Trump & Saudi Arabia: A Tale of Corruption

Summary

Pod Save the World

Episode: Trump & Saudi Arabia: A Tale of Corruption
Date: November 19, 2025
Hosts: Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes
Guest Interview: Atul Gawande (former USAID, public intellectual & physician)

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) high-profile visit to Washington, D.C., exploring the multiple layers of U.S.-Saudi relations: security, corruption, and normalization with Israel. Tommy and Ben discuss Trump’s overt business dealings with Saudi Arabia, the broader implications for U.S. foreign policy, and a raft of international stories including Swiss bribery, the degradation of U.S. institutions, the ongoing global impact of USAID’s dismantlement, and new angles in the Jeffrey Epstein saga.

A featured segment is Ben's interview with Atul Gawande about the collapse of USAID under Trump and its devastating humanitarian effects, which is also explored in Gawande’s New Yorker documentary “Ravena’s Choice.”

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Scene: Venezuela and Trump’s Militarism

• The hosts briefly reference U.S. military tension in Venezuela, speculation on possible strikes, and Trump’s cavalier approach to using force in Latin America and the Caribbean.
• Quote:
  “Trump, our ‘peace president,’ also said he was open to launching military strikes on Mexico.”
  (Tommy Vietor, 03:02)

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2. Mohammed bin Salman’s Washington Visit: Red Carpet for Corruption

[Starts ~07:59]

Background:

• MBS’s first visit since 2018; this time, the city prepares for another spectacle with Trump eager to please.
• Last time, MBS enjoyed fawning coverage as a reformer—until the Khashoggi murder changed everything.

MBS’s Wish List:

• NATO-like U.S. security guarantee (likely via executive order since Congress would balk).
• U.S. tech and support for a Saudi civilian nuclear program.
• Advanced semiconductor chips to rival UAE’s AI advances.
• Direct personal appeal to Trump for intervention in the Sudan war—complicated by Saudi and UAE backing rival militia groups there.

Analysis:

• The U.S. has little to gain from granting these wishes, especially nuclear cooperation.
• The real driver is Saudi economic and political leverage, not genuine U.S. interests.
• Trump and his team are openly in talks about multi-billion real estate and business ventures—clear conflicts of interest dominate.

Quote:
“Let’s pretend this visit is on the level for a minute. How is it in the US Interest, do you think, to give the Saudis a security guarantee or anything on their wish list besides ending the war in Sudan?”
(Tommy Vietor, 11:34)

Ben’s Response:
“We don’t need to give them a defense pact. It’s not in our interest to like have to go to war to defend Saudi Arabia at some point in the future. … None of them, particularly the large investments in the Trump business interests, have anything to do with what is on the mind of most Americans.”
(Ben Rhodes, 13:58)

On U.S. Cynicism:
“I think it makes total sense to give a civilian nuclear energy program to the country with the second largest proven crude oil reserves in the world.”
(Tommy Vietor, 13:58)

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3. Khashoggi, 9/11, and Trump's Business Ties: A Shocking Oval Office Exchange

[14:07–16:40]

• ABC’s Mary Bruce pointedly asks Trump and MBS about the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, 9/11 families’ anger, and Trump family business deals.
• Trump’s response: Dismisses Khashoggi as “controversial,” claims no involvement in the family business, attacks the media.
• MBS attempts to deflect 9/11 questions, framing it as a plot to divide U.S.-Saudi ties.

Quote:
“There’s no reason that these governments would be pouring money into the Trump properties because of the business acumen of Eric Trump. They’re doing it purely because of the access it gets them to Donald Trump… and they have decent reason to believe that.”
(Ben Rhodes, 16:40)

• Discussion highlights the merging of corruption and autocracy: “People like to talk about how Trump wants to be like Putin… He wants to be like MBS—sitting on top of a trillion dollars… silencing journalists who he finds to be a pain in the ass.”
  (Ben Rhodes, 18:48)

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4. First-Person Perspective: Jamal Khashoggi’s Fiancee

[21:26]

• Inserted clip:
  “It’s… digging more in my pain in my wound… but there is a focus for his [MBS’s] visit… and Jamal being forgotten.”
  (Khashoggi’s fiancé via Crooked Media’s Matt Berg, 21:26)

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5. Trump–Saudi Business Web: Real Estate, Crypto, and Shamelessness

[22:03–25:14]

• The Trump Organization, through entities like Dar Global, is licensing its name to an array of projects across the Gulf.
• Reuters & Financial Times report on projects in Saudi Arabia (Daria giga-project, Trump Tower Jeddah/Riyadh, golf events) and even the Maldives, now with a blockchain twist.
• Senators Warren & Jack Reed call for investigations, citing $11.6 billion of Trump’s wealth apparently tied to crypto dealings, some with ties to international hackers.
• The hosts lay out how Trump’s inner circle are cashing in on policy decisions—“minimal investments,” but huge payoffs for access and loyalty.

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6. The Medieval Playbook: Swiss Bribery and the Gold Bar

[30:35–33:28]

• Swiss business leaders, stung by Trump’s tariffs, show up with a $130,000 gold bar (engraved with “45” and “47”) and a Rolex desk clock, technically as “donations” to the Trump presidential library.
• The gesture works: tariffs drop.

Quote:
“This is the crassest form of corruption. This is like medieval shit… there’s nothing subtle about a couple gold bars and a gold Rolex clock. …This is not a strategy for anything other than enriching and empowering Trump.”
(Ben Rhodes, 32:24)

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7. U.S. Institutional Decay: The Case of Cash Patel’s FBI

[33:33–43:15]

• Cash Patel (FBI Director) is profiled: accused of abusing government planes for personal trips, using FBI SWAT teams for his girlfriend’s security, failing to register for Qatari foreign agent work, and purging professional agents for political reasons.
• The story is painted as “fantasy camp for the worst people in the world.”
• The hosts point out the disrespect to law enforcement, and the way basic norms and professionalism have decayed under Trump appointees.

Quote:
“Do you ever feel, Tommy, like we are now like citizens of universe? That is a fantasy camp for the worst fucking people in the world?”
(Ben Rhodes, 40:04)

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8. Epstein’s International Tentacles

[43:46–50:54]

• Focus on Epstein’s claims to be a “Trump expert” for Russian contacts and newly revealed deep ties to Israeli former PM Ehud Barak—including arms deals and intelligence links.
• Documents show former Israeli intelligence officials lived with Epstein; allegations include brokering arms/security deals in Africa.
• The lack of mainstream coverage is noted, possibly due to document provenance but with obvious international security/espionage implications.

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9. Bangladesh: Accountability and the Death Penalty for a Former PM

[61:25–64:40]

• Bangladesh’s ex-PM Sheikh Hasina is sentenced to death in absentia for ordering the shooting of student protesters.
• Discussion about accountability vs. vengeance—and how this relates to the broader wave of Gen Z protest movements.

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10. Corruption Scandal in Ukraine

[64:40–69:38]

• $100 million siphoned from Ukraine’s nuclear company, involving high-level allies of Zelensky.
• Suggestion that political interference with anti-corruption agencies was timed to cover up these schemes.
• The stakes: Ukraine’s ability to maintain international (esp. Western) support and make real progress as a democracy is at risk.

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11. Humanitarian Catastrophe in Sudan

[70:02–72:30]

• Sudan’s civil war intensifies: the city of Al Fasher falls to the RSF (UAE-backed militia).
• Aid workers describe “mega-cities” of refugees facing unprecedented hardship.
• Despite MBS’s call for U.S. help, there’s little action.

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12. Hitler’s DNA and Kalman Syndrome: Channel 4’s Bizarre Historical Forensics

[73:53–74:44]

• Channel 4 documentary reveals Hitler likely had an undescended testicle and possibly a micropenis, fueling a British media dunk-fest.
• Used as comic relief and a reminder of the persistent weirdness in European historical obsession.

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Featured Interview: Atul Gawande on the Collapse of USAID

[Begins ~77:05]
Ben interviews Dr. Atul Gawande (surgeon, New Yorker writer, and former USAID administrator) about the catastrophic worldwide impact following Trump’s executive order dismantling USAID—including hundreds of thousands of deaths, destruction of complex aid networks, and the shattering of American soft power.

The Human Toll:

• Loss of routine care, medicines, and basic food aid; staff fired overnight; compounded suffering in places like Kenya, South Sudan, and across the Global South.
• “What was a pause turned into a complete shutdown of USAID. …Hundreds of thousands of lives would be on the line just in the first year alone. But there was zero curiosity, zero interest in how to mitigate that suffering.”
  (Atul Gawande, 78:45)

Why It Matters:

• Gawande describes institutional knowledge and complex distribution systems as “not something you just turn back on.”
• The pain is hidden: “The deaths don’t occur like they do in a war… you go from 3% to 4% child death rates… but they’re scattered and you don’t see what’s happening.”
• Ravena’s Choice (the documentary) follows a mother forced to make an impossible decision in a broken nutrition system—a microcosm of what’s unfolding worldwide.

Foreign Perceptions:

• Loss of American credibility and soft power:
  • “We are not a reliable partner. …Most people are like, we survive. …None of [these reactions] are ones where anybody says, ‘we see America as a force for good in the world.’” (Atul Gawande, 94:02–94:30)

What Next?

• Rebuilding America’s development capacity is a multi-decade project.
• “There are no quick fixes to any of this.”
  (Ben Rhodes, 97:59)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

On Trump–Saudi Relations:
“He wants to be like MBS. He wants to sit on top of a trillion dollars. He wants to mix politics and business. He wants to be able to silence…journalists.”
(Ben Rhodes, 18:48)

On Saudi “Reform”:
“Now he’s fully back, thanks to business leaders who want Saudi money, President Biden who wanted Saudi oil, and the Trump goons who want corrupt crypto and real estate deals.”
(Tommy Vietor, 09:35)

On Systemic Corruption:
“You can’t even get your mind around the depths of the corruption. …[Crypto] is the easiest place to be corrupt because the money’s dark and it’s hard to have a paper trail.”
(Ben Rhodes, 24:04)

On Cash Patel and Institutional Rot:
“These Cash’s defenders will say, look, by law, he has to fly on an FBI plane because he needs the secure comms. …But the plane is not intended to support the lifestyle of a MAGA influencer.”
(Tommy Vietor & Ben Rhodes, 37:41–38:11)

On the Aftermath of USAID’s Shutdown:
“Instead of raping and pillaging…the societies we just defeated, as so often happens in war, we did the crazy thing of investing in Germany, in Japan… That is what has played out again and again in the USAID story.”
(Atul Gawande, 90:59)

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Important Timestamps

• 07:59 — MBS’s Washington visit & wish list
• 14:07 — ABC confronts Trump and MBS in the Oval Office
• 16:40 — Ben unpacks the wider meaning: corruption + autocracy fusion
• 21:26 — Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée shares her pain
• 30:35 — Swiss gold bar bribe
• 33:33 — Cash Patel/FBI corruption segment begins
• 43:46 — Epstein’s ties to Israeli intelligence
• 61:25 — Bangladesh: protests, crackdown, death penalty for Hasina
• 64:40 — Major Ukrainian corruption scandal
• 70:02 — Sudan’s war and humanitarian crisis
• 77:05 — Ben’s interview with Atul Gawande on the dismantling of USAID

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Tone & Takeaways

Tommy and Ben’s sardonic, conversational banter is on full display. The through-line of the episode is how corruption, self-dealing and disregard for norms—reflected in Trump’s dealings with Saudi Arabia, domestic institutional rot, and the abandonment of American global leadership—are fundamentally reshaping America’s role and reputation in the world. The personal story in "Ravena's Choice" and eyewitness accounts from conflict zones put human faces on these geopolitical failures.

Recommended for listeners who want:

• Deep, insider-informed cynicism about U.S. foreign policy in the Trump era
• A blend of humor, outrage, and expert perspective
• A broad survey of headlines with meaningfully explained context

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For further reading/viewing:

• New Yorker documentary: “Ravena’s Choice” by Atul Gawande
• New York Times/Financial Times reporting on Trump–Saudi business ties
• Dropsite News’ detailed work on the Epstein document leaks

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End of summary.

Transcript

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Ben Rhodes]

Hello and welcome.

[Tommy Vietor]

This is the Michelle Hussain Show.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Michelle Hussain. I speak with people like Elon Musk.

[Tommy Vietor]

I think I've done enough.

[Ben Rhodes]

And Shonda Rhimes. That's so cute. This will be a place where every.

[Tommy Vietor]

Weekend you can count on one essential conversation to help make sense of the world.

[Ben Rhodes]

So please join me, listen and subscribe.

[Tommy Vietor]

To the Mishael Hussain show from Bloomberg Weekend.

[Ben Rhodes]

Wherever you get your podcasts, you certainly ask interesting questions.

[Tommy Vietor]

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

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Ben Rhodes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Ben, I heard some music over the weekend that made me think of you, and I just wanted to just play you a little clip. That was, of course, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro delivering a message, I think, to the Venezuelan people, to Trump, and to John Lennon fans everywhere.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, not exactly the most prominent cover of Imagine that we've heard.

[Atul Gawande]

No.

[Ben Rhodes]

Or the.

[Tommy Vietor]

The Gal Gadot version.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, exactly. But hey, you know, if you're facing down the USS Gerald Ford and 10% of US naval assets, I guess you reach for inspiration Wherever you can get it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, whatever you can do. Yeah. We're not going to go in deep on Venezuela today because in part because that story is kind of in a holding pattern. I mean, there's this, as you just mentioned, the massive buildup of naval assets in the Caribbean. But then on Sunday, Trump said his administration might be having some talks with Maduro. It's not clear if it's him directly or someone, maybe Rick Ornell is back. Who knows? We'll see. But also, Trump, our peace president, also said he was open to launching military strikes on Mexico.

[Ben Rhodes]

So you don't need an aircraft carrier to blow up speedboats in the Caribbean, that's for sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

No, we'll see what that's for. 15,000 US servicemen who are just sitting in the region. Maybe you'll get a twist. Maybe we'll invade Chile or something.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, you know, it could be spinning one of those wheels like on my kids board games.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. What are the Falklands up to? Trump likes the 80s.

[Ben Rhodes]

Maybe we'll give him back to Argentina now that Mile's our guy down there. Maybe. Maybe we'll stick it to Kirstarmer and give the Falklands Maldives whatever island chain he chooses.

[Tommy Vietor]

There was a weird thing I saw on Twitter. I forget which good journalist retweeted this. I apologize. So the estate department says they intend to designate a group called Cartel de los Souls as a foreign terrorist organization led by Maduro that goes into effect on November 24th. I guess the question is whether that then becomes the justification for a strike on Venezuela proper.

[Ben Rhodes]

Certainly feels quite possible, but they've yet to tell us what their objectives are.

[Tommy Vietor]

Us.

[Ben Rhodes]

Whatever. Is it regime change? Is it the trillion dollars of oil underneath the ground? Is it something else that we're. We're missing here?

[Tommy Vietor]

Do you see that?

[Ben Rhodes]

Doesn't seem to be drug trafficking.

[Tommy Vietor]

You see the report in the Journal that said that fentanyl might count as a chemical weapon? That was part of the justification.

[Ben Rhodes]

Potentially, yeah. But we're not invading China. Right where the fen Right, comes from.

[Tommy Vietor]

Or Mexico.

[Ben Rhodes]

Or Mexico, anyway, that we know of.

[Tommy Vietor]

So that's a story we're not covering, but, boy, keep an eye on that one. So.

[Atul Gawande]

All right.

[Tommy Vietor]

We got a great show for you guys today, though.

[Ben Rhodes]

I thought you were going to play some Patriots theme song or something. No, but that. That game was a while ago.

[Tommy Vietor]

No surprise to the Thursday night game. Yeah, I. Honestly, I didn't even watch it. I had plans at night.

[Ben Rhodes]

You don't have to watch your team play the jets because you already know the outcome.

[Tommy Vietor]

I was also getting texts from you being like, this offense is an abomination.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah. Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Like that.

[Ben Rhodes]

That's all you needed to know.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Tough game. We got a great show, though. We're going to start. We're going to cover Saudi Kurm's Mohammed bin Salman's visit to Washington this week. We'll tell you what the Saudis want, what the US Wants, what Trump wants, and if any of it benefits us, the citizens of this country. We're also going to tell you about a very Swiss tale about US Government corruption, what we learned from a bunch of recent reports and profiles of FBI Director Kash Pat, our best friend. We'll talk about the ways the Jeffrey Epstein scandal has gone international and has impacted foreign governments. There's a scary report about AI and the future of hacking that we really should talk about more. But it's our government does nothing about it. And then we're going to explain why the former prime minister of Bangladesh just got the death penalty. We'll talk about a corruption scandal that has engulfed President Zelensky and the Ukrainian government. And then what a new documentary tells us about Adolf Hitler's junk. His package.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes, his pee pee. This is why you come to Pods of the world. We can curate these things for you.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's exactly right. And then, Ben, you did our interview today. What are folks gonna hear?

[Ben Rhodes]

It's about a different documentary. So Atul Gwande, who was the assistant USAID administrator for Global health, but is also just a leading public intellectual, writer, thinker, he's produced a new documentary for the New Yorker called Ravena's Choice, and he also wrote an article about it in a recent issue that focuses on the impact of USCID's dismantlement through the story of one woman and a terrible choice she has to make around nutrition for her child. But more broadly, we talk about what the impact has been of USAID being dismantled, how it's not like a light switch that you can turn back on because of the complex distribution networks and strategies of usaid, what the impact has been on a human level, what it will be going forward, the need to kind of bear witness, which is what this documentary does, but also how it's changing or not changing perceptions of the US around the world and what we can do about it. So we need to stay on top of this story and bear witness and atuls as good a person to talk to as anybody.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, he really is. I mean, I read the New Yorker story of not seeing the documentary Yet I think it's pretty short, though. It's like 20 minutes.

[Ben Rhodes]

22 minutes.

[Tommy Vietor]

22 minutes, yeah. So it's definitely.

[Atul Gawande]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Worth your time.

[Tommy Vietor]

Worth everybody's time. I'll definitely watch that. And you know, every time I see. I saw Elon Musk get in a fight with someone on Twitter the other day who thought it was gross that his new. Elon's new pay package could get. Make him a trillionaire. And he was lashing out and being defensive. And every time I see that, I get mad all over again at the harm he did to millions of people.

[Ben Rhodes]

All around the world and the complete lack of any self reflection that is followed by that decision. Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

Or a kind of yes. Also. Finally, at the end of the show, our friends at the POD subscribers will hear Ben and I answer some questions from the POD Save the world discord community. So join up if you want to hear that or if you want to fire some questions at us. You know, we love to hear from you.

[Ben Rhodes]

We love it.

[Tommy Vietor]

We also did a, a whole subscription show called Inside 2025 where we told stories basically about being drunk on foreign trips.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, inside 2025 did not focus that much on 2025, but there were some good stories along the way.

[Tommy Vietor]

It was, it was us revisiting back in the day.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

All right, so big story this week is the. Is Muhammad bin Salman's kind of quasi state visit in Washington. So Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS for short, it's technically not a state visit because MBS's dad is the head of state, but Trump is rolling out the red carpet. There's a black tie dinner.

[Ben Rhodes]

By the way, when's the last time you saw that guy?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yes. What's he doing? Just sitting there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Not much room. Yeah. Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Surprised?

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, there's some health issues there.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, big time. I'm surprised MBS hasn't, you know, grabbed a very expensive pillow.

[Ben Rhodes]

He doesn't, he doesn't need to get.

[Tommy Vietor]

Cheered in the studio here. Okay, so Trump, there's lots of meetings. There's, you know, the red carpet. There's all, all this stuff. So MBS is. This is his first visit to Washington since 2018. Listeners from back then might remember that that was the 2018 visit was like literally three weeks long. MBS, he went to DC, he saw Trump, he got coffee with Mayor Bloomberg in New York. He went to Boston and like hung out at MIT with some robots. He went to Silicon Valley and saw the tech CEOs like Tim Cook and Jeff Bezos and The Google guys. And he was fed it in Hollywood.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it came here.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just hanging out with everybody, celebrities, producer, everybody, all want his money. And MBS got all kinds of gauzy media coverage for being this great reformer. And then a few months later, MBS approved the brutal execution of a journalist named Jamal Khashoggi inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. And it all went crashing down for a couple months. Yep, now he's fully back, thanks to business leaders who want Saudi money, President Biden who wanted Saudi oil, and the Trump goons who want corrupt crypto and real estate deals as far as I can tell. So according to various news reports, Ben, the NBS wish list for this visit is the following. You want some sort of NATO like security guarantee? It's probably going to have to be via an executive order of some sort like the one Trump gave to Qatar because Congress is unlikely to approve anything without the Saudis normalizing relations with Israel. But I guess we'll see. He wants support.

[Ben Rhodes]

Funny that that's the priority of all the things you could ask.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, not sure why. Well, she get into that. So he wants support and technology for a Saudi civilian nuclear power program. What could go wrong there? The Saudis want advanced semiconductor chips to power their artificial intelligence industry and kind of match what the UAE got basically. And then Reuters reported that MBS plans to personally appeal to Trump to intervene to stop the war in Sudan, which is objectively a good thing. But we should note that the Saudis have been backing the Sudanese military while the Emiratis have been backing the RSF militia force. So this is also a bit of a proxy battle. So Ben, it's not clear to me what US interests are going to be advanced. Trump and Biden, like they used to want the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with Israel. But the Saudis say that's off the table if the Israelis won't support a two state solution, which Bibi reiterated last night. On Monday night he said he doesn't believe in a two state solution. So you think that would be off the table. Then there's the corruption piece. The Times had a great story on this that detailed how the Trump Organization is in talks to lend its name to these massive projects in Saudi Arabia, including something a 63 billion dollar giga project, they're call selling it in the town of Daria. That's in addition to like Trump Tower, the Trump Plaza, private members only clubs in Jeddah, other projects in Riyadh, Saudi golf events, the 2 billion that went To Jared Kushner. So, Ben, let's just, you know, you sort of previewed this like, let's pretend this visit is on the level for a minute. How is it in the US Interest, do you think, to give the Saudis a security guarantee or anything on their wish list besides ending the war in Sudan?

[Ben Rhodes]

Okay, so if I want to make the argument, it's a geopolitical argument, and the argument is essentially that the Saudis are sitting on top of a trillion plus dollars. They've got a lot of money to spend to throw at issues at a time when there's not a lot of we're in a cash poor world and these guys have the biggest checkbook to take out. And I think in the Biden years there was a sense that we don't want them to fall into the orbit of China. That essentially that's what you always hear. If they, if they take their money and they start doing oil transactions in the rmb, the Chinese currency, it'll undermine the dollar or if they start buying Chinese weapons instead of ours, like that will, you know, hurt our defense industry, all these things. The problem with that is, first of all, it's not very simple for the Saudis to just kind of flip a switch and become like a Chinese, you know, satellite or something. I mean, their military's all been built by the United States. It's not, as the people that are using that argument kind of overstate how much we need to court the Saudis and give them, to kind of keep them engaged with us and the Europeans and others. They're doing just fine as it is. So I think everything he's asking for is kind of extra. We don't need to give them a defense pact. It's not in our interest to like have to go to war to defend Saudi Arabia at some point in the future. You know, we don't need to give them a nuclear program, which is something that they're also asking for. That seems crazy because they could flip a switch and turn that into a nuclear weapon if there's a sufficient amount of infrastructure in Saudi Arabia. The AI, you know, the argument you get there is the same one as, well, they might buy Chinese chips if they don't buy American chips and that kind of thing. But at the same time, that cuts both ways too, because if all these chips go to Saudi Arabia without any kind of restrictions in the same way that F35s might be going to, seems like they're going to Saudi Arabia. Well, they actually do have relationships with China and That stuff could go out the back door, too. So in a bizarre way, if we're, like, pouring chips into Saudi Arabia to beat China at the AI race, it actually may help China in the AI. So all these things are a little bit more complicated than they would be presented. And none of them, particularly the, you know, large investments in the Trump business interests, have anything to do with, like, what is on the mind of most Americans. That's for sure.

[Tommy Vietor]

I think it makes total sense to give a civilian nuclear energy program to the country with the second largest proven crude oil reserves in the world.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. It's just they're in desperate need of energy.

[Tommy Vietor]

Obvious thing you would do. So Ben and I were. Our jaws were on the floor as we watched President Trump in MBS in the Oval Office earlier today. This is Trump taking a question from an ABC News reporter named Mary Bruce, who's very smart, actually. We worked with her back in the day. She asked about Jamal Khashoggi, 911 and Trump's corrupt dealings with foreign governments. Let's watch. Is it appropriate, Mr. President, for your family to be doing business in Saudi.

[Ben Rhodes]

Arabia while you were president?

[Tommy Vietor]

Is that a conflict of interest? And your loyal highness, the US Intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist.

[Ben Rhodes]

911 families are furious that you are here in the. Who you with?

[Tommy Vietor]

Who?

[Ben Rhodes]

Americans.

[Tommy Vietor]

Who are you with? And the same to you, Mr. President.

[Ben Rhodes]

Now, who are you with? I'm with ABC News, sir.

[Tommy Vietor]

You're with who? ABC News, sir.

[Ben Rhodes]

Fake News. ABC Fake News. One of the worst. One of the worst in the business. But I'll answer your question.

[Atul Gawande]

Thank you.

[Ben Rhodes]

I have nothing to do with the family business. I have left. And when I. I've devoted 100% of my energy, what my family does is fine. They do business all over. They've done very little with Saudi Arabia, actually. I'm sure they could do a lot. And anything they've done has been very good. That's what we've done. We've built a tremendous business for a long time. You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him. Things happened, but he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that. You don't have to embarrass our guests by asking a question like that, just to ask. Mr. President, you allow me to answer. You know, I feel painful about, you.

[Tommy Vietor]

Know, families of Nahi who live in America, but, you know, we have to focus on reality.

[Ben Rhodes]

Reality based on CIA documents and based on a lot of documents, that Osama bin Laden used Saudi people at that event for one main purpose is to.

[Tommy Vietor]

Destroy this relation, to destroy the American Saudi relation. That's the purpose of my pilepe about.

[Ben Rhodes]

The journalists treating painful to hear. It's painful and it's a huge mistake.

[Tommy Vietor]

And we are doing our best that this doesn't happen again. So in Trump's mind, Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist, was controversial. He has nothing to do with his family businesses. Even though we watched him at the peace summit in Charm El Sheikh tell the President of Indonesia to call Don and Eric about a deal, presumably some sort of like, you know, golf resort in Bali. What did you make of that answer about bin Laden trying to use Saudis to divide the US government? And how did it make you feel that MBS's answer was more reasonable than Trump's?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, there's so much happening there. I do think that this is one for the time capsule, big time, because you are taking both the corruption and the autocracy and kind of fusing them in one presentation from Donald Trump and the idea that he has nothing to do with his family businesses because he's not necessarily running day to day operations or not. The bagman flying to the Gulf to pick up the check for the investments in the Trump properties is complete and utter bullshit. There's no reason that these governments would be pouring money into the Trump properties because of the business acumen of Eric Trump. They're doing it purely because of the access it gets them to Donald Trump, the preferential treatment that they think it's gonna get them from Donald Trump. And they have decent reason to believe that, given the fact that we know, for instance, that lo and behold, World Liberty Financial gets a $2 billion investment from the Emiratis shortly before Donald Trump shows up and announces that there are no restrictions on AI trips and things flowing in the Emirates. Right? So this does not take Inspector Clouseau to figure out that there's a lot of corruption going on here. And Trump's efforts to obfuscate that are kind of absolute bullshit. Like people can see what's happening before their own eyes. Then on the Jamal Khashoggi thing, what's really depressing about this visit is that was a bit of a watershed moment in 2018, where it was such a shocking and glaring crime to murder and dismember a Washington Post journalist and US resident who was a human rights activist who'd criticized mbs, you know, that even got the attention as you said, for a few months of, you know, American business leaders weren't gonna show up. I remember talking to some foreign leaders and diplomats who said there was a real moment there where actually MBS is in trouble, like inside the Saudi royal family. Did he go too far? And Trump is the one who wrapped his arms around MBS at that time and kind of brought him in from the cold. Now, fast forward, he's all the way in from the cold. Like, this is MBS's world, and we just live in it. People like to talk about how Trump wants to be like Putin. I don't think that's exactly the right analogy. He wants to be like mbs. He wants to sit on top of a trillion dollars. He wants to mix politics and business. He wants to be able to silence. Maybe not by dismembering them, but he certainly, as he made clear in that clip, wants to be able to silence journalists who he finds to be a pain in the ass. And look, you're right. MBS seemed like more reasonable. Mbs, the person that our intelligence community says supervised the chopping up of a journalist, seemed more reasonable and less offended by not even a tough question, an obvious question that would be asked than Donald Trump. We can't get comfortable with the fact that he just literally said a journalist who was killed for doing his job was a difficult guy people didn't like. First of all, it's not true. I don't remember some chorus of people that were like, jamal Khashoggi is an asshole.

[Tommy Vietor]

He was viewed as a guy who deeply loved Saudi Arabia, but was concerned about the treatment of civilians by the monarchy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And the silencing of dissent and the kind of cult of personality around MBS. So, yeah, I mean, the 911 stuff is just. They don't want the conversation to be about what bin Laden's ties might have been to Saudi intelligence or what Saudi money. I mean, I'll tell you a story. Like, I went on the Axe Files, now defunct podcast by.

[Tommy Vietor]

Is it defunct?

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, it ran its course, but great podcast in 2016. And Axe asked me about this Saudi relationship, and I said something about them financing, you know, Wahhabi madrasas, and, you know, essentially, frankly, in coordination with the US Was supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan. They were spreading this kind of pretty strict form of Islam and that that was kind of part of the incubator for what became the Al Qaeda and the Taliban. And we went to Saudi Arabia after that, and I was told by John Kerry and Rob Malley, who was at the time like you MBS is really mad about this interview you gave to David Oxrod. And it's the first time I realized that gets your desk. I was like a po. I didn't know anybody listened to podcasts.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, MBS buddy. You got better things to watch and listen to, pal.

[Ben Rhodes]

But so they're very point is that they are very sensitive about this issue and they redirect it to is he wrong? He's not wrong. Like I'm sure bin Laden wanted to break up the U.S. saudi relationship, but that does that's not the question. The families are, the families are not questioning that. They're questioning like do we know the full facts about whether there was any Saudi government context?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, certainly bin Laden was pissed about US Troops in Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf and US Foreign policy generally. But you're right, that wasn't the question at all. By the way, Crooked Media's Matt Berg spoke with Jamal Khashoggi's fiance. You know.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

At the time when he was murdered. We're going to drop that in here in post just so folks can hear her perspective on all of this.

[Ben Rhodes]

I got very strange feeling this all came up.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's, it's, it's, it's and it digging more in my pain in my, my wound because I feel oh there is a focus for his visit for some deals and this and Jamal being forgotten. He did take a responsibility in 60 minutes interview in 2019 but nothing happened behind after this in sense. Okay he took responsibility but there is no real justice comes through. I do feel great in sense. There is some development going on in.

[Ben Rhodes]

Saudi Arabia which is Jamal wish to.

[Tommy Vietor]

Have it and I feel this have to align with another something is missing with all of this development and all of this advance. It have also to maintain the human rights side as well and democratic side as well and the real justice it have to be aligned together. There is something missing now which is the real justice transparent and democratic and the equal right. So man, just to flesh out the this corruption piece, I mean a lot of it is through a company called Dar Global which is based in Dubai but has close links to the Saudi government. And Dark Global seems to have helped Trump just license his name to all these Gulf countries properties like Saudi, Qatar, Oman, the uae. Their offices in the US are based in Trump Tower. Again this is a lot of this is from a great New York Times story. Also I don't know if you saw this Ben. The Financial Times had a report this week about how the Trump Organization is Collaborating with the Saudis to build a luxury resort in the Maldives. Yeah, but the twist is it includes some dumb bullshit about the blockchain technology, how you can, like, own like a fractal share of this, like, 80 villa property. That, by the way, was announced the day before MBS's visit. It's very, very, very subtle corruption there. And then I just, I noticed that Senator Warren and Senator Jack Reid asked DOJ and the Treasury Department to investigate World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto company that you just mentioned, because of transactions with North Korean hackers, Russian hackers, and even Iran. So I'm sure Pam Bondi will get on that one really, really fast. But, you know, this, this watchdog group called Accountable US estimates that roughly $11.6 billion, or 73% of Trump's net worth, is tied to, to his cryptocurrency ventures. And so we can see this stuff happening with the Saudis when it comes to real estate. We still don't know what, if any, participation they have on the crypto side.

[Ben Rhodes]

No. And it's all just like a scam. And you can't even get your mind around the depths of the corruption. And the reason they migrate to crypto is it's like the easiest place to be corrupt because the money's dark and it's hard to have a paper trail. Stuff can disappear, quite literally. And you can get away with anything because there's no real oversight anymore. Not that there ever was like that robust an oversight, but at least there were investigations in the pre Trump years. But I think the other thing you have to kind of keep your eye on in this relationship is we started by talking about really big consequential things like are they gonna get a bunch of F35 aircraft, are they gonna get a defense guarantee?

[Tommy Vietor]

NATO? Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Are they gonna get potentially a civil nuclear program? They're making really minimal investments to get that right. If you have a trillion dollar sovereign wealth funding, throwing $10 billion here, $10 billion there, and again, I don't know the amounts because we don't really know. But at real estate properties that don't really matter or into crypto ventures will never lead to anything that's literally beyond a rounding error for these guys.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. And NBS knows how to play the press release game. His first meeting with Trump, he said he was going to spend, I think invest 600 billion in the U.S. i wouldn't hold your breath.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

For that to come through, you know, they're, they're kind of running out of Money in summer. Not running out of money. They're. They. They are spending more than they should be on boondoggles like the Neom Project.

[Ben Rhodes]

We just talked last week.

[Tommy Vietor]

Last week?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

So I don't know, but, Ben, just a quick aside. So last week, we covered Syrian President Ahmed Al Shara's White House visit. After we recorded that, this unbelievable clip popped up that we just. We had to play for the listeners. Please watch.

[Ben Rhodes]

Men's had the little fragrance. Yeah, this is. No, no, it's the best fragrance.

[Atul Gawande]

Come here.

[Ben Rhodes]

I have more here, sir. Okay, so what we'll do is just take that, Joe, put it in, and then the other one is for your wife.

[Tommy Vietor]

So we don't know why that was set to music. I don't know if there was a little string quartet in the room or if it just got edited that way. I mean, I think it makes it.

[Ben Rhodes]

Sound like a hotel lobby, right?

[Tommy Vietor]

I think it came out of Shara's side in the delegation, was watching her, but I don't know. So, Trump, what was happening there? For listeners who are not watching on Pod Save the World, YouTube and please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube. We got some great stuff for you guys. A lot of funny visuals, and it's free. So Trump is spraying Shara with Victory 47, his $250 Trump cologne, which, according to the website, is quote, for men who lead with strength, confidence, and purpose. He also offered Alshara the. The counterpart Victory 47 perfume, which, quote, captures confidence, beauty, and unstoppable determination for Shara's wife or wives. Trump helpfully asked him to clarify how many wives he had, which, you know, made me laugh. It was a weird fucking question.

[Ben Rhodes]

It was real weird.

[Tommy Vietor]

Whoever's filming it laughs, too, is real weird.

[Ben Rhodes]

Maybe Trump's getting a little Shariah curious there. I don't know. But I have to say, like, it was objectively funny thing to watch it also, I know this is, like, such a tired cliche, but, like, this guy was in, like, a U.S. prison in Iraq, then he was, like, fighting in northern Syria for years. He's got, like, a bounty on his head, and suddenly the President of the United States is spraying cologne on him in the Oval Office.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's crazy.

[Ben Rhodes]

Just like a 1 of 7 billion life that this guy has, like, the movie rights alone. I don't know who play Alshar in the movie, but, like, that would. That. That would be quite the biopic. But I. The wives question, though, like, does that land poorly? Like, is that. I mean, because clearly it's like some, something he, you know, he has one of these kind of like orientalist, you know, views of like, if I was a Muslim guy with a beard, maybe I'd have like nine wives and maybe that'd be cool or something, you know. Yeah, there's a little bit of a wish fulfillment in that question.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yes, you're right. I mean, although, you know, I don't know that the, the bounds of marriage.

[Ben Rhodes]

Really keep Trump from, from explorations. Yeah, that's true. That's true.

[Tommy Vietor]

But yeah, I couldn't tell if Elshara just kind of laughed because the situation was weird. I never know about like, kind of translation and what he understands.

[Ben Rhodes]

What a weird thing to. For the translator too, by the way. Yeah, I mean you're, you know, you, you suddenly this is like the conversation.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. You're like flipping through your mind like, concubine, concubine. Where's that one?

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

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[Tommy Vietor]

So Ben, the Saudis, though, they're not the only ones getting in on the corruption game. We wanted to talk about Switzerland for a minute and an incredible story about corruption. So back in August, Trump reportedly had this disastrous phone call with the president of Switzerland, Karen Kelly Sutter. I think we covered at the time, Ben, like, I think Trump was mad about the trade deficit. So the Keller Sutter didn't grovel enough. So after the call, Trump jacks up tariffs. And that led her to calling this like emergency cabinet meeting to figure out how to fix the problem. It was like an actual crisis for the Swiss. So fast forward, earlier this month, the Swiss, they dispatched this group of Swiss business leaders and billionaires to meet with Trump. That crew brings with them a $130,000 gold bar paging Bob Menendez, engraved with a 45 and a 47 on it and a gold Rolex desk clock. Now, technically, this bribe was paid to the Trump presidential library, not Trump himself. Big wink, wink for you.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm sure that that would be in an exhibit.

[Tommy Vietor]

Either way, it worked. Now tariffs are down to 15%. So, like, again, I'm like tempted to laugh at just the brazenness of printing 45, 47 on a gold bar and offering it up is tribute. But you know, when you add it all up, like, we're the ones getting fucked here. Like, I don't, I don't know what the US should be demanding from the Swiss in a bilateral trade deal, but it's probably not a gold bar for a dear leader.

[Ben Rhodes]

I was in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago. I was in Geneva. And Baron. Beautiful.

[Tommy Vietor]

Geneva is beautiful.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, Both beautiful places. And the tariff thing was all NBA is talking about 39% tariff. And everybody's like, the Swiss are very reasonable. So they're like asking me, you know, why this number, why 39% don't you know, that we are, you know, net importer of services from your country. Like, like, you just add this trade deficit thing up, and people like yelling at me about.

[Tommy Vietor]

You're like, well, Sir Kevin Hassett tariffed an island full of sheep in, like, the South Pacific.

[Ben Rhodes]

So they were taking it very literally, but clearly they arrived at a different kind of strategy. And to your point, I mean, this is the crassest form of corruption. This is like medieval shit where there's, like, a king with a bigger army that you have to show up literally with, like, a gold brick. I mean, they probably just had to, like, go into some castle and dust off the playbook from, like, the 15th century. Like, how do you deal with, like, a bad tariff duty? Because there's nothing subtle about a couple gold bars and a gold Rolex clock, and there's certainly nothing that for U.S. taxpayers. And again, I desperately want people to bookmark this. All of the people that like to sanewash Trump or like to, you know, I've had some of my speaking engagements, people be like, well, isn't it time that we had an economic strategy to stand up for manufacturing in this country? If this was truly some theory of the case about reversing the iniquities of globalization through the use of tariffs, you wouldn't be relinquishing tariffs on Switzerland in exchange for gold bars, you know. No, this is not a strategy for anything other than enriching and empowering Trump.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, the Swiss are dusting off the playbook for, like, the Burgundian wars from the 1470s.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, good reference.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, thank you. I googled quickly. Yeah, it's insane. It's so insulting. It makes us look like just the most easy marks dictators. But anyway. All right, Ben, so switching gears here in the last couple of weeks, there's been a lot of really interesting reporting on FBI Director Cash Patel, who, according to one report in the Minnesota Star Tribune, is referred to as, quote, a giant douche canoe by a top A to Stephen Miller. So point for Stephen Miller here. But let's tick through some of the things we learned about Director Canoe from these articles. It was the Wall Street Journal did a great one. The New Yorker had a long piece the other day, and we'll kind of learn about some of the many controversies that are swirling around Cash Patel and the FBI right now. So the first is Cash Patel's use of the FBI's private jets. We've discussed this on previous episodes. Back in the day, Cash viciously attacked then FBI Director Christopher Ray for using the FBI's planes for personal travel. Now, Cash does the same thing all the time. He flies to Nashville to visit his 26 year old quote unquote country music sensation girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins. Cash even flew to Pennsylvania to see her sing the national anthem at a low rent wrestling event. And then, according to the Wall Street Journal, after the wrestling event, Cash flew Wilkins home to Nashville and then he continued on to a place called I shit you not, the Boondoggle Ranch in Texas. It is owned by a big Republican donor named Bubba. It is stocked.

[Ben Rhodes]

Stop. This is, this is fiction.

[Tommy Vietor]

You're wondering if Trump spent some one on one time with Bubba. Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

For some reason reports.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

The ranch, the Boondoggle ranch, is stocked with exotic animals that you can murder via the comfort of your customized Hummer. So there's that. Patel has reportedly asked an FBI SWAT team from Nashville to provide security for his girlfriend, which is just like nuts and unprecedented. Though we should note she is like a MAGA influencer type. She posts a lot. And she has been baselessly, as far as we know, accused of being a Mossad agent by various right wingers. The evidence is basically she's hot and.

[Ben Rhodes]

Cash Patel is ugly and she works at Prager U.

[Tommy Vietor]

Or she used to work at Prager U. Yeah. Which is there's some Israeli tenuous connection to the Mossad or whatever there was.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm just saying. I'm just relaying the man.

[Tommy Vietor]

You're just, you're just.

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't get sued here because she's suing everybody.

[Tommy Vietor]

She's also suing a bunch of right wing and influencers. One for like 5 million.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it's a lot of money.

[Tommy Vietor]

Okay. There's a. It'll. It's going to open him up to discovery too. It seems like a bad idea.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, it seems like a bad idea.

[Tommy Vietor]

Okay, so there's also a public interest group called Public Citizen that has accused Cash Patel of illegally failing to disclose his work for the government of Qatar and for failing to register as a foreign agent. Public Citizen also claims that DOJ changed the way it enforces the rules around foreign agent registration to prevent Cash from ever having to disclose what he did. Also, according to New Yorker, almost a quarter of the FBI's more than 13,000 agents have been assigned to work on the apprehension of undocumented immigrants. We have talked a lot on this show about the kind of opportunity cost of reorienting all these agencies to do stupid. That quantifies it better than anything I've seen. There's also the more pedestrian stuff about Cash being just kind of bad at his job when he's tweeting out inaccurate information about ongoing investigations or pushing out competent agents who are just perceived to be liberal in some way. Or apparently the Deputy director, Dan Bongino, didn't have to get polygraph like everybody else does. So out of weird stuff. So, Ben, let's just pause there. Like, we've talked about the flight stuff. I do just want to harp on it for one second because I do think it speaks to a mentality within this organization. These Cash's defenders will say, look, by law, he has to fly on an FBI plane because he needs the secure comms. But, like, what makes me so mad about this is when you sign up to be a top national security official, you're like, I would say, implicitly, really explicitly agreeing to make that job your entire life through the duration of the time you have it. You know what I mean? Like CIA director, FBI Director, National Security Advisor, like, Homeland Security Advisor. Those people are not going to fucking ranches for the weekend to hunt big game. Like, we worked John Brennan when he was Obama's, you know, counterterrorism advisor and Homeland Security Advisor at the White House before he went over to the CIA. John had his knee replaced and then showed up for work the next day. It might have been a hip, I can't remember.

[Ben Rhodes]

It was one of the two, but it was fucking weird. Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. He was at work the next day with a. With a big cut and a brand new knee.

[Ben Rhodes]

Hopefully a little Percocet or something.

[Tommy Vietor]

No, Jon. Probably not.

[Ben Rhodes]

Probably not. Probably just fucking.

[Tommy Vietor]

Just white knuckling. But, like, you got cash. Patel's flying to the ranches for the weekend. He's going to hockey games with Wayne Gretzky. He's flying to UFC events like that. That's not the job. You sit in the fucking skiff and you try to stop bad guys. That's your whole life.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Until you quit.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. You know, the plane is not intended to, like, support the lifestyle of a MAGA influencer, which is essentially what he's living with. These kind of random weekends. There are also other resources, too. Did you see that? She's getting now, like, security from, like, FBI, like, SWAT teams. SWAT teams. Literally. And he keeps redirecting it even when he was attacked mainly by MAGA people, as well as, like, a few libs like asu.

[Tommy Vietor]

He's really mad at the right wing, though.

[Ben Rhodes]

But he took umbrage by saying what a great American patriot. His girlfriend was like, people are not attacking your girlfriend, bro. People are attacking you for being corrupt and incompetent and a little fucking weird, okay? And so he's just redirecting, you know, there's security for her and all this stuff. But the reality about a guy like Cash Patel that I find interesting is, look, it's going to do a lot of damage in the short term. I mean, you mentioned that one story the Times did a big deep dive on the DHS gaps that are being left by this focus on immigration enforcement that included areas like child protection and cracking down on child sex trafficking and pornography. Like another thing that they just seem to be going pretty late on over the FBI these days. But the reality is, in addition to being kind of this, you know, I mean, he's not even like one of these guys that's like gonna go back to being a rich guy. Like, Cash Patel's future is as like a Post MAGA influencer 100%. So he's actually got some problems. Like, Cash is like taking on some water here because he's gonna have to go back to like podcasting and YouTuber and, you know, I don't know how long the girlfriend's gonna stick around when he doesn't have the private plane anymore. So he's kind of hanging on by a thread here. But the thing that bothers me whenever these kind of stories come up is and we can tie together the MBS thing into this all. Do you ever feel, Tommy, like we are now like citizens of universe? That is a fantasy camp for the worst fucking people in the world.

[Tommy Vietor]

The biggest users.

[Ben Rhodes]

Cash Patel is like living fantasy camp, right? He's got his like 26 year old girlfriend, he's flying down to the boondoggle ranch, he's going to UFC fights, MBS is coming here and saying, like, you get a trillion dollars and he walks away with everything he wants. You know, Eric Trump's vacuuming him up billions of dollars in like crypto investments. And what are we doing here, here? You know, we're just literally like extras in the movie of their fantasy camp. I'm getting a little tired of it.

[Tommy Vietor]

It sucks. And then, like, the damage is being done left and right. I mean, Cash Patel was angry and embarrassed by reporting about his use of the FBI jet. So we, like, in a fit of pique, fired a guy who was like, in charge of the aviation program. That dude was also in charge of hostage rescues and child abduction cases. Like, okay, well, I'd rather keep that guy around. I mean, to your point, about him returning to be a podcaster.

[Ben Rhodes]

The.

[Tommy Vietor]

I think it was the New Yorker story noted that his podcast back in the day was produced by the Epic Times. The. The Fallen Gong.

[Ben Rhodes]

Chinese. Yeah, Chinese thing.

[Tommy Vietor]

There was a former senior White House official From, like, Trump 1.0 who was asked about Cash Patel in New Yorker, and they said Cash was seen as lazy and had no significant achievements during his time. And then just on your fantasy camp point, I just. It is worth noting that he's just a fucking dork. Yeah, he's a huge dork and a loser.

[Ben Rhodes]

I guess that's how I feel better about it is. Cause I don't even know that that guy knows how to have a great time at the boondoggle ranch. You know, he's just such a weird. He looks so uncomfortable in his skin, you know? And that's actually like, what we have going on. These guys is like, some of them, like Steve Miller, literally look like they're being eaten from within by an organism of, like, hatred. Some of them, like Kash Patel, just look, like, deeply uncomfortable.

[Tommy Vietor]

They know they're not just standing there.

[Ben Rhodes]

Like, with their arms rigid and, like, weird looks on their face. Right? And then some, like Trump, are just like, whatever the fuck. Like, I just can't believe I get to do this every day. Right? But I will say, and you know, we don't do this that much anymore because we're 10 years into this Trump decade. But, man, the people that like to lecture us on, like, law enforcement and, like, the sanctity of law enforcement, you know, and, you know, you must honor the police. It is so fucking disrespectful to law enforcement in this country to have this guy running it.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yes.

[Ben Rhodes]

You know, he's a clown. And I mean, this just advice to Democrats who are being called soft on crime. Like, you might point out that, like, putting Kash Patel in charge of the FBI to fly a jet around to see his girlfriend perform at, like, wrestling matches is not exactly a tough on crime scene.

[Tommy Vietor]

Put a photo of him in your wallet and bust it out any one time someone yells at you to back the blue. Yeah. Also to my friend Charlie Kirk. Rest now, brother. We have the watch and I'll see you in Valhalla. That's what he said in the present.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm still trying to make good sense of that one.

[Tommy Vietor]

That is the most try hard, try hard shit I've ever heard in my life. You're not a Viking, sir. Also, he gives out these challenge coins. It's designed to look like the Marvel character called the Punisher. We're going to throw it up on the screen for, again, for the YouTube viewers. It is hard to overstate how lame and ugly it is. Again, go to YouTube if you want to see it. But it's like the shape of a skull. There's three guns on it for some reason. There's the number nine, because he's the ninth FBI director. There's cash, the signature. There's the FBI seal. Like a lot of time went into planning something this lame.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, he is the kid, the trite yard kid. Like, you know, he was that freshman in college that like, you know, did too many keg stands in 30 minutes and had to have his stomach pumped because he was just trying to like, trying so hard to be like the, you know, like, it's just, you know what, it's okay to just be yourself, you know?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, just do the job.

[Ben Rhodes]

You're probably a little bit closer to being yourself when you wrote the children's book about the wizard named Donald, you know, but. Cause this Punisher, you know, country music boyfriend, it's just, it's not very convincing.

[Tommy Vietor]

She's not that into you, dude. Okay, so back in the day, Cash Patel used to talk a lot about the Epstein files and pledged to release them. Now he's part of the COVID up. So we're not going to get into Trump's kind of crazy stonewalling of the release of the Epstein files because that is once again dominating the domestic political debate in the US and by the way, it's like I was listening to the BBC this morning. It was like the lead story there too, everywhere. But there have also been some, really, there's been some interesting coverage of Epstein's ties with foreign governments that we want to just quickly touch on. A lot of this comes from the roughly 20,000 Epstein documents released by the House Oversight Committee. But then Dropsite News has been mining another, I think kind of hacked archive of Ehud Barack's emails, maybe other Epstein related files. So the one. A couple things that jumped out at us. First of all, Epstein tried to pitch himself as a Trump expert to the Russians. He told the then Prime Minister of Norway to tell Putin that Sergey Lavrov should give him a call to talk about Trump. This is leading up to the infamous Helsinki summit. Epstein claimed to have spoken to Vitaly Churkin, the former Russian UN ambassador. So that's interesting and notable. And then there's just been a ton of reporting on Epstein's ties to Israeli government officials. So we've talked about his relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who stayed at Epstein's house a bunch of times. There's a ton of traffic between the two of those financial relationships. He would. Brock is also allegedly the quote, unquote, prime minister named in Virginia Giuffre's book. Virginia Giuffre is one of the Epstein's victims and she says Ehuparak raped her. She died by suicide earlier this year. And then dropsite news, they've done a bunch of fascinating reports off of both the congressional emails and then another tranche released by this hacking group that looked at Epstein's relationship with another senior Israeli intelligence official who lived at Epstein's house in Manhattan on and off from 2013 to 2016. That's weird.

[Ben Rhodes]

You haven't had former Israeli intelligence officials live at your house for three years.

[Tommy Vietor]

And there's also like lots of weird kind of clearly code worded emails that leaked out being like, return the headphones.

[Ben Rhodes]

Return the AirPods, the eagle flies at 12:30.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, weird shit, man. And then they looked at dropside news. Did they look at the role Epstein played in brokering security deals between Israel and Mongolia and then Israel and Cote.

[Ben Rhodes]

D', Ivoire, as one does.

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, yeah, as one does. And then Epstein's attempt to set up a back channel between the Israelis and the Russians over Syria? So these reports are worth your time. They're long, they're complicated, we're not going to dig into all of it, but Ehud Barak clearly seems to have lied about his business relationship with Epstein. And clearly anybody who has thought that Epstein had ties with the Israeli intelligence community that had not been disclosed sure. Seemed vindicated. In fact, one might argue that Ehud Barak and Epstein were kind of international arms and spyware dealers.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, this Ehud Barak relationship seems even closer than like any of the other, you know, Epstein relationships that have been discussed. Right.

[Tommy Vietor]

Besides maybe Larry Summers looking for dating advice. Jesus Christ.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, but the theft. Look, the thing about the.

[Atul Gawande]

Absolutely.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's some of the saddest shit I've ever read.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's sad as shit. But you're also. Are you truly that surprised by the people that. That seem to turn up in these files? I don't know.

[Tommy Vietor]

A few of them.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. Well, okay, yeah, I guess there are a few. But to be serious about this, like, you know, we've talked a lot about the royal formerly known as Andrew or Prince Andrew, but he seemed to kind of parachute in and out and stuff. Like, Ehud Barak was tight with this guy for years, staying at his place, emailing with him, his associates are there. This is a guy that was not just the prime minister, again, was the defense minister of the country for years when we were there. And this has not gotten a lot of scrutiny. And by the way, the allegations against him are worse than we've heard about almost anybody else.

[Tommy Vietor]

Like that he's sadistic.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's like sadistic rape stuff. Right. I mean, not even just ambiguous assault claims. So the first point is that this is clearly like a tight nexus with AHU Barak that like, again, like, this is not a conspiracy theory. These are emails we're reading. You know, and Israel, as in the United States, unlike the uk, there doesn't seem to be this. The mark of shame only falls on people who have the capacity to be shamed. So Larry Summers seems like he has the capacity to be shamed. He came out, gave a very sad seeming statement. That doesn't make it better, but it's just interesting that you don't hear much from Barack. You hear nothing obviously from Trump other than denials. And then the secondary question about, look, this Israel question is it's not just kind of fringe stuff here. I mean, this guy was literally doing foreign policy type stuff with the Israeli government. That is clear from the emails. The Israeli government makes use of all kinds of relationships around the world. They like to brag about their connections in all kinds of countries and their Mossad's capacity to kind of run influence operations. So yeah, I mean, as this more information comes out, it is a legitimate line of inquiry to want to know more about that.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, and shout out to dropsite news for being some of the only ones covering it. There has been a strange lack of quote unquote, mainstream media coverage. I mean, I don't know if that's because these documents are allegedly hacked, but I mean, even Dropsite was like, they're alleged to have ties with like the Iranian governments. We don't know how all this got out there. Maybe there's sort of like ethical questions or challenges verifying some of the documents, I don't know. But it is. The lack of coverage is surprising.

[Ben Rhodes]

And look, the thing I'd say is, yes, people don't want to kind of jump all the way to the worst kinds of conspiracy theories that exist in the world, which are like anti Semitic conspiracy theories. What we have to recognize though is there's something in between saying, there's nothing to see here, so we won't even look, and then saying, you're Kenneth Owens and this entire thing was a Creation of the Israeli government.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

There's some. There's a huge gray space in between those two things. And it's pretty obvious that Epstein was somewhere in that gray space.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right. And so is Ehud Barak.

[Ben Rhodes]

And so is Ehud Barak. And so is this random dude that lived with Epstein. And so is the question of why Jeffrey Epstein is involved. Trust me, if you're a New York wealth investor, financier, child trafficker on the side, I don't know why you're brokering a Cote d' Ivoire security agreement for the Israeli government. Like, it's not a normal thing that you do when you're, like, managing money for rich people.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's really weird. Presumably the Israeli government could just call someone over there to set up a meeting. You mentioned Prince Andrew. The prince formerly known as Prince Andrew. I guess We've covered his scandals. We've covered the king recently, stripping him of various titles and kicking him out of one palatial manner and into another, basically. But Andrew was always denied having met Virginia Giuffre. There's a infamous picture of them together touching each other in an intimate way that needs to be.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, like, it's kind of holding each other's waist.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's gross, given she was, like, 17. He says it was doctored. Well, in this latest branch of emails that was released, there's a message from Jeffrey Epstein to his former publicist saying, yes, Andrew met Virginia Giuffre and they took a photo together. So no surprise, Prince Andrew was a fucking liar.

[Ben Rhodes]

That guy's not only a liar, he's like a terrible liar.

[Tommy Vietor]

Terrible liar, terrible person.

[Ben Rhodes]

He's, like, frantically lying while resigning things. I mean, he doesn't give off I'm innocent vibes. Let's just say that.

[Tommy Vietor]

No, he does not.

[Ben Rhodes]

Mr. Monbatten Now, I think.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right, right. Yeah. He has a new name.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, well, gotta be weird to get a new name.

[Tommy Vietor]

Best of luck, 60s or whatever, 70s old creep. We're gonna take a quick break, but before we do, I wanted to let you know that the holidays are here. Ben.

[Ben Rhodes]

Happy holidays time.

[Tommy Vietor]

I guess we're having those this year. Now is the perfect time. If you're looking to get something, go to the crooked store and snag gifts for your favorite activists and friends of the pod. We have everything from conversation, starting stocking stuffers to cozy sweatshirts that you'll be wearing all winter. We should make, like, a pod. Save the world. Like chew toy for dogs.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, yeah, we'll definitely have conversation starters.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's a brainstorm. The last day to purchase to ensure you get your order by Christmas is December 11th for domestic consumption and December 7th for international shipping, so order soon. Go to crooked.comstore to shop. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. The holidays can be a blast, but also can be challenging for people too, and it's important to look for help if you're struggling. This November, BetterHelp is encouraging everyone to reach out, check in on friends, reconnect with loved ones and remind people in your life that you're there. And if you could use a little extra Support this season, BetterHelp is there for you. 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 12 or more 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 our tailored rex. With over 30,000 therapists, BetterHelp is one of the world's largest online therapy platforms, Having served over 5 million people globally and it works with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for a live session based on over 1.7 million client reviews this month. Don't wait to reach out. Whether you're checking in on a friend or reaching out to a therapist yourself, BetterHelp makes it easier to take that first step. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com crookedworld that's betterhelp H-E-L-P.com.

[Ben Rhodes]

Crookedworld what is the secret to making great toast?

[Tommy Vietor]

Oh, you're just gonna go in with the hard hitting questions.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Dan Pashman from the Sporkful. We like to say it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. We use food to learn about culture, history and science. There was the time we looked into allegations of of discrimination at Bon Appetit or when I spent three years inventing a new pasta shape.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's a complex noodle that you've put.

[Ben Rhodes]

Together every episode of the Sporkful. You're going to learn something, feel something and laugh. The Sporkful. Get it wherever you get your podcasts.

[Tommy Vietor]

All right, Ben, we're going to turn to this fascinating report about the Chinese government using AI to automate most of its hacking operations and we wanted to dig into it so this was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. And then Anthropic, which is a big AI company whose tools were used by these Chinese hackers, put out a report confirming, you know, all of it and what they'd learned. So this, there was a hack that happened back in September. Some Chinese hackers used Anthropic's clawed AI tool to automate 80 to 90% of their attack. And they could do things faster than any human being possibly could. And they were able to basically start these, these hacks and then only sporadically intervene, only have like human decision making at a couple key decision points, like should we continue, should we stop? Things like that. The specifics of this hack were pretty limited. Like Anthropic said they detected about 30 targets. The hacking, the execution wasn't perfect. So like the AI hallucinated some, you know, login and password stuff and messed up a few times. But going forward, if other hackers or their, you know, state backed entities are able to get around safeguards that are put in place by AI companies like Anthropic and then use those tools as publicly available tools to hack other targets, like the volume of hacking that happens in the world could just go up like exponentially. And so that is a scary prospect. And like the defensive side never has keeps up with the offensive operations. And so Crooked Media's Matt Berg actually caught up with Senator Chris Murphy on Tuesday to talk about this issue and the total failure by Washington to regulate AI systems. And he had sort of an interesting observation about the way industry is trying to avoid regulation. Let's listen.

[Atul Gawande]

There's a lot of power in the AI lobby. The industry uses China as a red herring, right?

[Ben Rhodes]

They tell us that, well, if you.

[Atul Gawande]

Regulate us at all, even lightly, China will gain an advantage and you know, ultimately control the global AI industry. That argument is a red herring.

[Ben Rhodes]

In fact, China would delight if the United States put no regulation, no restriction, no protection on our AI systems.

[Atul Gawande]

And AI destroyed American society and civilization before it destroyed Chinese society and civilization. China is actually being fairly thoughtful about.

[Tommy Vietor]

The way that it rolls out AI.

[Ben Rhodes]

It is not going to use its citizenry as guinea pigs to test different.

[Atul Gawande]

Versions of dangerous AI. They have more guardrails imposed by their federal government than we have on AI. So there is no worry that we are going to hurt ourselves by smart.

[Ben Rhodes]

Sensible regulation of AI.

[Atul Gawande]

In fact, it's probably the only way to protect ourselves.

[Tommy Vietor]

So, you know, it's worth saying it's not just China that's using these AI models. According to the Wall Street Journal, Goog spotted Russian hackers using an AI model to make like, customized malware. But Ben, I mean, like, this is, this is a massive problem. It's like one of those. It's one of the problems that only government can solve. And we were just like, the White House is just absent.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's the huge story that just doesn't break through because there's so many dimensions to it, right? When you think about what's worrying about AI, you could think about security threats, like, could the AI be used to create like a biological pathogen, Like a new pandemic? You worry about these offensive cyber attacks that I'll come back to. You worry about disinformation campaigns like deepfakes that are incredibly credible, that can radicalize people or like cause a crisis. And then you just think about, like job displacement, you think about AI companionship issues, teenagers committing suicide and things like this. And I think it's so big that people are like, ah, I don't know what to do about this. You know, but the reality here is that we might look back on this time and Trump is like a secondary story. Like, there's a world in which, you know, I've thought about this like 20 years from now. Like, Trump was the analog to like, what was really happening, which was that, like, we were just like giving over society to artificial intelligence. And just to take the anthropic example here, this is already here, right? And you don't have to be a computer genius to realize that AI can both do things faster and potentially better, particularly in this kind of space, right? I mean, studies have already shown it's better at things like coding, it's better at programming. Makes sense because it's artificial intelligence. But it can also repeat things, like at a volume that we can't even get our minds around. Like, instead of one cyber attack, there could be a million, right?

[Tommy Vietor]

It's like a volume game, right? Especially like password phishing and stuff.

[Ben Rhodes]

And a lot of cyber defense is a volume game. It's like you're a goalie and you're trying to keep out all these shots and all of a sudden like the shots went up million X. And I think these AI agent cyber attacks, people have to realize is this is like the dial up modem version that the fucking Chinese were using for anthropic. Three years from now when we reached AGI, Artificial generative intelligence and supercomputer and smarter than human beings, this stuff. If you're just like in North Korea and you're like, crash the power grid in Los Angeles. You know, like this stuff is going to happen.

[Tommy Vietor]

Right.

[Ben Rhodes]

And the idea that we're putting no guardrails on it to connect it back to Saudi Arabia, if you want to know why it's kind of weird to just let them buy as many chips as they want, build as many data centers and have as many large language models. It's this, it's like what might MBS want to do with AI in four years? You know, whether. I mean, just let your mind run with that for a little bit.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Add in like a successful quantum supercomputer that can break any encryption.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yes.

[Tommy Vietor]

And we are in real trouble.

[Ben Rhodes]

And that's why what you should want. And I actually don't even like this paradigm of like racing the Chinese because the Chinese are gonna get it. Like there's no world in which the Chinese don't have the same technology. And so what we normal times, we'd be negotiating with the Chinese like a whole new global regime of regulations. Right. Not just national ones, but international regulations for this stuff. But it's just not happening.

[Atul Gawande]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Like obviously I don't love the Chinese. I don't trust them. What I hate about this setup is it's like the same handful of assholes that ruined society through social media are now in charge of this stuff. It's like we're giving Sam Altman the keys to the kingdom here and people don't even.

[Ben Rhodes]

I don't even think people are Mark Zuckerberg. And yet people are not excited about. About it. Social media people were. They liked it. Right. Most people I know are kind of like, fuck, this thing. Seems like it sucks. And Sam Altman's doing these weird interviews and he's not convincing. I think frankly we need to help these people, not destroy society. They should want regulation because frankly, in the absence of regulation, it's more likely something really bad happens that it causes people to really react, you know?

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I'm sure Elon Musk will be on it. He'll be really thoughtful.

[Ben Rhodes]

And that's the thing you're counting on like, you know, it's tough when you're counting on like Elon to self regulate.

[Tommy Vietor]

I remember the point of this when he was like seen as like the one, the canary in the coal mine telling the truth about AI and like sounding the alarm. And now he's just racing to try to beat everybody too. He's just rapacious capitalist with a weird, you know, at times. Nazi.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. And people have to realize that the goal of Elon is not to have grok answer your weird queries on X about like, you know, did this person really, like, you know, shoot their dog or something? I mean, it's this next level.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's domination, it's AGI. And it's also displacing like as many workers as humanly possible at Tesla factories with robots.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, just like is already happening at Amazon.

[Tommy Vietor]

Great future we got here. All right, we're going to make a, take a big swerve here, Ben, and talk about Bangladesh. I think we've talked about Bangladesh. We probably talked about last summer.

[Ben Rhodes]

Oh, we did, yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

In detail. Yeah. So last summer there was a huge protest movement and then a violent crackdown on these student protesters that killed at least 1400 people. So the protest kicked off when the Supreme Court of Bangladesh reinstated a rule that set aside 30% of civil service jobs for the descendants of fighters in the Bangladesh Liberation War against Pakistan back in 1971. Before that war, Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan. And then there was this, this liberation war. But like so many of these protests we've covered on the show, the kind of quota ruling was the tipping point that got people into the streets where they expressed long standing anger about corruption, lack of economic opportunity and a broken political system, an increasingly authoritarian political system. So the prime minister at the time, Sheikh Asina, called the protesters traitors and then she authorized the military to shoot them on site for breaking whatever rule. So fast forward to Monday. The Bangladeshi International Crimes Tribunal, a court in Bangladesh, sentence Asina to death for authorizing these extrajudicial killings. And her case was kind of open and shut because they had leaked audio where she specifically authorized the use of deadly force. You probably don't want to do that on an open line next time. Autocrat that. So Hasina was found guilty, but she's currently in India and refuses to return. So she was tried in absentia and it's not clear what happens next. Bangladesh has been ruled by a caretaker government since she went into exile. That government has demanded that the Indian government return Hasina. But a bunch of political analysts don't think it's likely. It's tough politics for the Indian government to return someone who's going to be killed, but also like she had close ties with them over the years. A lot of people think the Indian government was propping her up, up over the years. So we will see, I guess. So Bangladesh has elections coming up in February. Hasina's party has been banned from participating. Ben, I don't know how do you see this set of protests that kind of folding into the broader set of Gen Z protests we've been covering so much lately.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, I think this one was kind of an instigator. Right. It was like one of the first ones. And it succeeded to a point. It ousted her. And she had been kind of a increasingly autocratic figure, been a dominant figure in their politics for decades and got this transitional government under Muhammad Yunus, who is this kind of unifying figure in the country. I think one of the challenges that I see with this though is, look, she was a bad leader, bad person, number one. I'm not a big fan of the death penalty in general.

[Tommy Vietor]

I'm not either.

[Ben Rhodes]

I am justice, but put her in prison for life. I just think there's something primal about the death penalty being kind of the objective. Right. But it ties to the second point, which is again, that there should be accountability. Right. In all these places. I'm not saying there shouldn't be, but you also really want the focus to be on like, hey, what are we building next? So you want to make sure that vengeance doesn't overcome the opportunity of trying to do what is often harder, which is building an alternative political system in society. And so you want to me, and I'm not suggesting that's not happening, Bangladesh, but you know, you want to see that anger channeled constructively in addition to being directed at accountability.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Speaking of anger and how it will get channeled at corruption, let's talk about Ukraine. So there's been a major corruption scandal that's come out over the last few days that has ensnared members of President Zelensky's inner circle. Listeners might remember how back in July, Zelensky was like roundly criticized for trying to weaken anti corruption agencies in Ukraine. He backed down after there were these major protests and pushback from the international community. But people are now wondering, you know, what did he know at the time and why was that happening? So the Economist has an excellent report on what happened. Here's some details from it. So there was this 15 month long investigation by these anti corruption bodies in Ukraine. They uncovered a scheme to steal at least $100 million from Ukraine's state nuclear power company. It was uncovered by all these secret recordings. They were bugging like offices and apartments and rooms. And the details are incredible. Like these guys found a golden toilet bowl in an apartment that belongs to a guy named Timur Mindich, who is a close friend and former business partner. Partner of Zelensky's. Mindich left the country right before he was arrested. So clearly he was tipped off somehow, which raises a whole other set of questions. This again is verbatim from the Economist. Quote, at one point in the transcripts, one of the accused complains about back pain from lugging heavy bags of cash around Kiev.

[Ben Rhodes]

It's tough.

[Tommy Vietor]

That's how much they were stealing. There's another individual recorded saying it would be a waste of money investing to protect parts of Ukraine's electricity grid near its nuclear power plants. And then right before this story broke, the Russians hit those electrical substations with drones and blew them up. And so the conspirators seem to have figured out they were getting busted. Sometime in July, they started harassing the various members of the corruption, anti corruption bodies again. That is when Zelensky's office and political party started trying to take control of the anti corruption agency's independence, which is very bad timing. Like I've not seen an explanation for that. That's an explanation for that. I've also not seen like a non political actor say that Zelensky was be in on the scheme or even aware of it. But there's a lot of questions being asked here because his current energy and justice ministers are among the alleged conspirators, along with a former deputy prime minister. And a lot of the money seems to have been stolen and taken over to Russia. There are also, I think, some evidence that this broader scheme started before the Zelensky administration came to be. Zelensky has called on two of the ministers to resign. He's announced sanctions on Mindich, who escaped the country. So Ben, this is really bad. It's. It already has enraged Ukrainians who can barely heat or light their homes. And then they're reading about $100 million being pilfered. And these guys like scoffing at the idea of protecting, you know, energy infrastructure from Russian drones. It's also going to infuriate Ukraine's international supporters who are like, why the fuck would I give these guys money if it's gonna get siphoned off like that? How much damage do you think is done in like, like what are the odds? You think that Zelenskyy can fix it?

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean, I think it does a lot of damage because look, Ukraine has always had a lot of corruption. A lot of the systems that were built there in the post Soviet years, and frankly some probably go back to the Soviet years were kind of these. Everybody gets to take something off the top and you grease something by paying off a politician. But Zelenskyy actually came to office as this kind of Anti corruption reformer type candidate. Right. This outsider. And I think what the reminder is, look, you're right, there's no evidence or nobody's said that Zelenskyy was personally involved in this. Frankly, he's said and done the right things since this kind of came to light at least recently. At the same time though, it's a warning that just cuz you might like Zelensky and the way he's led the country, that doesn't mean that underneath him there couldn't be huge fucking problems that he might not know about. Right. But the warning sign is this. Ukraine has drifted a bit to being like not a one party state, but like Zelenskyy and his party kind of dominating things. And when that happens, that's when this kind of shit happens. Even if the leader might be okay, if there's a sense of impunity and there's a sense that there's not like guardrails, like you know, you get bad apples in any party and this kind of shit happens. And it's especially dangerous for Ukraine because number one, it could endanger that support. You know, who wants to be supporting a country to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars from Europe or the United States and then learn that some guys are lugging that around in bags that were hurting their backs literally. And also you don't want to become. The victory that Ukraine could win, we know, is not reclaiming every ounce of territory and vanquishing Russia on the battlefield. The victory is that they can emerge as a democratic society, which is how this all started. That could be a member of the European Union. Well, none of those things can happen if you're corrupt either. You're not going to join the eu, so they have an extra responsibility to get this in order and to not get lazy. And frankly to take democracy seriously because ultimately that's the prize that they have to win here.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, it's a very big deal. I think that the sort of. I think the Economist story on this reported that the next part of the government that they're going to look at, the anti corruption body is going to look at is the defense industry.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

And you know, there's some sense that like Zelensky's better let that happen.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah.

[Tommy Vietor]

Even if it sort of leads to him losing some top allies again because it's sort of a question of cutting off a limb or letting the entire body get sick.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, exactly.

[Tommy Vietor]

We'll see what he chooses. So I think I stole that from the Economist or someone quoted two more things before we're done. So we get to Ben's interview. So we just want to keep highlighting what's happening in Sudan. So we've covered the civil war there. It's been raging since 2023. More recently, there has been the capture of the city of Al Fasher by this group called the rsf, the militia force that is backed by the UAE and that is fighting the Sudanese military as part of the civil war. They are just accused of unspeakable atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan. So we reach back out to our friends at the Norwegian Refugee Council who are working in a city called Tawila, helping people who escaped Al Fashr, you know, get services. So this is a clip from Noah Taylor, who's the head of operations for NRC Sudan. When I arrived here again a few days ago, what struck me was as I crested this hill, driving into the town, and what was burgeoning as a small makeshift camp back in June has now exploded into this sprawling mega city of a settlement with multiple sections and new arrivals still pouring in daily. I spent time with some families who had recently arrived, including a man who was reunited with his wife who'd been separated from. From for nine months. He walked on foot with the crutches from Al Fasher with a wound in his leg. It had taken him 18 days to travel some 60 km from Al Fasha to Tawela, dodging checkpoints, moving at night, moving in small groups to try to avoid those who would seek to extort him, those who'd seek to accuse him of being a soldier or intelligence, all to reunite. And unfortunately, this. This story is. Is one of the happy ones. The ones that aren't are the people who sit and. And look out towards El Fascia daily, waiting for any sign that their loved ones could possibly still be making that journey. I've worked in displacement camps and sites like this my entire career, and I've never seen anything like this before. So, you know, they're the. Marco Rubio called the Emirati foreign minister last week. Hopefully, Sudan was on the agenda, but we don't know that's the case. We also saw that, you know, we talked earlier about how Mohammed bin Salman apparently came to the Oval Office today with a request that Trump help end the war in Sudan. So maybe Trump will take that seriously. But mostly it seems like they just don't care.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. The only thing I'd say that's interesting is that MBS Mohammed bin Zayed is the leader of the uae. NBS and NBC used to be super Tight. And they seem to have kind of drifted apart, shall we say. And this is one of the reasons why. But yeah, as we talked about, absent some pressure on the Emirates and others who are kind of financing this stuff, like, it's going to be really hard to stop.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah. Final story, Ben. So we're going to try to put the. Put the dick in dictator or measure it at least. Channel 4 News over in the UK they produced a documentary called Hitler's DNA Blueprint of a Dictator. They analyzed a swatch of bloody fabric from the couch Hitler killed himself on. They confirmed the blood was his and they proceeded to start testing his DNA for like everything possible. A couple of conclusions. One, Hitler did not have Jewish ancestry despite long standing rumors that he may have. Two, Hitler most likely had something called Kalman syndrome, which is a rare genetic disorder that can mess with sexual development during puberty. Kalman syndrome can lead to undescended testicles and in 10% of the case, a micropenis. This tracks with an exam from a stint in Landsberg prison where doctors noted an undescended right testicle. So interesting. And one can only hope that those scientists who cloned Tom Brady's dog stay the fuck away from that swatch of fabric.

[Ben Rhodes]

So what you're saying is he had one undropped testicle and a micropenis.

[Tommy Vietor]

Sounds like that could have been the case.

[Ben Rhodes]

I mean it would, you know, I mean, look famously, you know, Hitler made sure that they really burned his body thoroughly. Right. And the thought was that he didn't want to get like, you know, paraded.

[Tommy Vietor]

Through the streets like miscellaneous.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, maybe it was this, I mean, maybe tiny bridge, just a very tiny little coffin. Tiny little secret that he was carrying around his whole life.

[Atul Gawande]

Right? Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

I also love, by the way Channel 4 doing this. And the Brits have been dunking as they should. They've been dunking on hit like I love that they're still dunking on the guy. Nobody deserves it more. Biggest creep in human history. We should have stories about his micro penis on a regular basis.

[Tommy Vietor]

It is remarkable documentary. I don't know how you pull something like that.

[Ben Rhodes]

It takes a lot of patience too to just get on that. What was the pitch meeting here? I wonder if we test his blood, whether we can find out.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah, I think it took a long ass time and I think there was. The Guardian had a good write up on it. It was like, like they tried to get a sample of blood from some modern descendant of Hitler and it's like they understandably weren't particularly interesting that publicity is like, yeah, no shit. But anyway, I've not seen this documentary. I think it's out now, so maybe I'll give it a watch. Okay, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, you're going to hear Ben's conversation with Atul Gawande about the impact of USAID getting doged by Elon Musk and Donald Trump and a bunch of other assholes. So stick around for that. Pod. Save the World is brought to you by Quints Cold Mornings Holiday Plans. This is when I just want my wardrobe to be simple. Stuff that looks sharp, feels good and things I would actually wear. For me, that's quints. And the bonus quince pieces make great gifts too. This season's lineup is simple but smart and Easy with quints $50 Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel like an everyday luxury and wool coats that are equal parts stylish and durable. Their denim nails the fit and everyday comfort at a fraction of what you'd expect to pay. By partnering directly with ethical factories and top artisans, Quint cuts out the middlemen to deliver premium quality at half the cost of other high end brands. So you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. I have a bunch of Quint stuff now. I got a bunch of workout shirts. They've got basics. They got some really nice jackets. If you're getting cold and you need something warmer, highly recommend the site. Check it out. They will have something for you and it will be affordable and it'll show up fast. Give and get. Timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.comworld for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.comWorld free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comWorld what is the secret to making great toast? Oh, you're just going to go in with the hard hitting questions.

[Ben Rhodes]

I'm Dan Pashman from the Spork Pole. We like to say it's not for foodies, it's for eaters. We use food to learn about culture, history and science. There was the time we looked into allegations of discrimination at Bon Appetit or when I spent three years inventing a new pasta shape.

[Tommy Vietor]

It's a complex noodle that you've put.

[Ben Rhodes]

Together every episode of the Sporkful. You're going to learn something, feel something and laugh The Sporkful. Get it wherever you get your podcasts. I'm very pleased to be joined by Atul Gawande, who is a renowned surgeon and public health leader. From January 2022 to January 2025, he was also the administrator for global health at USAID. You may have read Atul's work in the New Yorker. He currently actually has a new documentary film out from the New Yorker that is meant to highlight the dire circumstances left behind by the destruction of usaid. It's called Ravenna's Choice. It's short, it is incredibly powerful and it really drives home in one story the impact that so many people are feeling. So, Atul, thanks for joining me and thanks for making the film.

[Atul Gawande]

I'm so glad to be here.

[Ben Rhodes]

So let's just start with kind of the big picture of what's happened because there's a lot of attention for two weeks when you had 25 year olds going through and firing people. And then of course, it's the Trump era. So the camera kind of moves on to other things and people kind of memory hole what's happened. But obviously the impacts of USAID's closure are being felt intensely around the world. And there's some estimates that show that as many as 600,000 people have already died this year because of the shutdown, including two thirds of whom are children. Those are staggering numbers. But you're kind of warning that that could just be the beginning. Just put people a little bit inside the scale of what's happening.

[Atul Gawande]

Yeah. So let me just start where you started. Right. I was leading Global health at USAID when I departed at 11:59 on January 20. At inauguration a few hours later, President Trump signed the executive order saying that all foreign assistance needed to come to a halt. By that weekend, half of the global health staff was being let go because they were contractors and their contracts came to an end. You had all letters going out ceasing all spending of US Dollars. You had medicines on the shelf that could not be distributed, food on the shelf not given to starving children. It was evident within those first few days that hundreds of thousands of lives would be on the line just in the first year alone. But there was zero curiosity, zero interest in how to mitigate that suffering. And instead, what was a pause turned into a complete shutdown of USAID. So the staff were purged, the 83% of the programs were terminated. The institution was dismantled, and what remaining programs there were were transferred to the State Department and the, and the funds were impounded. Now that meant everything from global surveillance for bird flu. That was being done in 49 countries was shut down, HIV meds halted. There are programs that are running so things aren't at zero. The estimates that have been made have taken a fairly conservative view. The reason I went to the field and wanted to see it on the ground and brought a film team with me that followed me as I went was because we're not going to have the actual numbers immediately. Right. That the, the mortality estimates will for 2025 will be released in 2027. The data monitoring that would tell you, well, here's what services are working or aren't working. That set of funding was stopped by the administration. They also fired the inspectors general who would be doing audits and heading into the field and seeing what happened. And so the result is you don't see what is happening and then the deaths don't occur like they do in a war with everybody in one location. You go from a 3% to a 4% death rate for children and that's a 1/3 increase in deaths. But they're scattered and just walking around, you don't see what's happening. And so following individual stories is how you begin to unpack it. So we can begin to know what's happening now. And you can see why.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah. So you, you know, sometimes people are overwhelmed by statistics and a single story can drive home what's happening in a more relatable or recognizable way. And so with Ravena's choice, you tell the story of a mother from South Sudan who's in a refugee camp in Kenya who has to make a terrifying choice about how to deal with it.

[Atul Gawande]

Let's not give it away.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, well, yeah, but. Well, I wanted to ask you, you know, you could have picked so many stories. Why this one and why does it uniquely kind of capture maybe not uniquely, but why this one and why does it capture what so many people are facing around the world because of the USAID closure?

[Atul Gawande]

Yeah, so a couple of reasons. I mean, I've been went into the field fairly early and have pulled together a team that includes people who are embedded, people from Kenya, the Kenyan journalist, a refugee who's helping support the film team and do filming on an ongoing way, all of those things. And everywhere you're seeing these terrible cases. We met a family who lost their 18 year old daughter to pregnancy.

[Tommy Vietor]

Her.

[Atul Gawande]

Lost her life because the monitoring that was there for her, eclampsia, preeclampsia, was taken away and she ended up having a seizure and dying. Right. That's story after story that you could tell. I was in primary healthcare centers. I was in Nairobi advanced HIV facility. And everywhere you could see what's happening. I was particularly concerned about malnutrition, however, and it's partly because Ravena tells a story that most people don't know about, that you just think malnutrition is like, we just need to give people food. And that's the problem. Twenty years ago, a child with severe acute malnutrition would come to a hospital and they'd have a 20% chance of death at that point. And we learned how to move the care and the detection into the community. You have community health workers simply going and measuring the height and weight of children once a month and having some basic recipe for saying if this child is not gaining their weight or actually losing. Here is now a therapeutic food specially formulated to recover this child. Manufactured, actually invented and manufactured in the US it's sometimes called Plumpy Nut, a, a peanut paste that can rescue children. And they got to 85% of the children with severe acute malnutrition would treat them in the home and then the complications would come to the hospital instead of waiting for people to come in. And the result was dropping the death rate in Kenya to under 1%. That has been responsible for a big part of the reduction by half in child deaths that occurred during the last two decades. So I wanted to see what is the state of that system. I had worked on making that system work and what Raveena shows as she tries to navigate the system with a sick child who's also got starvation. That that system, every part of it is broken. The community health workers who do those measurements, two thirds are laid off. The food aid that can support people is down to only 40, was at the time 40% of calories for the day, which meant just a single meal available to children and as well as adults. And then their treatments in the facility.

[Tommy Vietor]

Were pulled away.

[Atul Gawande]

So we've found the way to make it so severe malnutrition, you don't have to die. And then we pulled that treatment away.

[Tommy Vietor]

Yeah.

[Ben Rhodes]

And I want to ask a question about the system because I think it's really important for people to realize that this is not even just a dollar question. Right. Because some people may hear this and think, well, why can't someone else pick up the tab for these things? First of all, that's not happening. We've actually seen the European Union cut their own development budget too. But even if it were somehow possible to find some other money, I think people don't understand. It's not just a Sense that what USAID was, was like some dollars flowing out or even just some medicines or some peanut paste. It's who's paying the community health workers? How does that supply chain managed? You know, I was trying to explain on the podcast the other day that it's, you know, in a place like Sudan, it's how do you get the things there? And there's logistics points and there's contracts with people who can move certain things around. And so if you remove usaid, talk a little bit about the system that is being removed on things like health and food support, and not just the kind of, now there's less money being spent on it.

[Atul Gawande]

This is such a great core point you're making. One way we save lives is, yes, putting medicines on the shelf and putting food distribution out and putting out the funds to organizations like the World Food Program and UNICEF and so on to do some of those things. And that's important. It rescues lives in the moment. But the biggest, most efficient part of the investment is the investment that identifies and helps patch holes that are making it. So instead of 70% of people on HIV or with TB or with malnutrition getting the what they need because stocks are out of supply, or there's a part of the system that's broken here and there. We were coming in and helping provide technical assistance that could identify. Here is where the gaps are. We sometimes would provide capital to close the gap and then hand over the system. It might be fuel for motorcycle riders, making sure laboratory tests get to the places where they are, they can be run, and it can happen in under 24 hours. Where it makes the difference instead of losing the time and that expertise. Most USAID staff were in the field. They were in the countries where they worked. They worked with their partners. And that might be, you know, might be. In Ukraine, we had 40 people, for example. You can't make the whole country run on 40 people. They had networks of civil society, of doctors and nurses, of people in the health ministry that could do the execution. And together you would partner around, hey, here's how you get the pharmacies back open again. You know, when you're in Kenya, here is how you get vaccination rates that are at 60% to 90%. And that's what saves hundreds of thousands of lives and ultimately millions. Just the last 20 years, the latest estimate is that USAID work saved 92 million lives. And those were the biggest parts of making that happen. It was ways that we kept scaling improvements in the system and accelerating, making those Things happen.

[Ben Rhodes]

So the obvious priority area of concern in what's happening is the lives that are being lost or the lives that are not being made whole because of the absence of this assistance. I mean, there's research that suggests that this could end up costing tens of millions up to 22 million lives. But I also want to ask about there was a secondary aspect to USAID, which was founded by John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War. In part, just so, if I could put it crudely, people liked us more. We're battling for hearts and minds against the Soviet Union and we're showing up as the good guys trying to help countries solve problems and develop and deal with challenges. What is your sense? Because if doing USAID well can be helpful in that regard, ripping it away from people is not helpful. And they don't watch Fox News in Kenya and they don't have a steady diet of propaganda being fed to them about how great the President is. What is your sense of the impression that this has made on the people you've met with in Kenya and other places in the field or people you talk to? How would you describe to Americans the impact this is having on the way that people around the world look at us?

[Atul Gawande]

So a couple things. One, let me start with what inspired Kennedy was the Marshall Plan. Here was America coming out of a war. We were the victors. And instead of raping and pillaging the resources of the societies that we just defeated, as so often happens in war, we did the crazy thing of investing in Germany, in Japan, in Italy and other countries where we whom we had just defeated. And that ended up producing much more prosperity for the United States as well as those countries gave us peace and stability for going on a century. And so it had enormous value and self interest for us as well as benefit to humanity. And that is what has played out again and again in the USAID story. There is a dark side to the USAID story. There have been periods, and we're in one of them, where the criticism is that soft power stuff is just soft headed. It doesn't do any good. Cooperation and work with partners to solve big humanitarian problems. What's in it for the US we should be putting our objectives, our political and our military objectives first. And the humanitarian mission should be secondary to that. And we did that in Vietnam, we did it in Iraq, we did it in Afghanistan. And every time you gave it in the hands of contractors who ignored what, you know, wanted to solve all the problems in one year or two years, had no long term plan, no engagement with the country to solve together these problems. And the result was they were political failures. They were militarily a failure on top of being a humanitarian loss of life. And you're seeing that again now. So, you know, we're not a reliable partner is the way the other countries see us now. They see China as being more open and predictable in certain ways. I'd say there's a mix of three different reactions that I hear. One group of people are just wistful. They remember when the US Was an important leader and would rally the world around. We have to stop hiv. We have to stop polio. We have to end famine. And we contributed enormously to make that happen. A second group were like, good riddance. You all were never. You were never a good country. We knew this was the real you the whole time. Right. We've given fodder to those folks. And then most people are like, we survive. We survive. We got through. We had Covid. We had Hurricane Freddie in Southern Africa. We have had climate disasters of all kinds everywhere. This is another one. And they suffer. But we will survive. We will find a way through. And it's a mix of all of those things happening, none of which are ones where anybody says, we see America as a force for good in the world or a force that we want to support rather than resist and fight.

[Ben Rhodes]

Well, obviously, one last question I want to ask you. Is the kind of people that will be watching Raveena's Choice, or hopefully the people that can be impacted by it and think more and care more about what's happened to USAID and again, encourage people to check it out from the New Yorker. But if people are thinking, well, what can we do about this going forward? Obviously, not much for the next couple years, although I think people should try to do more to support organizations that are meeting some of these challenges. But the opportunity may come someday where we can build a new development agency or at least reintroduce ourselves to the world as caring about these things that people need to survive. What would you tell people about how to think about what we could do differently in the future? Should we be thinking about, like, what would a new development agency look like? Should we be thinking about just different ways that America can show up in the world then, not just the way we have under Trump, but the way we did in Iraq and Afghanistan? What would be your affirmative case for what we can do when we can remedy this?

[Atul Gawande]

Well, first, I would say before I get to the affirmative case, we have an administration that denies any of this is happening. So it's absolutely critical that we bear witness and show the harm. And that harm, the indifference to health abroad and public health abroad is translating into indifference to public health at home. With the same HIV programs being shut down across the country, we abandon all HIV vaccine work research. We've, you know, we've decimated significant parts of the public health capacity in the country as well as we almost got SNAP.

[Ben Rhodes]

Just like we cut global malnutrition assistance, you know, 100%.

[Atul Gawande]

See, it is the same thing being extended home. So all that said, I'd say the second thing is, you know, USAID was built over 60 years and was a, you know, on the one hand it was 10,000 plus people deployed around the world. Those people had networks that reached the millions of people. So you could make a lot happen. It was our largest non military force for operations in the world. Rebuilding it is going to be a multi, it's going to take decades to really rebuild that. And I do think we have to be building the case for recognizing this is an independent development agency function. It is not something that can sit. We have three pillars of foreign policy, development, defense and diplomacy. And if you say, look, let the diplomats run the development process. Diplomats work on a month to one or two year kind of objective level. And these objectives are ones that are 20 years in the making. That's how we eradicated smallpox. It's how we were able to work around the world to lift a billion people out of extreme poverty and stabilize turn places like Latin America into largely middle and upper income countries where there used to be the impoverished of the world. So we know we can do this, but it doesn't happen if you don't build that independent and longer casting capability.

[Ben Rhodes]

Yeah, no, that's a good, that's a good, good point that this is. There's no quick fixes to any of this. Well again, everybody should check out the documentary Ravenous Choice. Continue to follow Atul Gwande's work in the New Yorker and pay attention to this issue. We'll keep trying to do that over here too. Thanks so much for joining us.

[Atul Gawande]

Great, thanks. Huge thanks.

[Tommy Vietor]

Thanks again to Atul Gawande for joining the show and we'll see you guys next week. Pod Save the World is a crooked media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our associate producer is Michael Goldsmith. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor and Ben Rhodes. The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Jordan Kanter is our audio engineer. Audio support by Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Thanks to our digital team, Ben Hefcote, 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 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.

[Ben Rhodes]

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[Atul Gawande]

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