Does the Signal Scandal Matter?

Summary

Summary of "Does the Signal Scandal Matter?" Episode of The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Episode Information:

• Title: Does the Signal Scandal Matter?
• Release Date: March 26, 2025
• Host/Authors: Jon Podhoretz, Abe Greenwald, Seth Mandel, Eli Lake

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1. Introduction

The episode delves into the recent "Signal Scandal," a significant security lapse within the U.S. administration involving unauthorized use of the Signal app for high-level military communications. Host Jon Podhoretz is joined by Executive Editor Abe Greenwald, Senior Editor Seth Mandel, and contributing editor Eli Lake to dissect the implications of this breach.

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2. The Signal Scandal: An Overview

[01:51] Jon Podhoretz:
Introduces the scandal where Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, was inadvertently added to a high-level Signal group chat discussing U.S. military actions against the Houthis in Yemen. This inclusion revealed the existence of the group and exposed a significant security lapse.

Key Points:

• The group chat was intended for secure discussions among top officials.
• The accidental inclusion of a prominent journalist raised concerns about data security and operational secrecy.
• The incident has ignited an internal ideological battle within the administration.

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3. Internal Administration Dynamics: Restrainers vs. Hawks

[02:54] Seth Mandel:
Explores the ideological split within the administration between "restrainers," led by J.D. Vance, and "hawks," exemplified by Mike Waltz.

Notable Quotes:

• Seth Mandel [03:05]: "I don't want to adopt the categories of my ideological adversaries."
• Eli Lake [04:39]: "It seems like an effort was made to target Mike Waltz as the representative of the more aggressive faction."

Discussion Highlights:

• Mike Waltz's background as a war veteran and his family's accomplishments underscore his credibility among hawkish members.
• The restrainers advocate for a more cautious approach to foreign policy, while the hawks push for aggressive military actions.
• The scandal is being used as a battleground for these internal debates, potentially destabilizing the administration's cohesion.

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4. Security Breaches and Accountability

[07:52] Seth Mandel:
Analyzes the severity of the security breach, emphasizing that senior officials like Mike Waltz should be held accountable to maintain governmental integrity.

Notable Quotes:

• Seth Mandel [07:59]: "If you wanted to protect state secrets, you would have a much bigger problem than this."
• Jon Podhoretz [09:12]: "This is probably the worst security breach we've ever seen."

Discussion Highlights:

• Comparisons are made to past security lapses involving high-profile figures like David Petraeus and Hillary Clinton.
• The lack of accountability for senior officials contrasts with the swift repercussions often faced by lower-level personnel.
• The need for stringent guidelines on the use of communication platforms like Signal for sensitive discussions is underscored.

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5. Impact on the Trump Administration and Leadership

[13:26] Seth Mandel:
Discusses Trump's response to the scandal, noting his tendency to downplay significant breaches and maintain loyalty among his top aides.

Notable Quotes:

• Seth Mandel [14:17]: "Trump seems completely comfortable lying about anything."
• Eli Lake [34:44]: "Trump doesn't have a filter that stops him before he takes actions to ask if that action is safe from prying eyes."

Discussion Highlights:

• Trump's historical pattern of minimizing or dismissing security failures within his administration.
• The cultural shift towards a less disciplined and more chaotic executive branch under Trump's leadership.
• Concerns about Trump's influence leading to a lack of adherence to established security protocols.

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6. Iran and Gaza Protests: Broader Geopolitical Implications

[52:52] Seth Mandel:
Examines the internal dissent within Gaza against Hamas, suggesting that the Signal Scandal may be symptomatic of broader instability.

Notable Quotes:

• Seth Mandel [55:31]: "Perspectives are shifting as internal pressures mount against Hamas."
• Jon Podhoretz [61:43]: "This suggests Israeli operational intelligence is now penetrating Gaza more effectively than before."

Discussion Highlights:

• Demonstrations in Gaza indicate waning Hamas control and increasing desire for peace among Palestinians.
• The effectiveness of Israeli intelligence in dismantling Hamas's operational capabilities.
• Potential for internal revolts within Gaza mirroring dissent movements in other authoritarian regimes like Iran.

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7. Connections to International Organizations and Domestic Groups

[66:11] Seth Mandel:
Highlights the involvement of international organizations and domestic groups like the People's Forum in exacerbating tensions.

Notable Quotes:

• Seth Mandel [71:15]: "Their main funder lives in Beijing, indicating foreign influence in domestic terrorism activities."
• Jon Podhoretz [72:23]: "The deportation of individuals connected to terrorist organizations remains a critical issue."

Discussion Highlights:

• The resurgence of groups like KUAD and the People's Forum in the U.S., linked to international terrorism fronts.
• The role of civil lawsuits in uncovering details about these organizations, as opposed to proactive measures by federal agencies.
• The challenges in prosecuting individuals involved in providing material support to designated terrorist organizations.

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8. Conclusions and Future Implications

[77:38] Jon Podhoretz:
Summarizes the potential long-term consequences of the Signal Scandal on U.S. governance and national security.

Notable Quotes:

• Jon Podhoretz [76:04]: "We're going down the yellow brick road of uncovering deep-seated issues within our administration and security apparatus."
• Abe Greenwald [46:51]: "The clash between business-driven managerial practices and the need for disciplined governance is at the heart of these failures."

Discussion Highlights:

• The necessity for a cultural and procedural overhaul within the administration to prevent future security breaches.
• The balance between efficient, business-like management and the stringent requirements of national security.
• The ongoing struggle to maintain governmental integrity in the face of internal ideological battles and external threats.

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Notable Quotes with Attributions and Timestamps

• Jon Podhoretz [09:12]: "This is probably the worst security breach we've ever seen."
• Seth Mandel [03:05]: "I don't want to adopt the categories of my ideological adversaries."
• Eli Lake [55:45]: "The demonstrators are currently under the protection of the IDF."
• Abe Greenwald [46:51]: "There are areas, like medicine, where you have to observe a rigorous checklist."
• Jon Podhoretz [76:06]: "We're going down the yellow brick road of uncovering deep-seated issues within our administration and security apparatus."

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Final Thoughts

The "Signal Scandal" serves as a critical lens through which the episode examines the fissures within the Trump administration, highlighting issues of security, accountability, and internal political strife. The discussions underscore the urgency of addressing these vulnerabilities to safeguard national interests and maintain governmental integrity.

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End of Summary

Transcript

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[Seth Mandel]

Hope for.

[Abe Greenwald]

The best, expect the wor some preach.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And pain Some die of thirst no.

[Seth Mandel]

Way of knowing which way it's going Hope for the best Expect the worst.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily Podcast. Today is Wednesday, March 26, 2025. I am Jon Podhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.

[Abe Greenwald]

Hi John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.

[Eli Lake]

Hi John.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And our contributing editor and columnist and podcaster at the Free Press, Eli Lake. Hi Eli.

[Seth Mandel]

Great to be here, John. Thanks for having me.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So Eli has his take this morning. Last night this morning on the scandal involving the use of signal for a group, high level group discussion of the war or the attack on the Houthis in Yemen by the United States on which Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic was inadvertently included and revealed the existence of this group and the security lapse that that suggested a lot of different bits of detail as we go into the second day. But Eli, your your piece this morning details what you see as an effort to use this event to wage an ideological battle inside the administration between the you called the restrainers led by J.D. vance and the Hawks led by Mike Waltz, the nationalist.

[Seth Mandel]

I don't even know. Can we call Waltz a hawk in this?

[Jon Podhoretz]

I don't know. Do you have a term do you use?

[Seth Mandel]

I don't know.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I mean I hawk monster fight his way into war.

[Seth Mandel]

I don't want to adopt the categories of my ideological adversaries.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Have a highly decorated war veteran special ops guy who became a congressman, is now a and and is the brother in law of the lead singer of Creed. Very important detail about Mike Waltz, his brother in law.

[Seth Mandel]

I see it.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But other than that, it's just an interesting detail. And that his sister in law, married to the lead singer of Creed, was Miss New Jersey in 2004 and his wife has like five PhDs, was herself a combat veteran and is like unbelievably impressive. So the whole Waltz family, most of.

[Eli Lake]

The New Jerseyans are like that.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. New Jersey. All right. So Seth, standing up, Standing up for the Garden State as our, as our.

[Eli Lake]

Garden State nationalists, Special Forces. That's, you know, that's.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, that's what. When you think, when you think Cherry Hill, you think special forces, PhDs and a giant water. When you think Trenton makes the world takes. There's Mike Waltz attempting to do to actually America makes, you know, missiles and the. And the Houthis take them. And that's Mike Waltz's policy. Okay. Eli Lake layout for us, it seems like it's not going to be a successful effort, but that situationally an effort was made, you think, to target Mike Waltz as the, as the representative of the more aggressive.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah. Or what we used to call the Republican Party.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, the Republican Party. Yes.

[Seth Mandel]

Right. It's not like the Republican Party. I mean like there were debates within the Republican Party.

[Jon Podhoretz]

If you're watching on YouTube, you will note that in honor of it.

[Seth Mandel]

Here you go.

[Jon Podhoretz]

We have Raul, we have Eli, Governor Reagan and Logan on this team T shirt is zip it, hippie. So. Okay. So Eli, please.

[Seth Mandel]

So Mike Waltz, I don't really identify. I mean, Mike Waltz was kind of offered what I thought was a fair kind of critique of the Biden approach to Ukraine, for example, where I would maybe disagree with him. The difference is that Mike Waltz is not. Would. You would never hear from him the kind of garbage that you would hear from Tucker that would focus on the, you know, the awful character of Zelensky and how he's just a, you know, sweaty guy in a track suit. Like, you know, all that animosity to, you know, that I think is papering over in some ways like something weird having to do with Russia, though I'm not making an allegation there. But my point is that Mike Waltz was not like he wasn't with commentary on the Ukraine war. I think he's very strong on Israel. It's just that he's within the parameters of a normal foreign policy debate. And that is enough at this point because there aren't really. It's not like they're like true blue Neos in the administration right now, that's enough to kind of get him on the list. For the people who I think in some ways are like, you know, this new right that wants to. That wouldn't mind seeing NATO blow up, that, you know, some of them claim that they want to reserve America's resources to fight China. But I'm sure they would come up with a reason as to why that would be a pointless and stupid war that really believe that Ukraine is the heart of darkness and corruption. And, and I would sort of agree with this crowd on how bad russiagate was. But then they turned that into like, well, anything you say bad about Putin is just an effort to try to silence people in the debate and everything like that. And I remember in 2008, 2012, even 2016, this was a fringe view. And I think it is kind of emerging at this point as a kind of dominant strain. And I brought it up in the context of if you really, if this was really about, like, protecting, you know, state secrets, then you would have a much bigger problem with Pete Hexseth. And I think Pete Hexseth, by the way, kind of shares a lot of the instincts of the commentary listeners. But he's really close with this guy, Dan Caldwell, who is like, you know, one of the important kind of Elbridge Colby type intellectuals, at least in this, what I call the restrainer movement. So why would.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Eli, you're throwing in a lot of names and you're, sorry, you're going second level as opposed to first. So my point is on the first.

[Seth Mandel]

Level, my point is that if you wanted to, if you want.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Dan Caldwell works for Pete Hegseth at Defense. Dan Caldwell is the person who is staffing, helping to staff the Pentagon.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, now he's senior advisor.

[Jon Podhoretz]

He's the number three in the department.

[Seth Mandel]

No, no, Elbridge Colby is the number three.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay. But he is, he, he is staffing, helping to staff the department. There were these two extraordinarily weird appointments at the Pentagon. One a guy named Michael Dimino, who is a sort of conspiratorialist, kind of pretty close to being an anti Semite. And then a spokesman named Kimberly.

[Seth Mandel]

Did she get bounced yet or is she still.

[Jon Podhoretz]

She bounced.

[Seth Mandel]

But who, like, said Leo Frank was.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Leo Frank was Lynch the Jew, who's a murder by a mob in Georgia inspired the founding, led to the founding of the Anti Defamation League. And like, so there's staffing there. So there's. That's, that's the weird. But Hegseth was the, was the most conventionally hawkish of the people on the Signal chat. And then you have Mike Waltz, the national Security advisor. And so it's the two of them, and then the voices against that. There's only one real voice against them in the chat, and that's JD Vance. But then you say in response to the release of the news that there were all these stories, leaks from the White House, you know, un. Unnamed officials at the White House saying that Mike Waltz was an effing idiot. And there may be.

[Seth Mandel]

It's also people like Kurt Mills, who is now the executive director of the American Conservative magazine.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. So, so, so isolationist Tuckerite conservatives saying nasty things about Mike Waltz. Internal quote, saying things about Mike Waltz, suggesting that people jumped on this to see if they could somehow oust Mike Waltz in favor of somebody that they thought would be more.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Amenable to their restrainer things.

[Seth Mandel]

And my point is only that if you were just looking at it about the severity of the breach, sharing the targeting packages, assuming that, I mean, I have. I believe Goldberg is being truthful when he says we didn't publish certain things is far more of a breach than a fat finger. F up, if you will, that you add Goldberg to the chat. Now, what's interesting is if you read like, the Twitter of Sean Davis, the publisher of the Federalist, he this now becomes not like a mistake because Walt's said, like, I don't know, I never talked to Jerry Goldberg. It becomes, oh, you're leaking to Jeffrey Goldberg. Which, by the way, is disprovable. If you just peruse the Atlantic, you don't find any, like, you know, scoops about Trump's foreign policy until this thing. So. But leaving all that aside, and by the way, my understanding is that he was adding people in the chat and that the actual number for the contact of the person he wanted was Goldberg's number. Now, that might have been a mistake when it was entered in his phone. It may have been. Who knows? But the point is that that is, you know, not great. It's bad. But it gets turned into he's talking to the enemy. Because the Atlantic was like resistance central, you know, has been resistance central in the Trump era. And instead of it. But. So it's. Is it really about, like, I can't believe we had this huge breach. It's a huge mistake. Even if you're on the text chain and you know, it wasn't you who brought in Jeffrey Goldberg to share that information on Signal, there is no guidance, by the way, that says you're allowed to do that. You're allowed to communicate if you're a senior official against. Under the Biden administration, now the Trump administration, according to the Department of Homeland Security computer infrastructure cisa, you're allowed to use SIGNAL as one of those devices. But there's no, like, guidance that says you're allowed to use SIGNAL to have substantive conversations and share top secret documents. That's not true. So it's. So nobody's saying anything about Hegseth, who I think, or for that matter, I imagine that the CIA director, John Ratcliffe is also somebody who you could maybe point the finger at if you wanted to do that. But no, it's all about Waltz, because I think that they just want. And then, you know, Trump has a rocky history, as we know, with his national security advisors.

[Abe Greenwald]

The only thing, I mean, we're hearing about and from Hegseth is that he didn't share these, the specific targets. And that's, you know, and he's been denying and insulting and insulting Goldberg and so on. So I agree there's definitely a sort of formation of defense of him. But Trump seems completely. He's downplaying Waltz's mistake as well. I mean, Trump's just taking this one like it's no biggie at all. Things happen. You know, he learned from every experience he said or something.

[Seth Mandel]

I'm not predicting anything. But as somebody who covered this stuff very closely in the first term, when I was at Bloomberg, I remember right before McMaster was fired, there were all kinds of statements that came out from Trump saying, I have no problems with them. I mean, you don't know that's true. He is a material.

[Eli Lake]

Isn't Trump's bigger problem with these guys when he thinks they're undermining his foreign policy? I mean, in other words, if he thinks that Waltz is genuinely carrying out the Trump agenda, then he really might be quite forgiving about a mistake like this. Right. I mean, his problem with McMaster and others was that he felt that they were trying to tie his hands. Right. But Waltz doesn't seem to be doing that. Walt seems to be a good defender of, you know, of Trump's foreign policy and what he's trying to do so.

[Seth Mandel]

That he let Mike Flynn go and he thought. And Mike Flynn was as loyal as you get.

[Eli Lake]

He was.

[Seth Mandel]

Because there was so much heat.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. I am that. That the, that the isolationist, Tuckerist, Putinist. Right. Is going after Mike Waltz is interesting, but it's not suggestive of anything other than these fights, which really do boil down to kind of, we must stamp out any version of the right that isn't seeking conciliation with Russia that wants some kind of a deal with Iran. And that I believe, if you really scratch beneath the surface, was like they were tilting too much toward, toward Israel or we're too nice to Israel or something like that. Though that is kind of being left to the side in favor of just straight old, old fashioned anti Semitism. It's a kind of weird thing where it's like, well, you can be anti Zionist without being anti Semitic is the old, old canard. Now the question is, can you be anti Semitic without being anti Zionist? And there is some kind of weird effort to play that new card because people are just talking about, you know, whether the, how, how many, how the Jews are manufacturing conspiracies about the Holocaust and that they, and that Jewish businessmen in 1915 raped 15 year old girls and deserved to be lynched rather than saying that Israel is a socialist country that we shouldn't be siding with.

[Seth Mandel]

And you forgot JFK assassination.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Oh yeah, yeah. And the Jews killed, killed jfk. Which is proved by the fact that the documents don't mention Israel. So that means the documents that mention Israel were destroyed. So there is, don't be so naive, K. I'm very naive. I'm so naive.

[Seth Mandel]

But who's being naive now, Kay?

[Jon Podhoretz]

That's a good question. So there is that, but then there is this question of whether or not is there actually any real disagreement within the administration by which I mean, there is this conversation for four days and what's indicative is that Vance says, I don't know if we should do this. Maybe we should wait a month to get a lot of other stuff going on. And I hate the Europeans. Why are we bailing out the Europeans? And then others say, no, no, we're not bailing out the year. We're just keeping the shipping lanes open. We have to keep the shipping lanes open. And Vance is like, okay, whatever, you know, I'm, I, you know, the President may not understand what, you know, where this is going. And then, and then Stephen Miller comes in and says, no, we're going ahead. And that. It's not like it was a knockdown, drag out fight. It was like a conversation with people in a room that we got to overhear in which somebody says, I don't know if we should be doing this. And then a bunch of other people say, oh yeah, we really do have to do it. And then he's like, all right, okay, it's up to you, whatever, you know, as long as, as long as everybody's on the same page. So I, I didn't really see this as like a major, the exposure of a major policy disagreement as yet. I mean, clearly the ballot, there are lines here that Vance is representing within the Republican or the Trump coalition, and that could get worse over time. And I don't like the signs of the lines, but the, I think that's actually why the story about the internal politics, there was a big effort to make it a big story yesterday, and it's largely the subject of your piece, but I don't think it's going to get much purchase. The question is, how significant is the, is the security breach? Was it a security breach? How significant is it, what does it say going forward if no one, if no one is held responsible? How do you run a government in which no. In which senior officials are not held responsible for security breaches that they cause, but then you go after junior officials who do the same thing later on, that kind of thing. There's going to be a hearing today, probably, as you're already hearing this, listeners in the House Intelligence Committee following the Senate Intelligence Committee's hearing, in which there will be, which was yesterday, in which some of these questions, I assume, will be raised, particularly by, you know, Democrats on the Intelligence Committee in the House, who, as you may know, are all just incredibly sane and, you know, very full of politest. I'm sure going to be just a lovely hearing that really does credit to the, to the idea of political debate in the United States. But Trump clearly does not want to make a big deal out of this. Like, that's, that's where what's different about.

[Eli Lake]

Well, then he has, he's going to have to take a different tack now because now the Atlantic has published the actual operational details of the strikes. And so what seems to have happened is that the, you know, the guys on the chat and in the Trump administration sort of goaded Jeffrey Goldberg into publishing details that proved that Hegsmith had attached actual war plans. The administration is, the administration says they're not war plans because imposing them earlier this morning, the Atlantic called them attack plans. And so the administration is saying, see their attack plans, not war plans. You can't trust Jeffrey Goldberg. But the point is that we now are, you know, we now can look and see that, you know, it has literally the minute that F18s were launching and then the minute that, you know, another Blake strike window starts and it says in the thing that the target and Yemen was walking into his girlfriend's house or something like that. I mean, like, we're. We're literally like, seeing a script. It's almost like reading, you know, a kind of movie script in a way, a scene setting. And so they seem to have. By denying this stuff as. As much as they have, they seem to have dared Jeffrey Goldberg into publishing more of these details. And so now it's a second day story with more details.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right, but the second.

[Eli Lake]

But. And it's also to, you know, to contradict the idea, you know, Hegseth and these guys saying there's nothing classified in it. You know, whether or not that was classified, the information that we're seeing is obviously very secret.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It's not only classified. Like, I don't mean that somebody stamped the word classified at the top of a piece of paper. These are operational war plans. I don't even know what the word classified does justice to what they are, because the idea is if they're floating around and the Houthis were competent enough to grab them out of the cloud, then the Houthis could counterattack, hit our forces before we hit the end, you know, and there could be a catastrophic consequence. There is nothing on earth that is more classified than the details of a strike, military strike. You know, there's all the fun memes last night. It's sort of like, what would the group chat have looked like on Gen on June 5, 1944, had it been out and around or, you know, or any other, you know, or Agincourt or something like that? Like, you know, this is the one thing on earth you could say, well, lots of things need to be classified because they might compromise sources and methods and all of this. But, like, this is an American foreign policy action in the process of going on that should the enemy get its hold on, it, can react in real time and turn it back on you. Hegseth and Waltz both are doing something else, I assume, which is they're not managing the fallout from the story. They're managing Trump. So Hegseth is failing Atlantic, with its bad editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, and they're failing. And soon they will fold because they're so failing. They're so failing that somebody who has $40 billion owns them and just every three minutes hires another 75 people from the Washington Post to, like, pack onto their. That's how much they're. They're. They're failing. But they're trying to get the message to Trump.

[Eli Lake]

We can say that that has backfired, I think. Right. I mean, that's my point is that.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, has it backfired with Trump it's only backfires, right? It's backfired in the sense that. Oh, for God's sake. Like you're embarrassing yourself. Now, of course, with Kurt Mills at the American Conservative and Sean Davis at the Federalist and everybody else who is in desperate need of psychiatric commitment. They have whatever it is that they will use, whatever they have to hand to say, you know, to say, you see, it's not really a war plan. The Atlantic is now calling it an attack plan. That proves it wasn't a war plan. It's an attack plan or whatever it is they're going to say to attack the people they hate and defend the people that they like or not even now they have to defend Waltz and Hegseth. I think they want.

[Seth Mandel]

By the way, the smarter spin would be this. We've had this problem for, for years which is that senior officials get away with breaches of state secrets that mid level and lower level people don't.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

This is hardly the first time. Look at how Petraeus got a slap on the wrist when he allowed for his personal diaries to fall in the hands of his biographer and lover, Paul Broadwell. Look at Hillary Clinton, look at Sandy Berger. And you can look at all these things and they're never punished as severely as, you know, reality winter or you know, if Snowden was to return to the United States or something like that.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Larry, Fred, any low level official responsible for a security breach who can be, who can be right found out and prosecuted by the Department of Justice doesn't have a leg to stand on. Now they will have a leg to stand on. I said this yesterday. Which is.

[Seth Mandel]

No, but they could have made this argument before, which is because they don't.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Want to make the argument because they don't care.

[Seth Mandel]

No, no, I'm talking about the low level person who's. And then. And you could have said this, you could have said this for the last 15, 20 years, right? That there is this.

[Jon Podhoretz]

We've never seen something this high in, in.

[Seth Mandel]

Oh yeah, no, no, this is terrible. I agree.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I mean this is, this is just the Secretary of State having a personal emails.

[Seth Mandel]

Oh, I agree.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But okay, so this is like the worst security breach of this probably ever seen.

[Seth Mandel]

No, I mean Snowden was worse. WikiLeaks and some.

[Jon Podhoretz]

No, no. Okay, but that was, that was a kind of counter intelligence op. This is the Secretary of Defense of the national security advisor causing a security breach.

[Abe Greenwald]

The thing about this is how much worse it could have been.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right?

[Abe Greenwald]

I don't know.

[Seth Mandel]

That's the key.

[Abe Greenwald]

I don't use signals, so I don't know. But I was talking to someone yesterday, yesterday who was telling me that, like, if this. Thank God it was only Jeffrey Goldberg. Because if it were someone else, signal uses some code thing where you can then get into someone else's account or the contacts and so on, and it can sort of spread and branch out. It could have been genuinely catastrophic. That is the issue here. They're going after Goldberg as if he's the worst person to have been accidentally the best person. Yeah, he's the best person.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Or he turned out to be. Right. I mean, he could have taken.

[Eli Lake]

It could have been Glenn Greenwald instead of Jeffrey.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, yeah. Just exactly. It could have been anybody who would have actually revealed the plans on Saturday and then blown the mission. So. Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

So Goldberg blown the identity of the CIA case officer who was also on the chat.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. Okay. So my point is, you're saying they could have gone another way, saying the.

[Seth Mandel]

Spin could have been, this has been a problem. It's not great. It's early. You know, people make mistakes. You know, but, like, let's not pretend we haven't been here before, that kind of thing. And then talk about Sandy Berger, Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right, okay.

[Seth Mandel]

That would have been at least more credible.

[Jon Podhoretz]

However, but as I said earlier, if.

[Seth Mandel]

You'Re Pete Hegseth and you believe that, you know, the only audience that matters happen to be goldfish and have no memory and don't care, that, like, the Atlantic's gonna then say, okay, you called my bluff. Here it is. You know what I'm saying? Then if you. If you just. If you know that your core constituency just won't care, then say whatever you want. I mean, that's almost like we're living in a postmodern era.

[Jon Podhoretz]

There is no core constituency. There was only Trump. Trump told Hagsett when his nomination was in trouble, you're gonna have to fight for it. And Hegseth fought for it. And Trump said, good work. You fought for it. Now he gets into trouble. So he's fighting.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And he's fighting by lying. And Trump doesn't look at that and say, you know, there are things he really shouldn't lie about. Trump will lie about anything.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So Hegseth is like being a good student of Trump's here.

[Abe Greenwald]

Perfect student. And not just lie. Trump is completely comfortable. And this. We remember this from the first term. Living and operating on a different plane of reality from everyone else. If everyone else sees that. That. That war plans were leaked or attack plan, whatever, he is fine saying, no, no, they weren't. That's. That's, you know, it's the very same way he called Zelensky a dictator and then was asked about it after they had some sort of makeup. And he said, I said that. I don't remember saying that.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But, I mean, look, let's look at it this way. So if Trump is Warm tongue and had Hegsets and screw tape. Right. That's crazy. Is the older. Right. Screw tape is the case. Okay.

[Seth Mandel]

No, screw tape is the. Is the. No, no, no.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Screw tape. Screw tape writes the letters.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, screw tape.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, I'm sorry. So I got it backwards.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, so if Screwtape is Trump and Wormtongue is Hegseth, Right. What would be different here is Hegseth trying to show Trump that he's a good student of his methods. But Trump genuinely, I think, believes that unless he gives explicit orders that you're supposed to be warm tongue, he's the only one who's allowed to be Screwtape. Like, you can't just go on and he gets to do it. And if you're Sean Spicer or something, you have to say that the inaugural had the biggest crowds on Earth. But it's not clear that you can freelance the lying necessarily. Or is he going to be proud of Hegseth? It's like you went out there and you lied through your teeth. And, boy, I'm proud of you because, you know, the only people who really care about this are liberals who want to destroy me. I don't actually know the answer to that question. Trump said, Mike Waltz learned a lesson, and that's fine with me, that he learned the lesson. And I, you know, I don't know what to. What strikes me is that then there's the. Then there's the question of parsing what Walt said, which is. Walt said, I don't have a relationship with Jeffrey Goldberg, and I don't know how he got on the chat.

[Seth Mandel]

And Goldberg said he met him once, which makes sense because, you know, he's a congressman and stuff.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Do you know people in your life with whom you have an emailing and texting relationship, sometimes going back 10 years, whom you have never met? I do. Where I met once, I have.

[Seth Mandel]

I don't think. You think Waltz is leaking to Jeffrey Goldberg.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I think. What do I think? I think that Waltz and Goldberg have. That Goldberg was in Waltz's signal phone book and that he was trying to add somebody else to the Chat and.

[Seth Mandel]

No, no, I don't think that's what it is. And I have some reporting here that I can tell you what happened was his Goldberg's number was on the contact of the person who was supposed to be added to the chat. So the difference. There's a difference.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It's not like Goldberg, because I've used WhatsApp and WhatsApp uses the phone number system. Okay, so all right, so then, I mean, so basically what's going to have to happen is like the world of being a student in AI now, which is to say if you don't want AI to be writing all of the papers that students in high school and college are going to write, they're going to have to go into a room and write the papers in a room with no Internet connection by hand on. In a blue book. Like we're going back to the early university. No, I'm saying you right? I mean, you're not. And similarly, they're not going to be able. People aren't. If this is the level of, you know, inadvertent screw ups that can happen, maybe we're back to people having to have face to face meetings in rooms that, where things aren't recorded. And you know, like, I'm sorry, but I sort. We sort of assumed that was always heads like, oh, we're going into the situation Room, you know, to have the conversation. Well, now it's like, okay, so you know, Witkoff's in Russia and Vance is going to Europe and this one's. So why can't they just continue to have the conversation? Well, I don't know. That's an interesting question. Maybe they can't because it's too dangerous for like the lives of Americans fighting wars.

[Seth Mandel]

No, no, no, no. In a rare dissent here, John, they do account for this. There are skiffs and there's something called T skiffs, which are temporary skiffs.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I know.

[Seth Mandel]

And you're not supposed to talk about substantive stuff like this on a signal group chat. And I think it was a bunch of people who are still getting their sea legs in the administration, namely Hegseth, who just thought, you know, I've got a very busy schedule and I'm trying to, you know, get everybody sign off on what we're doing here. And he made a huge mistake by putting out that stuff on the signal where he should have just waited to be in a skiff. That's. I think that's.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I'm right. So you're saying. So practices are probably going to change as a Result of this era.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, but they don't have to invent a new system for only face system.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I'm.

[Seth Mandel]

No, they have to go to the old system and follow the old rules and do it that way. And I mean, whatever the interpreter. The idea, by the way, that this guidance allowed them to use signal for whatever they wanted is just not true. It was like, you can use signal to say, you know, I'm going to be in Berlin tomorrow, can you meet? Or something like that. You can't use signal to like, say, you know, these are the target packages for our strikes against the Houthis.

[Eli Lake]

There's another problem. There's one obstacle to the going back to the skiff, the world of the skiffs, which is Trump.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

I mean, we read all those stories about him, like, taking phone calls from foreign leaders at Mar? A Lago, like, oh, well, at dinner, you know, hang on, she's on the phone, you know, ig, you're on speaker, say hi to so. And, you know, like, he. He doesn't have a filter in his brain that stops him before he takes actions to ask if that action is safe from prying odds.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

But he'll pick up the phone and whatever.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Look, you're absolutely right, but the fact of the matter is that under, not only under our law, but under the literal creation of the system of American government, Trump is the only person in America who is beyond classification. Trump doesn't need a security clearance. He is the security clearance. He can tell anybody anything. He could go on television and say, tomorrow we're going to bomb the Houthis and here's our plan. And here, let me. It's really cool. Let me show you in 12 hours. And he will not have broken any law, he will not have violated any rule. The. The what? The power of security in the federal government rests in the President himself, personally, as the, as the executive branch.

[Eli Lake]

I know this is a legal perspective, but I'm saying from a, From a, you know, protect our secrets perspective.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

I mean, he could still do things that are dangerous.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

They're legal. He doesn't have good judgment.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

But I wrote about this yesterday, and I think that that is essentially the problem is that he has created a culture in his administration that is so loosey goosey and undisciplined and that everyone ends up being some version of that. And by the way, the way he's now handled the fallout is furthering it. I mean, saying it's so big that we learn a lesson, things happen, you know, and you move on. That's, this is, it's, it doesn't bode well.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So here is Eli wearing the T shirt of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan. I'm not going to now lionize Ronald Reagan. It's not what I'm going to do here. But I'm saying, like, Ronald Reagan wouldn't go into the Oval Office without a jacket and tie because he wanted to respect the outward dignity and symbols of the presidency. And this was, he would always wear a jacket and tie. Right. Ten years later, Bill Clinton is getting girls to, he's like manhandling girls under his desk in the same Oval Office. By which I mean similarly, as Obama says, I'm going to use my pen and phone and create unconstitutional executive orders to further my possible, you know, my, my policies. Trump is the logical conclusion of 17 different steps that took place before he ran for office that made it even conceivable that he could win the presidency in the first place. So the degradation of these standards of behavior and practice, including the way that he got elected, which is Hillary Clinton's handling of her emails, which arguably is the one thing that got him elected, why did Hillary Clinton behave the way she behaved with impunity about with US Secrets and taking them home and doing whatever it was that she did because her husband got away with Lewinsky Gate. I mean, there is a straight line from one to the other where consequences no longer attach to, as Eli was, don't attach to the big people. And then they start behaving like consequences don't attach to the big people. And then there's Trump who, like, takes it to another level. But Trump is the result of a process. And now the Trump people in term two who aren't people who were in government, a lot of them weren't in government or in the executive branch ever before, whereas in Trump, one, most of the people had been in government before.

[Seth Mandel]

And yeah, okay, I, I agree with you talking about defining deviancy down.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

But just to throw a little bit of a monkey wrench in, there would be some people who would say, I don't know, 40 years ago, how can Americans elect Ronald Reagan? When we were having a conversation not so long ago that I remember that we would never support, you know, Governor Rockefeller because he had a divorce. So it's like, you know, there was, there was an argument at the time that Reagan represented in some ways decline, even though I don't agree with that. But my point is that, like, this has been going on even longer than that in some ways.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Well, you can Go with Kennedy, Right. So there's a cover up of the fact that John F. Kennedy is sleeping with 19 year old interns, right?

[Seth Mandel]

Well, but that's different because the public didn't know. But I'm saying that when the public.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Came to know, right, in the 70s when stuff started coming out about Kennedys misbehavior in the White House because there was still the mythology machine around Kennedy, the idea that he had, he had caused a terrible breach in conduct that should be, you know, like that, that stuff should be caulked and sealed. Right. It was more like that, what the hell, you know, do whatever you want or something like that. Like, yeah, you couldn't have Clinton in the White House having sex if you hadn't had Kennedy in the White house having sex 30 years earlier. Like, I agree, all of this has its own connections. But then we get to 2025 and all these people who are working waltz is a congressman. Hegseth was a, whatever the hell Hegseth was. You know, Vance was, has never been the executive branch except that he was a, you know, he was a Marine, Ratcliffe was. But I mean a lot of people didn't have any, aren't experienced. And so when you if the first term everybody was following protocols they had learned from working in the executive branch before. Trump didn't abide by them, but they did. And they were horrified, right? Kelly, John Kelly and McMaster and Bolton and others were horrified by the way Trump breached all of these protocols. But you know, and now we have people who simply don't have the experience to know. I'll give you an example. Eli's had this experience. I'm sure you've had this experience 10 times. So when I was writing my book Bush country, which I wrote in 2003 about the, for the second Bush administration and I was going around the White House interviewing people and I would go in to see people and particularly in the sort of like national, in places where people had secure documents on their desks or something like that. So at one point I went to see Scooter Libby, who was, you know, Dick Cheney's chief of staff and an old friend of mine, somebody I had played softball with in the 1980s. And at some point Scooter had to step out of the office to see someone or something like that. And he brought in his assistant or secretary to stand, right, to make sure you wouldn't buy his desk to watch me. He was doing me a favor because it was like, I don't, I have to step out but you can still stay. You can sit, you can still sit here. But it's like there were such developed, almost, you know, like theatrical ways in which secrets were protected. Traditions, methods of all this. Informal, informal over time that, you know, they were without. And this happened four or five different times with four or five different people. I, I assumed that was totally logical.

[Seth Mandel]

Arrest.

[Jon Podhoretz]

What if you've never, what if you're Pete Hegseth and you've never yourself, you've, like, never even seen a classified document before now your secretary of defense, you know, you never even went through a security clearance before.

[Seth Mandel]

Okay, but let me, let me, let me push back the argument that you could have made a kind of a version of this argument in 1980 or 1976 when Reagan is running. He's an actor. We never had somebody who had, like, no experience like that before. And then he was a governor, but he's really just an actor. He had a divorce. He tells stories that are probably not true. You know, there, there were all kinds of kind of, of that era, versions of this. And yet, I mean, none of us would say that. I mean, it was a wonderful thing for America that Reagan was elected in 1980, and this, it shook things up. You could argue.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

Now, I'm not necessarily arguing this for Trump, but I'm saying that the argument for Trump is. Yeah, you know, all these, you know, yes, we've come a long way from the kind of formal culture of Washington and, you know, you spill a little bit of beer along the way, but we need to be, we need to shake up the rot had gone too deep.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. I am not arguing against. I'm literally just trying to describe what I think happened. I don't. That trying to understand why this happened is an, is not only an argument in experience. As I say, as Abe said, like we dodged a bullet because something worse didn't happen, particularly if it's a phone number on signal. Maybe what if the phone number had been, you know, Muhammad Sinwars? I mean, you know.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So, you know, we, we don't know how, but, but the question is, how did it happen? And the answer is, if you want all of this novelty and this different kind of administration with all kinds of. There are going to be negative consequences to it. And then you have the kind of apologists saying there are no negative consequences. Well, how dare, how dare you even suggest it?

[Abe Greenwald]

Right. I mean, something about this administration, it sort of cuts both ways in the sense that, well, Trump comes from the business world and there is and Musk is involved. And Musk is obviously, among other things, a titan of business and industry. And there has, in the private sector, there is the formalities of organizational practice. There are a lot of them that have encroached, that have become really garbage. I mean, I've worked at places where you've had unnecessary meetings and minute keeping and, you know, this whole sort of culture of management that gets in the way of actually doing things.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

And I'm certain from Trump's perspective and someone like Musk's perspective, it's like, we don't need that. We're, you know, and the way Doge operates, clearly they don't, they don't observe that. They sleep there. They, you know, do whatever. They're just about getting things done fast and dirty. Don't, don't worry about the, the, the, all the niceties. Problem is there are certain areas, medicine for one, where you have to, where you have to observe a rigorous checklist and do things by the book. If you're a, if you're a airplane pilot, you cannot go by rote, you can't go by, you can't go by memory, you have to go by a checklist.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Abe Greenwald]

And if you are in the federal government at the highest levels, you also have to observe this. So they're sort of coming, There are these ideas coming up against each other here, one of which is like, slash, all this ridiculous conduct that gets in the way of actually of productivity. And that's coming up against. No, no, we have to maintain serious standards here because we're dealing with the most important things in the world.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Look, I think that's a brilliant observation. That sort of. The cult of McKinsey, the managerial McKinsey ization of government and everything in America has been a net negative. It exists for reasons that are designed to protect and shield senior managers from the consequences of their own decisions by creating false negotiations narratives, in my view, and creating paper trails that keep them from seeming to have their fingerprints on things like mass layoffs or whatever. And that's a real thing. And you do have these two businessmen in Trump and Musk. Trump owning a privately held company. So he does not have, except for his tax, the thing that theoretically got him in trouble with the New York State Attorney General. Though of course it was. That case was nonsense. But aside from filing accurate tax returns, it's nobody's business what goes on inside the Trump administration. Musk is different. SpaceX is a publicly traded company, so he does have compliance rules and all of that. But clearly he does not like to be constrained. A lot of senior corporate managers, like, want to be like, this is how they got where they got. They used the system, the managerial system to get themselves to the top of the food chain, and they use it to keep themselves in power to beat other people down. And that. That's their superpower in a weird way. And obviously, none of that has any, has any benefit in an administration where you have this completely antinomian guy at the top who doesn't like rules and doesn't respect rules and all of that. But where the. Trump, where Trump would, where this would fit in with Trump is he has to build a building from scratch. So, you know what has to happen? He has to hire somebody who is going to make sure that the steel is strong enough to hold up the 22nd floor and that all of the corners are level and that, you know, he's not going to build the building In Pyongyang that's 105 stories that no one can go into because if you stepped into it, the entire building would fall down. So there is this, you know, incredible skyscraper built by Kim Jong Un that no one can live in or even enter because it's structurally and architecturally unsound. So even Trump has to bow to reality when he's building a building and hire professional people who will follow rigorous rules of the most exacting kinds to make sure that what is completed is whole and good and true and, and, and, and safe and won't get him into trouble on the other end. And that's actually what we're talking about here. The secrets, like I. Who cares? When they cl. When they say, oh, no, you can't see this rule, this conversation we had at the CDC about how to mask, like, that's where we're keeping that privileged. But when you're sending American Pilot, maybe we weren't even saying, you know, when you're sending people into death, potential death, you protect them with secrecy.

[Seth Mandel]

The one difference, you're absolutely right, and in the context of this is these are being shared before the attack. It's atrocious at this point, though, the vat, that their value is diminished because the attack already happened. It's not like a list of. Well, that's why, that's.

[Jon Podhoretz]

But that's why Jeff Goldberg didn't do anything wrong. Jeff Goldberg. And that's why it, it sickens me. I mean, as somebody who's been a critic of the media for my entire career in the media, and as has been a critic of Jeffrey Goldberg from his from the moment that he pusillanimously fired Kevin Williamson so that his. So that his woke staff would eat Kevin first and let him survive. He did not interfere in any way, shape, or form with the thing that was exposed to him, which was his moral obligation. I don't even mean it was his professional obligation or it was his obligation.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Because now there's this claim, like, well, if he really were moral, he would have said, oh, you included me on this chat. You should exclude me because I'm not. I shouldn't be allowed to see this. Which is like, come on. Ridiculous. If you're on a beach. I've been on a beach. And, like, end up overhearing a whole conversation with a famous painter and talking about his affairs with his girlfriends. Like, I wasn't gonna say, oh, you know what? I really shouldn't hear this.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Because I'll move away on my towel so that I can't. I was like, it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

[Eli Lake]

We always. We always expect journalists to walk away from a story, right?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, walk away from a story or. Like, it's not even the. It's like, just like, it just happened that he's sitting there on his email, and suddenly these emails come pouring over, like, I'm sorry. You know, also, he thought it was.

[Seth Mandel]

Too good to be true at first. He was like, are you serious?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. Is this a game someone running? Is someone running a disinformation operation to discredit me or something? Or, you know, trying to get me in trouble? Yeah. Which is. So he thought things through and let it all play out. And then it was only when he heard that the. The first strike had succeeded that he knew that everything that he had seen was true. That's was all. It was all trending in that direction. But not until they made it clear that, you know, with the missile hitting Yemen, that it was real, you know, so. So two days of defense of Jeffrey Goldberg are making me, you know, physically ill. So is there any. Oh, all right. Eli.

[Seth Mandel]

Yes.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Reported from the Middle East. Been all over the place. And Seth, of course, an expert on this. Right. Sort of. How seriously are we to take this seeming revolt in northern Gaza against Hamas rule? These demonstrations in Gaza yesterday with people shouting that Hamas needs to leave and they need peace and all of that.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, the fact that it happened is extraordinary, given the climate of fear that is in Gaza. I think in some ways it might suggest that Hamas is losing more of its grip than maybe we thought. It's not the first time. By the way, there have been videos from Gaza where we've seen individuals kind of cursing at Hamas officials in food trucks because they're not getting any of the aid. I think it's quite hopeful. And by the way, it cuts against some of the essentialist views of Gaza that we sometimes read. It's true that you can find polling, but how reliable is polling in a territory that's controlled by people that will kill you if they think you look at them the wrong way? I mean, listen, I don't want to get too neocon optimistic. I don't want to give you my whole Sharansky spiel, but I do think that there is. It's obvious that, like, there are probably many more Palestinians who lack the kind of carriage of the hundred of the hundreds of demonstrators that we've seen that they have to feel the same way. This was such a disaster. If you're living in Gaza. I mean, there were many crimes that were committed on October 7, first and foremost against the Jewish people, obviously, and the Jews that they murdered and raped and tortured but. And abducted. But there was also a kind of a crime if you're a Palestinian and you'd like a. Maybe a better life. To start such a reckless war in such a brutal and barbaric way. There had to have been lots of people. And if you remember the original coverage in the Arab world, this faded eventually once the Israeli counterattack started. But the original coverage was. Why didn't you consult anybody when you did this? Why did you just go ahead and launch us into this turmoil and this chaos for. No. You know, without telling anyone about it. What's. What's. There was a. There was. And so that's really the way to get beyond this situation is that if you have something that emerges that kind of correctly puts the blame on Hamas in this situation instead of defending it.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Also, Hamas is not exactly in a position to come out of their hidey holes.

[Seth Mandel]

No.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And mow down the demonstrators because if they come out of their hidey holes, Israel can. Can shoot them from the air.

[Eli Lake]

The demonstrators are currently under the protection of the id.

[Seth Mandel]

Yes.

[Eli Lake]

I mean, that's the truth.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Seth Mandel]

Although there has been some reprisals that we've seen. Right. There will.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Individual reprisals.

[Eli Lake]

But you know, as far as the. It's not. The IDF obviously did not plan protest. But as far as the IDF is concerned, you know, the timing couldn't be better. But a big change happened in January when Israel re. When Israel reopened north south travel. Right. And allowed Gazans, as part of the ceasefire, to start returning north. There was a moment where they got back to their towns in the north and nothing was there. And they were shocked because they live under a totalitarian government and have nothing but problems. Propaganda to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And they were being told that the Zionists are up against the wall. And look what we've done and we've shaken this and, you know, everybody's in trouble. You know, they were fed a picture of, if not victory, of, you know, something halfway to victory. And they did not know that the extent of the structural damage in the north, you know, and in these residential and these. The extent of the structural damage was because Hamas goes into these houses, builds an entrance into tunnels from children's bedrooms. We saw this. Hides, you know, hides it behind a toy chest. I mean, these are sick people. Hamas and fires from these houses. And only felt more free to do so when the houses were empty. And so people didn't realize and they came back and they understand intuitively, I think, that Israel didn't move everybody out of northern Gaza to smash a bunch of buildings and then go chase Hamas in the south. Like, if you're a student at Columbia, you believe stupid things like that, like that Israel just lives to bomb houses for no reason. But if you live in Gaza, you understand that there's more going on here. If you live in Gaza, you know, and we've, you know, we've seen the articles from people who have lived there who have said, here's what happened. When my family built a new house at midnight, Hamas people started coming with trucks, and they were. And they put up fake walls and they put up screens and tarp, and they started drilling. And the new house that I was building during the day, Hamas was doing construction on overnight. I mean, people have reported that this has literally happened to them. So Gazans aren't stupid. They understand that Hamas operates from within their homes. And whether or not they supported it before, when they came back and saw, you know, it's the fafo sort of, you know, this was the finding out part. Everything. Whether or not they supported before Hamas operating from their houses, we don't know. But when they got back, they saw that these are the consequences of Hamas, the way of Hamas's way of war. And that really changed. That January moment was a shift. And I'll say one other thing, which is Amit Segal said this in his newsletter this morning. He mentioned the fact that we're seeing a kind of mirror image of when there are protests in Israel against the government and against the war. You're starting to understand the hopefulness that, that sparks in the other side. Now, this is complicated because they're not saying if you protest against your government, you're a traitor. Right. I mean, that's what Hamas is saying. But his point is that you begin to understand why when certain protests happen in Israel, people in Gaza, Hamas and people in Qatar and Iran and Turkey get excited and Lebanon get excited.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

That there's internal divisions that might be exploitable. And there's a weird mirror image situation here where they're getting a look at what you feel, what, how you react when you see the other side and you go, yeah, yeah, go, go, get out, you know, in the streets against Hamas. And so I think there's a lot of sort of realizations happening both, both sides of that border.

[Abe Greenwald]

I'll, I'll say this. If this is happening because it's only a few hundred, but a few hundred people, but if, if this really is happening because Hamas is in worse shape than we had realized and are less able to punish those who oppose them, and if there are more people who would oppose Hamas if they felt comfortable and safe doing so, then we should start seeing more of this as the war goes on. If that happens, then I think then we're seeing something interesting. I mean, you know, if this becomes something, you know, I don't even want to say like, like to, to the level of like what you see in Iran or something, but that's my, that's.

[Jon Podhoretz]

My concern is that you can look at this and you could say, well, look at what's going on in Iran. And Iran is perfectly capable, has had these demonstrations on and off now for 25 years, and it just sort of crushes them or lets them go for a while and then burns them out, or it chokes off any media attention so no one can see if they're happening. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people, not just a few hundred. I mean, the main difference question is, I think whether we weren't taking out.

[Eli Lake]

The IRGC high command.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

And so the question is, can they continue to suppress the way they've been able to suppress in the past?

[Jon Podhoretz]

So I don't think myself politically that it represents a change in the fortunes of Hamas with the Palestinian people in Gaza. The question is, is this a real sign that Hamas is finished? Not, not that they're willing to rise, but that they're willing to rise up because they feel like Hamas is finished, that there are Things that they are hearing and seeing and feeling and feeling the difference in the pressure, the internal pressure, as the entire Hamas leadership is now once again being targeted one by one. And which means that Israeli operational intelligence is very real inside Gaza in a way that it wasn't for 10 years. I mean, when they say, we killed this one, we killed that one, we killed this one, we killed that one, that means someone is telling them where these people are, and they're sending a drone or a missile right at their house or at their car and blowing them up. So they now have Gaza penetrated again in a way that they so didn't. That they didn't even know about the tunnel system. And that this is something that has conveyed itself to some people in Gaza who are like, all right, the jig is up. Like, this is it. They're going down. We can come out and start saying, get the. Get the hell out of here and see if we can contribute to make this happen a little faster. So I don't think there's going to be like a, you know, citizens revolt and that they're going to take Mohammed Sinwar and like the Ceausescus and turn them upside down and pee on him. I do think that, you know, Israel there. This is a suggestion that this new Israeli offensive is having real world consequences that are changing the political situation inside the Palestinian polity in some fashion or other. And we'll just have to see how that goes.

[Seth Mandel]

There's also an opening here on campus, in a way, in America and the west, which is that, you know, listen, these people in some ways are the grandchildren intellectually of Edward Said, and his big theory was that Westerners will kind of falsely represented Arab populations or Palestinians in order to dominate them for their own agenda. Well, here you have Palestinians saying, Hamas is the villain. They got us into this war. Screw them, end Hamas. And you have the people who claim to be their advocates acting like what Said would call Orientalists. And that is what they're doing because they are these. Basically, they're little props in a play for, you know, Nurdine Kiswani and Kuad and all these people at Colombia. Then it's not a reality, because the reality is that there are Palestinians are like, this is. You've brought in a nakba on our heads here.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Okay, can we talk quickly? And then we need to stop. But we. Since you brought up Kuad and Colombia.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So your. Your estimable publication, Free Press, and. And it's one of its star reporters, Maya Sulkin and others.

[Seth Mandel]

She's Like a comet now.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. Anyway, dealing things about what's going on in Colombia and inside the councils of Colombia. So Colombia, of course, capitulated to the Trump administration, gave in, and to the authoritarians and as you know, now, their catamites of the emperor or whatever. And we revealed that there was some kind of meeting, private meeting, that Katrina Armstrong, the interim president, had, where she said, don't worry, we're not going to enforce any of the things we agreed to. We're not going to enforce. So this is now public that they. She said 24 hours after the agreement, that they're not going to abide by the agreement. And then we've seen now, Seth has written about this, and we have seen now on the Columbia campus that Columbia is not enforcing the agreement, that there are masked people wandering around campus having protests. And the agreement said no masks, or if you have a mask, you have to say who you are, take off your mask. And Columbia Security or whatever aren't, aren't doing that. And if you want to talk about fafo, Katrina Armstrong should not be, should not be fafing. The Trump administration. It loves this fight.

[Seth Mandel]

Oh, yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

It thinks this is an 8020 issue in the United States. And, you know, if she really wants to have Trump come out and announce that they violated the ceasefire and that there'll be no money for Colombia for another 20 years, Zygos into her.

[Seth Mandel]

Maybe Steve Witkoff can go to Doha and work out a deal with Colombia.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. And then, of course, this detail that came out about Nadeem Keswani and Kuad, which is the group that Mahmoud Khalil manages, and this, like, very pregnant detail that the group was reactivated after being dormant on social media.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Just before the October 7th attack started.

[Eli Lake]

Yeah, minutes.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Minutes before.

[Eli Lake]

This was SJ.

[Jon Podhoretz]

So the signal said, we're back, we're back. Yeah, we're back. And then, and then the hang gliders.

[Eli Lake]

And also, you know, and I, and I, and I talked about this a bit yesterday on the, on the blog. I wrote about this, you know, some of the revelations in this lawsuit that Nirdine Keswani herself had been using toolkits and talking points that had been circulating. And some of these other groups, too, they had been using talking points that had been circulating among the IRGC and had not been released publicly. And then when they released their toolkits, here's what to do on May 11, the shutdown for Palestine or whatever. And then after that, the IRGC talking points and the conversations that they were having were leaked. And it Turned out that some of these groups were very like. It's like Jeffrey Goldberg in the Signal chat. Somebody in the IRGC added Nurdine Kaswani to the Signal Chat, except purposefully.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

He meant to add her so that they could be prepared, you know, to have this stuff. She was using images that was like.

[Jon Podhoretz]

And by the way, so just, just to make clear. And Eli, who has covered this for 20 years, knows way better than I. This is the connecting. This is the connecting thread that circumstantial evidence never provides you.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

If they can prove.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Jon Podhoretz]

That KUAD was reactivated.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, they would have been student result from abroad, which became co. Op.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, right, right. They can prove that they were activated from abroad.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

They're not all going to be deported.

[Seth Mandel]

No.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Americans are going to go to jail in the United States.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

These are organizations that have been declared by the federal government, official sponsors of terrorism. And your cooperation or furtherance of their behavior is a crime.

[Seth Mandel]

Yes.

[Jon Podhoretz]

In the United States.

[Seth Mandel]

And the group that I'm interested in watching is something that. It hasn't gotten as much attention. It's called the People's Forum. They are outside. They show up on Columbia and they show up at NYU and they show up and it's at CCNY and so forth. But they. On was October 8th. Literally on October 8th, they had a demonstration. It was, you know, it wasn't a lot of people, but they had everything and they were defending it and celebrating it as an act of resistance. And you know, even the loathsome Max Blumenthal there was, there was, there were, you could tell in certain people, but they had everything kind of set to go. People were still trying to figure out what happened. And they were like, this is a glorious operation. Look at, look, you know, you know, they pointed to some, a photo of a Israeli tank or a plane or something that had been, you know, demolished or something that does suggest a heads up.

[Eli Lake]

And as Eli, Eli, as you wrote.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah.

[Eli Lake]

Months ago or a year ago, the, the Conference for Palestine.

[Seth Mandel]

Yeah, that's right.

[Eli Lake]

In Detroit that Rashida Tlaib showed up at as a surprise speaker on the last day or the second to last day, whatever it was. You know, and we've both written about this a lot about that. There were, you know, actual celebrations of terrorists there. There were people who, from the PFLP who complained that they were. They had, they had to, they had to be videoed in to the conference because they couldn't get a visa because they are terrorists, because they are members of the front for the Liberation of Palestine, the People's Forum. And I think, you know, you. This was where I think I saw this first in your article. The People's Forum hosted the website.

[Seth Mandel]

Right.

[Eli Lake]

For that conference. So the People's Forum has been involved with this in a way. And the People's Forum, we should also say is, I mean, essentially we're talking about a Beijing propaganda front.

[Seth Mandel]

Well, their main funder, Neville Singh, and he, he lives in Beijing and there's some connection there. Also there's a group called Breakthrough News, which is very big on YouTube now that covers all these things. They're totally connected to the People's Forum. And so here.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah, the central point here is that everybody in the United States has, has rights of free speech. And so you're allowed to celebrate terrorism. Yeah, you are fully permitted to celebrate terrorism. You are not allowed to work for a terrorist organization or, or act in ways that consciously and deliberately with a connection to that organization further that organization's and goals.

[Seth Mandel]

You're certainly not allowed to get money from an organization like that and in the courts give money to the organization like that. But the question is like, what is material support in that? Yeah.

[Jon Podhoretz]

You know, and there are precedents. The shutdown of something called the Holy Land foundation in Richardson, Texas, which was revealed to be a, you know, an arm of. I can't remember who they were the arm of.

[Seth Mandel]

It was a Muslim Brotherhood front. Muslim Brotherhood directly working with Hamas.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Yeah. The deportation of Samuel Aryan, the, the professor at Florida International University who is basically a, A member of the.

[Seth Mandel]

Whose son in law, by the way, is a tenured professor at Georgetown. FYI.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right. And whose wife was at the, was at the demonstrations.

[Eli Lake]

And the whole groups that it was part of, by the way, they, the core. Each time they shut them down, the core just moved on to another one. So the organizations we're dealing with today, descendants of those that are just talking about organizations sanctioned by the US Government that have just been.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Basically, what is so important about this is we're finding out about this not because the FBI or the, or, you know, is coming out and announcing indictments of criminal indictments of these places. Right. That's not what's happening. What's happening is private lawsuits filed on behalf of hostages, hostage survivors and students at Columbia whose rights have been trampled by these groups are surfacing details in these civil suits. Why are they surfacing details in these civil suits? Well, okay, so this is the secondary story. That is the story of the next five years. There are U.S. attorneys in every major city in The United States. There was an FBI all over America. There was, you know, there are police departments that have counterterrorism wings and units and all of that stuff taking place outside of red states. Somebody was deliberately looking the other way. If some lawsuit can surface. The. It was three minutes before the attack that Koofi came back online, not Kufi. I mean, Kuad came back online. So could the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. Why didn't the U.S. attorney. Because it was the Biden administration and they didn't want. They did not want to pursue this. And that's a secondary. That is the narrative that is going to go along with this. If we keep going along this road. And the Justice Department just set up this task force to go after legally to go after the people responsible for October 7th on the grounds that they harmed Americans to find their sources. Met funding, all of that. And this is only the beginning, right?

[Seth Mandel]

My one piece of. I don't.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Here we go.

[Seth Mandel]

Here we go.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I'm not doing personal squishy. Okay, go ahead.

[Seth Mandel]

It's not a squishy thing. My only thing is this. We talked about this earlier. The narrative now is that the planning for October 7th was so airtight that not even like no one knew about it. Now, maybe that will find out. Actually, the Iranians knew about it and so did Hezbollah. And there is some evidence that they talked about a kind of plan, but they didn't know the details of the dates and everything like that. So that's my only. My only thing is that there was. We were led to believe that there was increasing incredible operational calm security before this was launched. So it's interesting that it looks like there's a little piece of evidence or a clue that would suggest. No, actually there were networks in the United States that were given a heads up about it as well. That's not just. I'm not saying. I'm not doubting it. I'm just saying we maybe need some more information here because maybe more.

[Jon Podhoretz]

No, obviously I said this is. We're going down.

[Seth Mandel]

We're just.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Down what? Starting down.

[Seth Mandel]

Yes.

[Jon Podhoretz]

The yellow brick road.

[Seth Mandel]

Yes.

[Jon Podhoretz]

I mean, this is the very beginning of the yellow brick road. But the reason that we're starting down it now at the end of March in 2025, was a deliberate effort not to put your foot on the yellow brick road on from October 10 onward and post.

[Eli Lake]

Now, going forward in the future, there may be other ways to learn things that there weren't before, which is that this particular lawsuit that we're talking about. One of the plaintiffs is a former hostage, Right. And the hostage says that a his Hamas captor told him they were providing material support to these groups on campus. Money and other things. Now, we don't know that he's telling the truth about what the Hamas guy said. We don't know if what the, if the Hamas guy, if he said that. We don't know if the mosque was. But the point is that as the war has gone on, we're also learning more about the organizations in America. We're not just learning more about, about what it's like under the surface in Gaza. Also, you know, we're getting a peek under the hood of the whole thing.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Right.

[Seth Mandel]

That's extraordinary.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Eli Lake, Everybody should.

[Seth Mandel]

Can I do a quick plug?

[Jon Podhoretz]

Very quick. Because we're like, so over time.

[Seth Mandel]

I know. Okay. Breaking History is my podcast. If you're not subscribing, please subscribe. Leave. Five stars and a nice review. The Karen episode is great. It's the Botter Meinhof gang, the most notorious terrorist in West German history. And a comparison with Luigi Mancioni. And next episode next week will be about this topic, which is looking at the influence of the intellectual Edward Said on the Tentifada uprising that we saw start in 2023.

[Jon Podhoretz]

Eli Lake's breaking History. Eli Lake, thank you so much for joining us as usual. And for Abe and Seth, I'm John Pod Horitz. Keep the candle bur.