should be getting our ldlc, our bad cholesterol checked and talking to our doctor. I'm listening. And if it's still too high, Repatha can be added to a statin to lower our LDL C and our heart attack risk.
- [54:32]
Anthony Amore
Hmm.
- [54:33]
Tommy Vitor
Guess it's time to ask about Repatha. Do not take Repatha if you are allergic to it. Serious allergic reactions can occur. Get medical help right away if you have trouble breathing or swallowing, swelling of the face, lips, tongue, throat or arms. Common side effects include runny nose, sore throat, common cold, cold symptoms, flu or flu like symptoms, back pain, high blood sugar and redness pain or bruising at the injection site. Listen to your heart. Ask your doctor about Repatha. Learn more@repatha.com or call 1-844-repatha Two other things the Israel bucket before we move on. So a couple weeks ago we spoke with no Chenal who was sailing with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on her way to Gaza. Like the global Samud Flotilla head of her, she was intercepted, expected to be intercepted when we talked to her and then was on October 8th. So Ben hopped on a zoom with her to talk about her experience in Israeli custody. And here's an excerpt from that conversation.
- [55:34]
Ben Rhodes
Okay. Well, we are pleased to welcome back Noah Schnall who we last spoke to when she was on board the Conscience Flotilla. Noah, good to see you. Obviously, the last time we saw you, you were on the high seas in international waters. People who aren't watching this on YouTube, can't see. You still have the residue of a black eye and some other bruises. How did your ship get boarded? How were you taken?
- [56:02]
Noah Schnall
Yeah, I definitely want to go through that, but I also really want to stress the fact that we were attacked in international waters, right? So some people think, oh, maybe you approached Israel or you approached an area that was, you know, dangerous for you or whatever. This was international wires. Every part of this was illegal. Two helicopters came above us and then several, maybe four or five Zodiacs, which are these, like, rubber boats that, you know, like, maybe the seals will use, you know.
- [56:35]
Ben Rhodes
And is it daytime or nighttime?
- [56:37]
Noah Schnall
Nighttime. Like five in the morning.
- [56:39]
Ben Rhodes
Okay.
- [56:39]
Noah Schnall
People are this naval elite naval group called 13. Literally just means, like, group 13 starts rappelling down onto the ship. And then they started, because we had Starlink, like, cutting all the. Physically cutting all the. The surveillance cameras, smashing them and turning them up, like, three ways of just making sure nothing would be seen from our side. And then they commandeered the ship, and we rode with it all day until, I think, under their command until it reached Ashdod Port, just north of Gaza. I mean, from the beginning, certain people, myself included, were selected for worse treatment. And it was very obviously people of color, Arab people, people that they assumed were Arab and weren't, like, Turkish people. I got zip tied, so. And not everybody else did and separated.
- [57:35]
Ben Rhodes
So what happened to you when you got to Israel proper?
- [57:41]
Noah Schnall
So we were taken to Ashdod Port and processed through this port. And it was like humiliation from the beginning. They would shove your head down so you would like facing the floor and then your arms up, Right. So it's like stress positions. And, you know, if you said anything, they would slam you against a wall. Which, of course, happened to me and others as well. Strip searches began immediately. One woman confided in me and agreed that I just anonymized her name, that she was penetrated during her strip search. I mean, just absolutely horrific things.
- [58:14]
Ben Rhodes
And then what kind of mistreatment did you get? Any more physical mistreatment while you were in prison?
- [58:19]
Noah Schnall
Anything that you would do to anger them and a word could anger them. You would get threatened in the mornings. We would. The women, at least I can't speak of. The men, would be, like, threatened with rape, which don't have words for that. There were. The men told us that the prison dogs, they would get woken up with prison dogs and men with guns just to terrorize them.
- [58:47]
Ben Rhodes
And if you don't mind me asking, I mean, you have a few bruises on, like, your ankles and arms. How did you get those?
- [58:54]
Noah Schnall
Three or four, potentially five, I'm not sure. Guards, men and women, took me into this little side room, and to get there, they actually lifted me off the ground because I had shackles on my ankles and wrists. Lifted me off the ground. So I was, like, hanging, basically like a stuck pig, you know, and took me into the room and just wailed, just started wailing on me. I don't actually know why they stopped, but, yeah, one larger woman, like, sat on my neck and face. I just couldn't breathe. And I started, like, kicking and definitely connected with somebody. I don't know who.
- [59:29]
Ben Rhodes
All right, well, look, thanks so much, Noah. I'm glad you're safe now. I'm sorry for what you've been through. But like you said, I mean, it's part of a much bigger picture of what's happening. So thanks for helping bring a small part of that picture to us.
- [59:42]
Noah Schnall
Thank you for listening.
- [59:43]
Tommy Vitor
You know, Ben. So it's just incredibly harrowing to hear that. Also, it just, it seems. It's hard not to believe that that treatment was intentional because Greta Thunberg did an interview with a Swedish publication where she detailed, like, verbal and physical abuse that she had suffered, the people around her had suffered. There's reports of people getting their medicine stripped away. I mean, it just seems like, you know, it's by design. And also, it makes you assume that the treatment of Palestinian prisoners is exponentially worse.
- [60:11]
Ben Rhodes
Yes. And you know, that Noah kept emphasizing that in our longer conversation, too. But I would just say this is a Jewish American citizen from Los Angeles, and this is how she's treated. And yet it's not surprising. And I don't think it would be surprising to most people. Just think about how weird that is. Like, well, why is that? Okay? Why is that normal? This is not. And this will set up the next clip. This is not fucking normal. And it's not happening just in Gaza. This is happening in Israeli prisons. It's happening in the West Bank. It's, you know, so.
- [60:48]
Tommy Vitor
And the Trump administration is doing nothing to help these people.
- [60:50]
Ben Rhodes
These are Americans. Like, I mean, these people, like, celebrate their ability to get hostages out of prison. You know, some of whom have done weirder and sketchier things in trying to deliver medicine on a flotilla in international waters. But they don't seem to care here. And that includes Democratic representatives.
- [61:06]
Tommy Vitor
Right.
- [61:07]
Ben Rhodes
Who are not coming to the aid of their constituents in too many cases.
- [61:10]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. So similar example. So we mentioned a recent Pod Save the World guest named Jastreman. Nathaniel has been in the west bank for the last few weeks. He's covering life there during the olive harvest. And everyone should check out his great substack on the West Bank. It's called Infinite Jazz J A Z. So if you subscribe and you come a paid subscriber, you can actually fund the work that he's doing because he funds it all on his own. But. So over the weekend, Jasper and a bunch of Palestinian farmers were out in the fields when they saw this sort of mob of violent Israeli settlers. They went up to the IDF to try to get some help so they could just go home. But the IDF in Jasper's view, basically set them up and drew them into an ambush. And they were chased by this violent mob of settlers who were literally wielding clubs and beating the shit out of people. I mean, there's a video that Jasper took of this one settler clubbing an elderly woman in the head and nearly killing her. So we reached out to Jasper, I saw this, him tweeting about this and posting videos over the weekend. Reached out to him, just like check in and see if he was okay. And then he sent us this video to sort of explain, you know, his experience and what it was like, including just the US government's shocking lack of response to what he had gone through. Here's a clip I had to run for my life. I was thinking about the fact that two weeks ago or maybe three weeks ago, I wrote a story in the Paris Review about the families of Americans who have been killed in the west bank when I traveled with them to Washington D.C. as they tried to get justice. And honestly I was just thinking of my own parents joining that group. And part of the reason I was thinking that is because we were just a few kilometers away from where the 20 year old Palestinian American, Saifullah Musalat, was beaten to death by settlers, by a huge pack of settlers, exactly like the one that was chasing me. The IDF never showed up. The Israeli police never showed up. They have since lied and told media that they came and dispersed it. A categorical fabrication. I just feel incredibly angry that the IDF led me into that, led us into that, and knowing that in all likelihood nobody will ever be held accountable for it. Somebody in the town contacted the, the U.S. embassy, I think, and they asked to speak to me. So I got on the phone. I'll just say that they both really put on a good show of expressing sympathy and outrage and saying that like, yes, like we need this. This is it. Enough is enough. This needs to Stop. And they said, you're right, you know, we need this. This place needs to be protected. Something needs to change. They said they would get back to me later, and I have not heard from them since. I've not heard from anybody in the US Government, even though I've made it very clear to my representatives, which include Chuck Schumer, Kristen Gillibrand, Dan Goldman. I've let them know that I'm in danger. An ally that all three of them support very closely is threatening my life. And I've asked for some sort of protection, and I've not heard back from any of them. So, again, Ben, like, a truly horrifying experience for Jasper. And also, you know, I'm glad he was not hurt. But it was also. It's a reminder that west bank settlement construction and settler violence, they are not even mentioned in the. In the deal to bring, you know, peace to the Middle East.
- [64:32]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, and we only. We know about this because Jasper happened to be there. How many times does this happen across the West Bank? We don't have cameras there. We don't have an American there. We don't have a journalist there.
- [64:41]
Tommy Vitor
And Israel is deporting international activists who go to the west bank to observe these, to protect them.
- [64:45]
Ben Rhodes
It's the same thing as in Gaza. No international journalists in Gaza. They want no international journalists in the West Bank. Ultimately. Ultimately. I'm sure that's why they make life pretty miserable for people who are covering this. And it just tells you that there's something broken in the society. I'm just telling you that that's just normal. It's just, oh, it's something. Even if you don't like it, you're probably just like, well, it's just the settlers being the settlers. Like, man, that's fucked up.
- [65:08]
Tommy Vitor
And that the Trump administration and Mike Huckabee, the ambassador, look, he sides with the people wielding the clubs beating the shit out of the Palestinians, not the American citizens getting chased by this mob. Again.
- [65:19]
Ben Rhodes
America First.
- [65:20]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, America first. Check out Jasper substack. It's Infinite Jazz. Jaz. And also you can find him on Instagram and at Infinite Underscore. Jaz. He's doing great work. So, Ben, we got some historic news out of Japan where Satna A. Takaichi has become the first female prime minister in Japan's history, replacing Shigeru Ishiba, who served for about a year, I think. A few weeks ago, Takaichi was elected to be the head of the Liberal Democratic Party. That's the long dominant political party in Japan. But her ascension to being Prime Minister was not sure. It was not a sure thing. In fact, like, one of the LDP's coalition members dropped out of their alliance and it led her to scramble to find another partner to shore up support. But she pulled it off. So politically she skews quite conservative. She's invoked Margaret Thatcher as a role model. She is a protege of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Listeners probably remember Trump was boys with Shinzo Abe. There was sort of early on like they were golfing.
- [66:17]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah.
- [66:18]
Tommy Vitor
And like they ate the beautiful cake during some international crisis maybe. I think we were like bombing Syria or something. Anyway.
- [66:24]
Ben Rhodes
Oh yeah, that's right. Right.
- [66:25]
Tommy Vitor
Beautiful chocolate cake. Yeah. Abe was assassinated in 2022 after he left office. Horrible incident of very rare gun violence in Japan. But he was a nationalist. He advocated for a stronger military and it's pretty right wing guy. So unlike Abe, Takechi is not from a political dynasty. She's not like a blue blood or. She was a former news anchor who was elected to parliament in 1993. She served in a number of important positions. She's always described as a hardliner and a sort of security hawk. She has raised eyebrows for regularly visiting shrines that honor convicted war criminals. Like, she's not going to be the one to kind of patch things up with South Korea, for example, given Japan's treatment of them during the war. She said she wants to get tougher on immigrants and on tourism. She wants to boost military spending. She wants to let the government borrow more money to grow the economy. And she's very socially conservative. She opposes gay marriage and allowing women to keep their maiden names after marriage. To get a little more.
- [67:21]
Ben Rhodes
No, I think compelling it.
- [67:23]
Tommy Vitor
Yes, exactly.
- [67:25]
Ben Rhodes
You are not allowed to keep the same name.
- [67:27]
Anthony Amore
Right, Exactly.
- [67:27]
Ben Rhodes
That kind of got my attention.
- [67:29]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. It's shocking. Obviously it cuts both ways, but like 99.9% of the cases are are women being forced to take their husband's name. So to get a little more context about what to expect from her and the challenges she faced, we caught up with an expert, Yuki Tatsumi. She is the senior director of the Institute for Indo Pacific Security. Here's a clip of that.
- [67:46]
Ben Rhodes
Even though she won the prime ministership, the voting margin is very, very slim. So it's kind of like a US current situation at the House. So she could lose that majority vote, you know, majority support. You know, it with like a single misstep. For example, she made a very smart choice of retaining and actually appointing Akazawa, who was the.
- [68:11]
Tommy Vitor
Who was at the forefront of negotiating.
- [68:13]
Ben Rhodes
The tariff deal with the Trump administration. But now she formally appoints him as a Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, which will be. Which was a very, very smart move because he was really the only person in Japanese political circle at this point, including Takaji herself, who has met Trump. I think she has a better chance of building that positive relationship with Trump, not only because of her own image, but she also brings incredible asset that her predecessor Sheba didn't have, which is she can claim herself, himself to be a Mr. Abe's protege. And still to this day, I think Mr. Abe is one of the few leaders that, you know, President Trump keeps talking about, you know, in a very fondly way.
- [69:07]
Tommy Vitor
So Trump is heading to Asia later this week for APEC meetings. He goes to Japan as well. It's going to be interesting to see how Xi balances the need to get along with him and the pressure from tariffs with his demand that Japan cut, I think, a $550 billion check to the United States in a term for tariff reduction. So I guess we'll find out. Any predictions for how this goes.
- [69:30]
Ben Rhodes
First of all, you left out my favorite detail of Takaichi, which is that she was like a heavy metal drummer.
- [69:34]
Tommy Vitor
Back in the day. Yes, she was.
- [69:35]
Ben Rhodes
She's been on quite the journey. And I will say, like, it is cool that there's a woman Prime Minister of Japan. I'd note even the United States is not increasingly isolated company in that regard.
- [69:47]
Tommy Vitor
Bummer that she's a right winger.
- [69:48]
Ben Rhodes
Well, that's what I was going to get to. And look, she's clearly also a pretty savvy political oper right now in terms of how this is gonna go. Look, there are a few things that worry me inside of Japan. There's actually like an even further to the right party, like a straight up, like new right, populist Japan first kind of party. Right.
- [70:10]
Tommy Vitor
She's not anti establishment. She's been around forever.
- [70:12]
Ben Rhodes
Exactly. And so part of what concerns me about her is that she may need to tack right to keep the kind of far right on side. We've seen that playbook before. And look, I mean, we say this about Germany, we should also say about Japan never Good. When the far right starts to like pop up in Japan, right.
- [70:30]
Tommy Vitor
Nationalists.
- [70:31]
Ben Rhodes
So that's concerning is just like internally what's happening, where's it going? And concerning that, man, this wave globally is now, it's literally everywhere. There's no place that we don't have this kind of far right nationalism as the historical Memory of, like, I don't know, World War II seems to fade. I do think in terms of the U.S. i don't know, Trump probably will like her because she's going to join the club of the kind of CPAC goons. And I assume so. Even though he's always had this kind of chip on the shoulder about Japan, I think that the trade deal is already hard for her to swallow. Those are tough terms for the Japanese and it's going to hurt their economy. Part of what they might do is I imagine one of these fake investment numbers. If I'm going to be predictive, get Softbank back out there, remember? And Japan says that they'll invest a trillion dollars in the US economy in the next 10 years and Trump says it's a big win and the aid never comes. But then the other thing you mentioned, but I would watch this, she seems like the kind of person who's designed in a lab to have tensions with the South Koreans over historical issues. So you could also just see this kind of fracturing which is kind of already happening with Trump back in Asia.
- [71:40]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And especially with South Korea just having elected a lefty.
- [71:45]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, yeah.
- [71:45]
Tommy Vitor
You know, we'll say. Yeah. One to watch. Two more quick things before we get to the interview. So in the past several months, Ben, we've talked a lot about Trump's cover up of the Epstein files. That's information about his buddy and now deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the financier. So one of Epstein's victims, a woman named Virginia Giuffre, published a memoir this month about her treatment by Jeffrey Epstein and his enabler Ghislaine Maxwell in Epstein's like coterie of friends. And so tragically, you know, it's a posthumous memoir. Giuffre died by suicide earlier this year. But the details in the book that have leaked out already are truly horrifying and, like, have created scandals across borders. The book includes stories about the British royal family's Prince Andrew, who Giuffre says raped her. It also has gruesome details about encounters with a, quote, prime minister who is widely believed to be former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Those allegations also detail violent beatings and rape, which Barack denies. But they're really tough. Read. Epstein had financed a security company for Barack. They were known to be friends. There's a photo of him, like going into Epstein's house in New York.
- [72:52]
Ben Rhodes
And they're weird emails, too that have come out.
- [72:54]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, really weird emails. Now in the wake of those reports, Andrew, Prince Andrew has now officially agreed to give up his title as Duke of York. That comes after he's been stripped of other various duties, like public or charitable positions and military titles over the course of the last few years because he's a scumbag. There's also recently publicized emails that show Andrew's claims that he cut off contact with Epstein in 2010 were a total lie. Police in London are investigating whether it's true that Prince Andrew asked a police officer who was assigned as his bodyguard to look into Virginia Giuffre and probe whether she had a criminal record. More on that one, understandably. I think a lot of people think that, you know, Andrew relinquishing his title is not enough and they want the British Parliament to officially strip him of it. Only they have that power. It seems like not only the right thing to do, but potentially a popular thing for Keir Starmer to do. But I don't know, man. Truly vile stuff here.
- [73:45]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah, I think Andrew, you know, he denies it, but the fact that he's kind of not pushing back in the.
- [73:52]
Tommy Vitor
Photo of him in Virginia Duffrey is the one that everyone's seen.
- [73:55]
Ben Rhodes
So obvious, right? So that guy should lose all his fucking titles. If I was Keir Starmer, I'd make that a thing. I'd investigate whether he was trying to use resources to go after her. If I'm King Charles, not that he's gonna take my advice. Same thing, just take it all away, right? Cause this guy's a.
- [74:13]
Tommy Vitor
Take the fucking corgis.
- [74:14]
Ben Rhodes
Fucking creep. He should not have access to anything, including the corgis. Right. The Ehud Barak thing, it's like under discussed. It is fucking weird to me. That's not a bigger story. This guy was not just the Prime Minister of Israel. He was a very prominent prime minister of ISRA then he was the Defense minister. Yeah, he was the Defense Minister in the Obama years.
- [74:32]
Tommy Vitor
Right. Like well known.
- [74:34]
Ben Rhodes
He's, you know, and the details are like, just like. Like sadistic, seductive.
- [74:40]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, like.
- [74:41]
Ben Rhodes
Like, it's just very odd to me that this is not a bigger story. But then the other thing, like, because I want to say on these denials that these guys make, like, with everything that comes out here, there was no other reason to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein other than to do this. Like, Ehud Barak would have us believe what he went for the fucking dinner company and he didn't. I mean, I know this has been adjudicated, but like with each detail reinforces. And this gets to the Trump of it all too. Like what these guys were doing, you know, and this why Donald Trump is, like, happy to have a government shutdown so they don't have to seat another Democrat who could vote for a discharge petition to call for the really Epstein files. Like, this has never, like, been a clearer cover up than what we're seeing right now.
- [75:26]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, it is a shocking cover up. It's disgusting. What's his name? Alex Acosta, the US Attorney who gave Epstein the sweetheart deal back in, like, 2007, 2008 in Florida, was recently asked whether he had ever said that Jeffrey Epstein had connections to US or foreign intelligence. He had denied that. It might have been in a hearing. It might have been an interview with, like, the House Oversight Committee or something. But that's something we had covered previously. There has been, like, there was one news report that almost certainly was quoting Steve Bannon, by the way, that suggested Acosta had said that Epstein was like a Mossad guy or had some backing. But anyway, there's just a new data point on that.
- [76:00]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And the only thing I just want to point out, again, because it's relevant to the intelligence question, again, people think of Ehud Barak as Prime Minister around camp Dave in 2000. He was the Minister of Defense of Israel from 2007 to 2013.
- [76:13]
Tommy Vitor
It's a long time.
- [76:14]
Ben Rhodes
The Minister of Defense in Israel has, let's just say, plenty of ties to Israeli intelligence. You know, they oversee a chunk of it. Right. And I mean, I don't know. Like, I don't.
- [76:25]
Tommy Vitor
He seems pretty compromised.
- [76:26]
Ben Rhodes
Why don't we put out these files and tell us, like, the truth or else these questions are going to continue to mushroom.
- [76:32]
Tommy Vitor
It is awful. Speaking of awful, just finally, Ben, we wanted to highlight some really brutal but incredibly, you know, necessary and brave reporting on the just daily suffering that has been caused by the gutting of US Foreign aid by getting rid of usaid. There's a reporter at the Associated Press named Kristin Galano. She highlighted the devastating hunger crisis in Myanmar. And then a team of reporters, including Renata Brito, wrote about the crisis and Lesotho when we decimated their HIV treatment and prevention programs. These stories are incredibly tough reads. You know, as we said at the top, I mean, like, in Myanmar, you have kids starving to death because there's just no food going into these camps. But I think, you know, it's important just to follow up on the impact of Elon Musk, like, taking too much ketamine and deciding to take the chainsaw to usaid.
- [77:23]
Ben Rhodes
Yeah. And I guess the thing I want to add to this is that, you know, I worked a lot in Myanmar, and I went on one trip to Myanmar, I think it was in 2013. There was entirely like a USAID trip. Like, one of the follow ups to Obama being there was that we're going to have this big USAID plan to help them have greater crop yields and develop these nutrition programs. And I bring it up because I remember I went on this trip and I met with all these USAID people from Myanmar and from within the region, and then we met with all these Burmese officials. But we can be pretty hard on American foreign policy on this podcast because we talk about a lot of stupid shit. This is what we should have felt good about. I mean, I remember meeting these people, like, they're just really smart people who could probably have been making a lot of money doing shit in the United States, who were just out there trying to figure out how to feed as many people in Myanmar as possible and help them feed themselves. And to see that wiped out and to see the disregard for the fact that we're literally starving people to death because of these cuts, there's nobody else who can come in and make that whole. It's just. Don't go back to thinking that Elon Musk is just like a shitposting CEO. This is a man with a ton of blood on his hands.
- [78:39]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And this is Marco Rubio, who denied that anyone would die.
- [78:43]
Ben Rhodes
And Marco Rubio, who signed the death papers from US ID, lied about this. Like, kids are dying. People are dying, and we cannot look away from this.
- [78:53]
Tommy Vitor
Absolutely not. Okay, we are going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear my interview about this crazy, brazen daytime jewelry heist at the Louvre Museum over the weekend. So stick around for that. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th was World Mental Health Day. And this year, we're saying thank you, therapists. BetterHelp therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys. That's millions of stories, millions of journeys. And behind everyone is a therapist who showed up, listened, and helped someone take a step forward. Moments in therapy, like the right question, a safe space to cry, or a small win can change lives. This World mental health day, BetterHelp is honoring those connections and the therapists who make them possible, while showing how easy it is to get guidance from a licensed therapist online with BetterHelp. BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the US BetterHelp does the initial matching work for you so you can focus on your therapy goals. A short questionnaire helps identify your needs and preferences and their 10 plus years of experience and industry leading match fulfillment rate means they typically get it right the first time. If you aren't happy with your match, switch to a different therapist at any time from their tailored wrecks. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on 1.7 million client reviews. This World Mental Health Day, we're celebrating the therapists who have helped millions of people take a step forward. If you're ready to find the right therapist for you, BetterHelp can help you start that journey. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp H E L P.com Crooked World that's BetterHelp H E L P.COM Crooked World Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected and.
- [80:39]
Anthony Amore
Each one more expensive and more complicated than the last.
- [80:43]
Tommy Vitor
It can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need and are all connected on one platform. Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? Let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price. Sign up today@odoo.com that's o-o o.com listeners have probably heard about the shocking heist pulled off at the Louvre in Paris on Sunday. In a matter of minutes, a team of four burglars stole eight pieces of French crown jewelry from the Napoleonic era that were considered that are considered priceless. When the team here at POD Save the World heard about the story, we thought we got to get somebody on the phone to talk about international museum heists and like what the hell you do with all the stolen stuff now. So joining me today is Anthony Amore. He is currently the director of security and chief investigator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. He's also the author of the upcoming book the Rembrandt Heist the Story of Criminal A Stolen Masterpiece and An Enigmatic Friendship. Anthony, great to meet you.
- [81:53]
Anthony Amore
Likewise. Thank you for having me.
- [81:55]
Tommy Vitor
Well, we were chatting before we started. I'm from Boston. I've been to the Isabella Gardner Museum. I remember it was the biggest news story in the city, in the state, in the country for a while. But like we really haven't. Let us let it go us massholes. Right?
- [82:11]
Anthony Amore
Well, the world hasn't you'd be surprised how famous this heist is around the world. It's the biggest property theft in the history of the world. So I guess it makes sense. But 35 years on, people are still incredibly interested in it.
- [82:25]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, well, I want to ask you a little bit more about it in a bit, but before we do. So, over the weekend, these guys in Paris, disguised as construction workers, they used a truck mounted ladder to get up to the second floor of the Louvre to the gallery floor. Then they cut through the windows with a tool called an angle grinder, which I definitely didn't have to Google. Then they smashed the glass case to get the goods out and they were out of there in like seven minutes. And my understanding is they made off with Empress Eugenie's tiara, made in 1882, composed of 212 pearls and nearly 2,000 diamonds. 992 rose cut stones, really fancy diamond brooch with another couple thousand diamonds. There was a sapphire or diamond set, there was an emerald necklace. And you get the point. They stole a lot of shit. First question, why do you think the thieves chose this set of jewels? And then what do you do with them? Now if you're sitting on this, like what, 10,000 diamonds and emeralds and things?
- [83:24]
Anthony Amore
Well, anytime you see thieves have struck a museum, the goal is money. It's only money there. I could count on one hand how many times museum museums have been robbed for something other than money, some other sort of motive. And, and as two Boston guys, I can tell you that it's always Massachusetts that these things come back to. But the goal is to, you know, in this theft, it's really a nightmare scenario. So the thieves clearly cased this location, right? They plan this really well. And what the fear is that when you steal something like crown jewels, not that there's some evil collector somewhere who, who commissioned this heist like you see in the movies, but that the thieves might break these things up. Like the piece you just mentioned, 2000 diamonds, right? Imagine if they break it up and sell each diamond individually and the emeralds and the pearls and all the rest. I mean, it's a. You can't steal the Van Gogh and sell it, right? Because there's no one that's going to buy it. It's too recognizable, it's too valuable. And you can't cut a Van Gogh up into 100 pieces, but you can take a tiara and you can take all these individual pieces. You can melt down the gold or precious metals. It is a scary prospect. So the Pressure is really on the investigators to get these things back quickly.
- [84:48]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. And I've read one article about the heist, so I think I'm an expert now. They suggested that older jewels like these might not have kind of microscopic watermarks or things that might would make it easier to identify newer jewelry. Is that right? Are we, like, carving little serial numbers into jewels these days?
- [85:06]
Anthony Amore
Sometimes, not always. I just bought a diamond for my fiance, and it's not etched.
- [85:13]
Tommy Vitor
Congratulations.
- [85:14]
Anthony Amore
Thank you.
- [85:15]
Tommy Vitor
Buried the lead here, but.
- [85:18]
Anthony Amore
But it's not etched in any specific way. I would say that, you know, these older diamonds might be distinguishable because it's an older style cut, but they can be recut. And, you know, even if they were etched with some, a consumer is not going to be looking for this etching. They're not going to think, you know, they buy something from a dealer that came from a tiara. They're not going to say, boy, I wonder if this came from that Napoleonic piece back in Paris. They're much, much easier to fence. And that's why it's really a scary prospect and an evil thing to do. But a clever evil thing to do.
- [85:55]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah. I've noticed that the price of gold has gone way up in the last year or so. Has that led to more theft of gold jewelry?
- [86:03]
Anthony Amore
No, it hasn't. You haven't seen a big increase from museums, that is, they may be from retailers, but you haven't seen it from museums. These pieces are significant for their gems, though, more than they are for precious metals.
- [86:18]
Tommy Vitor
Got it. And then a lot of people are wondering why, you know, down the hall there was 140karat Regent diamond that I think is worth 60 million. Is that thing just too big to win? Well known to resell. Is that why it wasn't taken, you think?
- [86:32]
Anthony Amore
Probably, you know, there would be speculation to say, but I think, you know, thieves, their goal is to get in quickly, get the stuff and get out. So these pieces were centralized in the center of the room, and they all have, as you rightly implied, these all have small pieces that can be separated and sold far more easily than a giant diamond could. So again, I hate to say it this way, they chose well in their horrible crime. Yeah.
- [87:05]
Tommy Vitor
So you wake up Sunday morning, you're getting ready for another Patriots victory that came out of nowhere. Drake may all of a sudden is just the stud. And you pick up the paper, you read about this heist in Paris. What was your reaction to the operation? Like, did you come away thinking these guys were experts, that the Louvre Security is kind of a joke, something in between. Like what? What did you think?
- [87:26]
Anthony Amore
Well, I spent 20 years in this field and I, I actually have this database of all these heists, like 15 heists in it to create these profiles. So the first thing I asked, I thought to myself was I feel bad for the people that work at the museum. It's, they really take this personally. They care for these things throughout their career. So I can empathize with them. But the first thing I was interested in from a criminal perspective was how long did it take? It was seven minutes. I have this normal curve that shows three to nine minutes is how long these heists usually take. That's typical. What was really interesting to me from an investigative point of view is that they did this at 9:30 in the morning just after the museum opened. Right? Not a half hour before it opened, but after it opened. And that causes me to wonder, and this is again speculation, but did they know something about the way visitors move throughout that museum? Right, so it's open, but when they go into that Apollo Gallery, it's empty. Right. So they knew you or I would figure, hey, the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world. If I break into a window, it's going to be jam packed, right? But this room's empty and they knew this. I think maybe they went in after it opened because some defenses come down when you open to the public. You have less technology that's working at the moment. And again, assumption, but it's so intriguing to me that they did it at the time they did. And secondly, this method of using, as you described this, they call it a freight elevator, but it's more like a hydraulic lift that brought the ladder up to the second floor on a work truck. It's so audacious, but it's really again, clever. You know, they had high vis vests on. And if you or I were walking into that museum, we would think they must be facilities guys where nobody's going to call the police. You know, you remember, if you see something, say something. Nobody saw that and thought they were seeing something, right? And it's audacious, but it really worked. But again, you wonder why not just walk in with visitors then do your smash and grab. There's a particular reason they thought it necessary to go through this window that would make it far easier for them to get into that empty gallery for some reason.
- [89:42]
Tommy Vitor
Interesting. Would that be, I mean, could that be as simple as you couldn't walk in with your face covered and there's probably facial Recognition software, other cameras just kind of everywhere.
- [89:51]
Anthony Amore
You know, not many museums are using facial recognition type software right now. I would say some are, but it's not politically palatable for many museums. I don't know if the Louvre is using it. You make a good point though, because there is no question that the guys that did this have been doing crime for a long time. It's not like the movies where four college guys got together and said, hey, we're in trouble, we need some money, let's do this. These are sophisticated gangs, but they probably have robbed everything but museums. Because most, most of the time, and by most, I mean almost 99% of the time, people who steal art or things like this only do it once because it's so hard to fence your stolen goods. Right, right.
- [90:37]
Tommy Vitor
In recent years there have been all these stories about state sponsored or state backed theft, especially in the cryptocurrency world. Like experts often point the finger at North Korea, China, Russia, Iran for either allowing criminal groups to do this stuff from within their borders or even outright directing it. Do we see that at all in the kind of like art or high end jewelry world?
- [91:01]
Anthony Amore
No. The only similarity I would, I would, that comes to mind has to do with Chinese artifacts that were plundered from China. And there is a market amongst wealthy people in China to buy these back. Essentially it's sort of a status symbol. But other than that, you don't really see a lot of state sponsored activity like this. You know, when I say state, I think of ISIS too. ISIS was fencing artifacts that were dug up in the Levant, you know, where archaeological digs happened. And they were, they were monetizing some of those. But typically these are gangs, these are career common criminals. They're not Thomas Crown, they're not Danny Ocean. They're, you know, your common who robs banks and breaks into homes, deals drugs. And they see this crime and they, and they, you know, it's easier than breaking into a vault at a bank. Right.
- [91:58]
Tommy Vitor
There are some report, again, I read one article. Some of the reports suggest they were sloppy or like they dropped one of the crowns on their way out, which was worth like tens of millions of dollars. They left a construction vest, they left the truck, they left the angle grinder. Did you think that was sloppy and do you think that would be helpful in finding these dudes?
- [92:14]
Anthony Amore
Well, it's two parts, so I don't think it's sloppy per se because you know, these guys, their goal is to get out of there without being caught. So it's not Uncommon for thieves to drop something on their way out because they're in a mad rush against time. Right. Seven minutes seems like 70 minutes. And I've spoken to a lot of thieves, and they'll tell you that's true, because you know even when you're doing something bad, your fight or flight syndrome is pumping, Right? Yeah. And they dropped that crown. But at the end of the day, they got away with this stuff. And it's estimated today the estimate came out at around 90 million euros. So. Wow. It's hard to say. They're sloppy when they got away. Now, the things they left behind could, could. Could be good leads for investigators, especially this vehicle that they tried, that they had hoped to burn, but were thwarted. One can make the logical assumption that if there's something in there worth burning, then it could be a valuable piece of forensic evidence or what have you. So hopefully that holds some promise.
- [93:14]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, some sort of DNA or something. You currently work, as we said, at the top, at the Isabella Gardner Museum, which, again, as a young. Well, once a young Mass hole, it is one of the most famous museum heists in US History, if not the most famous. I believe the thief stole 13 pieces of art. Rembrandt, a Vermeer, a Manet, works by Degas. I've seen, as you said, the top of the value estimated at like half a billion dollars. Can you tell us that story and why you think it remains unsolved to this day?
- [93:44]
Anthony Amore
Well, yeah. So it was March 18, 1991, 24 in the morning, and it was just as it was the early morning hours after St. Patrick's Day. And at the time, we had good.
- [93:55]
Tommy Vitor
Time to do anything in Boston.
- [93:57]
Anthony Amore
That's a crazy time, right? And there were two overnight guards. One was working at the watch desk. And two police officers approached the side employee entrance and rang the intercom and said Boston police were responding to a disturbance. And the guard at the desk buzzed them into the building. And once he did that, that was the biggest mistake in the history of security guards. So the two guys come in, they talk to the guard. They say to him, you know, we're here for a disturbance. Anything going on? The guard says, no. The cop says, are you working alone tonight? The guard says, no. There's one of the guys, he says, we'll get him down here. Second guy comes downstairs, and once he does, the police officer says, you look familiar to me. Do I know you from somewhere? And the kid behind the desk says, no, let me see your id. So he hands over a driver's License and his work id. And the cop says, yeah, I do know you. There's a warrant out for your arrest. Come out from behind that desk. And when he does, then the cop says to the two guards, you two, you're under arrest. Assume the position. So they stand up against the wall. The two cops handcuff them. They put duct tape around their face, and then they say, gentlemen, this is a robbery. We're not here to harm you. Don't put up a fight. We're here for the paintings. And the guard famously says, they don't pay us enough to put up a fight. Which is accurate. Right? These are gallery guards. They're not Navy seals. You know, they're. They're two young guys, and they bring the. They bring the guards in the basement and separate them and chain them to pipes, and then they go upstairs and they steal 13 works of art. Twenty years ago, when I started looking for them, the estimate was $500 million. So you can imagine what the value is now. And none of them have been seen since. And the Museum offers a $10 million reward for information that leads us to the art. So you can imagine we've never stopped looking for these things. And again, it is the biggest property theft in the history of the world. So nothing really comes close. Think about the Louvre and how big a story this is. That's 90 million euro. Ours is well over half a billion dollars. So it's a major, major crime.
- [96:12]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, big time crime. And also a beautiful but not big museum. Right. I mean, as a. It's a small and stunning property, but losing that many works of art must have been quite a blow.
- [96:24]
Anthony Amore
Well, we still have 7,500 pieces on the wall. On the walls. But we did lose Rembrandt's only seascape. We lost one of only 36 Vermeers in the world. We lost five Degas. We talk about irreplaceable. These are. These are pretty much it. And you might remember from when you lived here, the famous thing about the museum is that Isabella Stuart Gardner's will says nothing can ever be changed or replaced. So we couldn't say, take the Mona Lisa and put it in our galleries. Nothing can change. So we have these pieces of her collective work of art that are missing. So the museum itself is left less than whole. And you probably remember seeing the empty frames on the wall walls.
- [97:09]
Tommy Vitor
Yeah, yeah, definitely do. Speaking of priceless, is that the really famous painting of JFK behind you?
- [97:15]
Ben Rhodes
You.
- [97:16]
Anthony Amore
How did you notice that? That's amazing. Yes, it's.
- [97:19]
Tommy Vitor
It's just in frame. By the way, are you sitting in front of priceless art as we speak?
- [97:24]
Anthony Amore
No, that's a cheap copy. But I'm. My favorite presidential portrait.
- [97:29]
Tommy Vitor
All right, let me, let me call off the guys I have on the way to your house.
- [97:32]
Anthony Amore
Well, it's amazing that you, you did that. Maybe you, maybe you should be on Antiques Roadshow or something that you notice that.
- [97:40]
Tommy Vitor
Honestly, I don't think, I don't think I have the talent to be on that show. Those guys actually know what they're talking about. I want to. So the, the Gardner Museum heist that happened in the 90s, right? I mean, before this weekend, I personally would have thought that surveillance technology at museums is so ubiquitous, along with DNA evidence and like all these other crime fighting tools that I don't know about, that a heist like the one we saw at the Louvre would be all but impossible. Clearly, I am wrong. I don't know what I'm talking about. But can you talk about some of those innovations and why you think they failed to at least prevent this incident? Although obviously the story's not over. They could recover the stuff.
- [98:15]
Anthony Amore
Well, the second part of that I'll take first and say that there is no place that's impenetrable. None. You spend time in the White House, you can break people. People have walked into the White House. There really is no 100% security. That's first and foremost, right? In terms of technology, every couple of months, something, some new advance comes along. Like museums are now looking at AI cameras because everybody had analog cameras. Then we switched them all to digital IP based cameras. And one of the challenges about buying AI cameras is like, if I buy these today, what are we going to see a month from now? You know, the advances are remarkable. That being said, it surprises many people, especially in the United States, that museums are not regulated. Right? So every museum does security the way they want it. They can have none if they want. The Louvre, though, is a government museum. Most European museums are. So they have, you know, they have their own state standards, but, you know, state budgets come into play as well. So people often equate museums with wealth because of the treasures within. But that doesn't mean they're cash rich, right? So if you look at the way this theft was pulled off, guys with power tools, they got up to the window uninhibited because of their clever ruse, and they used power tools to get through the window, you know, and brute force eventually is going to work, even if it's difficult. Then they get into that room again. I had this question about how they knew it'd be empty and then they use brute force again to get through the cases to steal the jewels. I saw today on Twitter that people are pointing out that they used to use a much more secure looking case than they do now and instantly making these assumptions that the new case is insecure. Well, we don't know that for sure. And the Louvre hired a woman for the first time as a security director in late 2024, so people are are pointing to that too, as if your chromosomes decide what type of security director you are. So it's unfair. I'm hesitant to point fingers at the Louvre too much because I know there's no major museum that hasn't been robbed a few times.
- [100:38]
Tommy Vitor
Wow. Remarkable. Well, I can't wait to read your book the Rembrandt Heist. The story of Criminal genius, Stolen masterpiece, and enigmatic friendship. Anthony, thank you so much for doing the show. I really appreciate it.
- [100:48]
Anthony Amore
Wow. It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
- [100:54]
Tommy Vitor
Thanks again to Anthony and Mori for joining the show and we'll talk to you next week. See you. Pod Save the World is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Saul Rubin is helping out this summer. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Cantor is our audio engineer. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, William Jones, David Toles and Ryan Young. Matt de Groat is our head of production. Adrian Hill is our senior Vice president of news and politics. If you want to listen to Pod Save the World ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. Don't forget to follow. 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 much more. And if, like us, you're opinionated, leave us a review. Our production staff is proudly unionized by the Writers Guild of America East. Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected and each one more.
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