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- [00:01]
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- [00:41]
John Podhoretz
1, 2, 3 will that be cash or credit?
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Christine Rosen
Credit.
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Seth Mandel
4. Galaxy S25 Ultra the AI companion that.
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John Podhoretz
Does the heavy lifting so you can.
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Seth Mandel
Do you get yours@samsung.com compatible with select apps. Requires Google Gemini account.
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Abe Greenwald
Results may vary based on input.
- [00:58]
Seth Mandel
Check responses for accuracy.
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John Podhoretz
Hope for the best, expect the worst Some preach and pain Some die of thirst the way of knowing which way.
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Seth Mandel
It'S going Hope for the best Expect.
- [01:21]
John Podhoretz
The worst Hope for the best welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, March 25, 2025. I'm John Pothoric, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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Abe Greenwald
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi Seth.
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Seth Mandel
Hi John.
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John Podhoretz
And social commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
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Unnamed Panelist
Hi John.
- [01:48]
John Podhoretz
Big story of the day, the week, probably the administration so far, the big leak, the biggest breaking story is the inadvertent addition of Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to the signal text chat of the high powered group planning or involved with the Trump administration strike on Houthi targets in Yemen and what the potential fallout of it is. And I think there are two or three different strands to pull on. One is the safety security strand about how our deepest secrets are being handled by the people who are responsible in part for disciplining others in their charge who mishandled, misuse or otherwise are reckless with class, with the most highly classified information. The second strand is the policy debate, or the policy differences that the revelations in Jeffrey Goldberg's article in the Atlantic of the discussions in the chat made clear and what we should take from them. And then the third is the political fallout from the revelation itself. So anybody want to start with the security question?
- [03:25]
Unnamed Panelist
Well, actually, can I can I rephrase it as a competence question? Because setting aside what was clearly a securities breach, it suggests a much deeper problem. Because first of all, if you have a federally issued phone, which these Guys all should have. You're not allowed to even have signal that phone because it's considered compromised. We know that a lot of these messages were coming from people then from their personal phones, some of whom were in Moscow potentially at the time. And it suggests that, you know, they have absolutely no recognition or respect for the fact that enemy countries would. Will be listening in on their conversations, hoping to understand what the plans of the United States are. So, yes, a security breach, but also just basic competence. And I've seen in the immediate aftermath this attempt to suggest, oh, this was this very sophisticated game of 90 chess where they were trying to capture the. They were feeding this story to Jeffrey Goldberg to see what would happen. That's ridiculous. Ridiculous. They are simply incompetent. And someone's head's got a role for this. This is a, this is a gop, and particularly a MAGA wing of the GOP that has spent years calling on anyone in the Democratic Party to punish people who do similar, if not far less alarming security breaches than this, beginning with Hillary Clinton's email, private email server, and moving on. And I don't think that it's. That we have to see some consistency in the messaging here. So if somebody doesn't isn't held accountable for this, it's not going to be enough, I think, to say, well, you know, Biden didn't get rid of these people who did incompetent things, so we don't have to either. That's not what the American people want to hear. This is a very easy story for an average American to understand. These guys did something incompetent. Somebody needs to be held accountable. So we'll see if Trump does hold someone accountable.
- [05:10]
John Podhoretz
Okay, let's do a quick, let's do a quick vote of the panel. Yeah, four of us. So the vote is how many people on this panel think that anybody's head.
- [05:19]
Unnamed Panelist
Is going to roll Tragically, I think.
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John Podhoretz
I think the number is zero. I think we're at zero percent.
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Unnamed Panelist
Terrible. That's a terrible thing.
- [05:27]
John Podhoretz
Okay, but I'm just saying you said someone head has got a role. And the problem is that today a couple of people on that text chain are actually testifying before Congress. I do not believe that Defense Secretary Hegseth is one of them. Defense Secretary Hegseth yesterday lied openly and unashamedly on the deck of the, I think the USS Arizona, maybe he was in Pearl harbor and said, Jeffrey Goldberg's a liar and the Atlantic is a failing publication. I didn't do anything. And all of that hours after the National Security Council had effectively acknowledged publicly that the information that Goldberg had published was accurate and that it's clearly accurate. If you read the article, he didn't make any of it up. He showed screenshots and in fact, I'm not a fan of Jeffrey Goldberg's, but he behaved very responsibly with this information. There's a bunch of information that he did not put out in the article, including the fact that they had name. They. They knew who they were going after, apparently that there were names of target phys. Actual explicit targets among the Houthi leadership that they were going after who were named in the. And he. And. And he f. And he refuses to name one of the people in the chat because he is an active intelligence officer. So Goldberg was measured. He did not reveal any of this until after the mission was over. He did not reveal any secrets, state secrets, and he protected the identity of a. Of an intelligence officer. So his, his conduct here as a journalist is exemplary, as far as I can tell. And believe me, those are not words that I like to speak about Jeffrey Goldberg, whom I think has behaved disgracefully in many aspects of his career. But I. There's nothing else to say about that. But. So, okay, no one. So we don't think any heads are going to roll, but at some point, PDX is going to have to go before Congress and say, did you attach the war plans to the signal email text that you were sending? And he'll have to say yes or no.
- [07:43]
Unnamed Panelist
And. But this is why they use signal, because you can set signal, like WhatsApp and other of these encrypted messaging services to have your messages disappear after a certain period of time. That's also a potential violation of some of the records acts that we have that require officials at certain levels of government to retain records so that, that, you know, investigations can happen, but also for the historical record. So he might actually, by the time he testifies, be able to say, oh, no, and there'll be no proof. That's.
- [08:06]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, they got two weeks. You got to call them within two weeks. Because apparently, according to the article, they set it to delete self. This message will self destruct after two minutes.
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John Podhoretz
No, because he would then have to make the claim that Goldberg fabricated the text. In other words, we. They're there. So it doesn't matter whether he deletes.
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Unnamed Panelist
Goldberg kept all of the evidence.
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John Podhoretz
Goldberg has the evidence.
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Seth Mandel
Well, National Security Council said, yeah, that's. That's accurate to me.
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John Podhoretz
Yeah.
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Seth Mandel
So that's not Worth as good as we need.
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John Podhoretz
Right? So it's really not worth debating whether or not everything in there was true. It's obviously everything in there is true and factual, and that there's more there. That Goldberg did not reveal that in and of itself is a demonstration that what he had was accurate.
- [08:53]
Abe Greenwald
Can I just say, I mean, when I. When I. This story first broke, isn't it so fitting? I mean, can't you just see these guys, like, butt dialing in Jeff Goldberg on foreign policy and like, you know, out on this, on this platform that they're not supposed to be on? I mean, this is the group of outsiders and mavericks and first timers and.
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John Podhoretz
Like, you know, this is not first timer at a maverick, but Waltz is not. Right.
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Unnamed Panelist
It's the attitude, though, that I think Abe is absolutely correct. It was hubris through and through. And I read the story after I had recently read a piece that Kevin Roberts of the Heritage foundation just wrote talking about how we're in the midst of the second American Revolution. There is so much hubris. And I really would urge these guys to go back and read some mythology, because this is not going to end well for you with this attitude, this. This absolute sense of entitlement to not have to follow the rules because the rules are for suckers and losers. I don't understand the attitude, okay?
- [09:59]
Seth Mandel
I mean, I can see the attitude thing because I pictured, you know, Rob Long used to write those columns in National Review where he would imagine text chains and group conversations, right, of, of. Of. Of celebrities or of, you know, high level politicians or whatever. And this is what that. If you asked Rob Long to write one of his classic columns, but imagine that it was Hegseth and JD Vance and all these guys, you know, texting about, bombing Yemen. This is the sort of column that you would get, right? I think that Abe, that's kind of to your point, which is like this is. There was something truly characteristic about the way everything sounded, about what exactly happened. And it's the sort of thing that you would imagine a realistic spoof of, you know, using as its subject.
- [10:57]
John Podhoretz
How about this as a. As a larger sociological point, which is that all we've talked about for the last three or four years, sociologically, is the problem of the young people in America, adolescents in particular, addicted to their phones, living their life through their phones, doing everything through their phones, getting depressed by their phones. What is this? Like, they can't actually not use their phones. Like, they can't be like, you can't do this over the phone. You got to go into a skiff, a secure, a self contained intelligence facility, in order to have conversations about. About what, what on earth is going on when you're about to launch a major military strike on a country thousands of miles from the American shore. So 20 years ago, every single word spoken in that text chain would have been, people would have had to go find a skiff, get together at a certain specific time and have that conversation so that it could not be taped, so that it could not be overheard, so that there was no way to penetrate it by foreign intelligence agencies. And now we're in the age in which people cannot live without their iPhones. And starting with Trump, though, right?
- [12:16]
Abe Greenwald
I mean, this is the thing you have, you have the president who sort of quasi announces policy at night on Truth Social, you know, so there is a looseness that starts with him here about the proper way to do these things.
- [12:37]
Seth Mandel
Yeah. And also, by the way, we should say that abroad, when a government official is traveling abroad and he needs to take a phone call from Washington about something important like this, they're in certain countries, they create a skiff. Right. I mean, we've all seen the pictures of, like, Obama taking a phone call about some drone attack or whatever, and it, you know, it looks like a movie set because they've had to pull, you know, all sorts of tarp around. And you know what, like the cone.
- [13:09]
John Podhoretz
Of silence from Get Smart, like, they end up in a. Yeah, they build.
- [13:12]
Seth Mandel
They actually build a skiff wherever they go, even if they're abroad. So, you know, it's easier, it's possible to do, it's possible to travel and have these conversations safely, is what I'm saying. And they just plain didn't do it.
- [13:26]
Unnamed Panelist
But is this part of Trump's sort of cynical approach to international affairs where everyone's just cutting and making deals? The assumption is everybody's spying on each other, so no one's, no one's particularly bad or good in these scenarios. And so we're just going to assume they're all listening in on us. But since I'm going to cut a deal with Russia, because, you know, Putin's not that bad a guy, according to Trump's envoy, and because, you know, China, whatever, we'll work some, we're working to deal with them. I mean, is this the way. I'm not an international businessman, so I don't know. But this, this idea that, again, the rules of government exist for a reason, and we're being slightly glib, but I think because it's as you say, it reads like parody, this story, but this could seriously compromise the safety of Americans at home and abroad. What they did, and it's unlikely to have been the only time they did it. And we're only a few months into this administration, and that does scare me.
- [14:15]
John Podhoretz
Let's talk about the ways in which you can compromise, because clearly this had a happy result. That is to say, the mission was planned. It went off without a hitch. It was successful. The information was inadvertently leaked to a journalist who made the very praiseworthy decision not to blow the operation, not to contact. In other words, if he had contacted Walt or something and said, hey, Mike, my texting buddy, which is how I ended up on this altogether. You included me on this text chain. I know what's going on with the Houthis. And they would have had to scrub the mission. Right. If he had done that, didn't do that. They didn't scrub the mission. The mission went forward, it was successful. And this is now an after action report, essentially about a security breach. The question is what lessons are going to be learned by people who work in the federal government after this is over and what disciplinary authority people in this government are going to have over others. June, more junior officials who are caught being careless or, you know, dangerous with classified information. Because let's say you find somebody who is leaving a file out on a table that can get stolen by a Russian, or, you know, they leave it in a McDonald's or whatever, and then that person is arrested and is prosecuted, and their lawyer is going to say, how can you throw this guy in jail? If, Mike, if the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security advisor, the Director of National Security, and the head of the CIA are all cavalierly throwing around classified information on their phones and texting war plans to a journalist, this would be selective prosecution. You can't treat my GS13 client as though his security breach is worse than anything that just happened in the course of an operation involving the U.S. military doing a military strike, about which there is no more secret thing that there could be. So you're now interfering with the possibility of the federal government using deterrent powers to keep people from misbehaving with classified information, which, by the way, was already clearly going to be a problem in between these administrations and during the Biden administration when Trump got busted for taking those documents to Mar a Lago, and then three weeks later, it turns out that Biden had taken documents and taken them to the pen Center. So once again, you have classified information being mishandled by people not in office. Trump was out of office, Biden was out of office at the time and not getting punished for it. And then how are you going to punish anybody else? That's not fair. It can't be one standard for people who actually have hold of the most sensitive classified information and then another standard for like a guy who just left something in a McDonald's.
- [17:39]
Unnamed Panelist
But this is where the nihilism of our particular political moment really comes to the fore, because that's exactly what all these people on this text chain will argue. I think it's what Hegseth already has argued, basically. This is ridiculous. I'm going to do a typical partisan attack on the media and. But the subtext is you can list all the times in which the Biden administration should have punished a very high official, high level official for a huge mistake and didn't. And I think a lot of voters put Trump in office because he promised not to act that way, not to govern that way, especially when it comes to our border, to national defense, to the things that have to do with safety and security for the American people. This is an example. This is an opportunity for him to show that he will govern differently. I don't have much confidence that he will punish someone and remove them, but he should because that actually speaks to what I think is the average voter's concern and why he got their vote this time. The chaos of the Biden administration in terms of foreign policy is supposed to be counterbalanced now by Trump having a plan. Now, we don't agree with all of the sort of NEO isolation as part of that plan, but he's supposed to be pursuing and prosecuting this vision for the global order. This would be a weakness for him and we'll see if his, his sense of that and his own ego will maybe urge him to at least have one head roll.
- [18:53]
Abe Greenwald
But I'm not confident because. And what, what would he always say about Biden? This guy doesn't fire anyone. He never fires anyone. Right. They do a terrible job and he lets them stay. He lets them say, if I see someone's doing the wrong thing, not doing a good job, I fire them. They have to go. That's it.
- [19:12]
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- [19:42]
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- [20:12]
John Podhoretz
Okay, so that's the security angle. So now let's talk about the policy angle, because what we got, what was revealed here was a relatively, I mean, I would say relatively dispassionate policy disagreement. That is to say, that didn't go very far. It wasn't very heated or anything like that. It was, we're going. And then J.D. vance said, I don't know, this may be a mistake. We should maybe message it for a month and see how people feel and see where the economy is before we do anything. And we're bailing out Europe. I hate to bail out Europe. Europe sucks. And then Waltz and Hegseth come advance. I mean, again, friendly. It was all friendly. I mean, you can all. Everybody should read this. So I'm just revealing what you can already reveal. But both basically, Waltz and Hegseth both said the economy is not going to be helped if the shipping lanes remain in trouble. Europe doesn't have the capacity to take out the Houthis ability to strike at the ships. We're the only country that has the capacity. This will a help the economy. If we don't do it now, in three months, we're going to have to make sure the shipping lanes are open. So we might as well do it now. We have a window of opportunity. And then I think the missing data that you can extrapolate from the things that Goldberg did not publish was. And we have eyes on the leadership in Yemen. And we now know we got to move now because we know where they are. And sort of like the Israelis, we have an operational moment where we can do the most damage and take out the leadership and screw up their planning. And so we have to do it now. That's what. That's what is not there. But since we know Goldberg then hinted about this on the news last night said there were names on this list. And we know that, we know that the administration bragged after the event that they had taken out senior Houthi leaders. So there was a policy dispute about whether or not this should be done at all advanced. So we now know that internally, like, externally, it is what it looks like. Vance is now arguing internally in the highest councils for a neo isolationist position, according to which we don't even have interest to keep open the shipping lanes because that just helps Europe, as though the war. As though. I mean, he's an educated man. The idea that if you make shipping harder and goods harder for Europe to get, that, that doesn't increase the cost of goods in the United States. Like, like a nine year old can understand that. Right? I mean, Seth, you have a nine year old. Your nine year old is uncommonly well educated as a homeschooled kid. But I think you can explain that if half the toys are, you know, like taken off the shelves, you know, in here and in Europe, like that the other half the toys that remain are going to be more expensive. Like, that's not hard to understand, apparently, unless you're, you know, J.D. vance and you're in the thrall of this bizarre neo isolationist world in which America somehow is not part of the global marketplace.
- [23:57]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, it's like explaining the concept of supply and demand to the Vice President.
- [24:02]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, I mean, I really is this.
- [24:05]
Seth Mandel
There'S less of this. This costs more.
- [24:07]
John Podhoretz
This cost, you know, but he doesn't mean it. Right. We should. Okay, go ahead.
- [24:11]
Unnamed Panelist
I just have a question about the timing of the conversation that was captured by Goldberg. Because if it came around the time that Vance was going to go scold Europe in person, there's also a sort of branding thing he was doing here, which is he really wanted to scare Europeans and tell them it's, it's a new, there's a new cop in town. And he probably suspected that they, there would be these people behind the scenes going, well, he's all swagger, but Trump still took out the Houthis, so we can continue our trade. So we know, you know, maybe we'll weigh, you know, what he's saying and his rhetoric against the actions of the administration. It struck me that he was, he was really positioning himself as a political leader in that conversation, although he did then back off and allowed the people to decide who.
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John Podhoretz
Well, he said, I support whatever, you know, everybody wants to do and good luck and Godspeed and all that. So as I say, and It's.
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Seth Mandel
I don't think the President fully understands the implications of what he's doing here. That was the. The wording that I think.
- [25:08]
John Podhoretz
Right. For Europe.
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Abe Greenwald
Yeah, right.
- [25:11]
John Podhoretz
And then, of course, the terms of the internal dynamic. The person who shut the conversation down and then everything went forward wasn't Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, who is supposed to be managing the foreign policy, United States, out of the White House. It was presidential aide Stephen Miller, who was the one who said, okay, everybody, shut up. We're doing it, not Waltz. Right. So, but here's. So the. So the play. The. The. The play, the lay of the land, is that Vance internally is what Vance is externally. He is the voice of the Tucker wing. And it's not that he's being the voice of the Tucker wing outside, but inside, he's being more measured and flavored. He's playing his role, and he's going to play his role inside and outside. And this is the game. This is his long game to take over the party and run as Trump's heir in that lane. And then you have Hegseth and Waltz, and Hegseth, whom we really was an X factor in terms of how. Where he was going to be on policy was like, no, no, no, no. We have to do this to open the shipping lanes to show that we mean business, to hit this, you know, so they can stop hitting Israel. I mean, Hexith mentioned Israel in the tech, in the. In the conversations, and, you know, we got to do this. And Walt's pretty much saying the same thing, which to my mind, makes this a near tragedy, because if Christine's right and heads have to roll, I don't think they're going to roll. But if they were going to have to roll, the two heads that would have to roll would be Waltzes and Hexseth's Waltz for adding Goldberg to the text chain in the first place, and Hegseth for the unthinkable fact that he attached the war plan to the. To the.
- [27:08]
Unnamed Panelist
Well, that they were using it at all. That they were using signal at all.
- [27:11]
John Podhoretz
Christine, I've lost your sound. Okay, go ahead. Go again now.
- [27:18]
Abe Greenwald
You're good.
- [27:18]
Unnamed Panelist
I was just going to say the fact that they actually were using Signal at all is a. Should be a fireable offense. But isn't so.
- [27:25]
John Podhoretz
Well, a lot of things should be fireable offenses. And, you know, there were many people who did fireable things in the Biden administration also, which is the other part of this that I think we better, you know, like Democrats, better keep Their powder dry. Because just as we discovered three weeks after Mar? A Lago that Biden had stolen Doc purloined documents, also after the administration was over, we're going to learn that, you know, Mark Milley and, you know, the 51 intelligence officers all had a signal chat in which they were talking about, you know, plans to deny Israel weapons or something. You know, like, I would be very nervous to assume that this is, that this is a new, that this is new, because every time we think Trump has done something that completely unprecedented, nope, not unprecedented at all. Happened, happened before. But okay, so we have now, I think, a relatively clear sense that there is a, there is a hawkish, I wouldn't say internationalist necessarily, but a hawkish, Jacksonian, hawkish wing of the party that wants to hit America's enemies and hit them hard the way we would hit the Barbary pirates. And then there's this kind of isolationist wing that doesn't want us to do anything. And then they're like, there's like the Stephen Miller types who are like, okay, boys, stop talking and start doing so. That's the policy implication. What are the political, are there political implications? So Christine's done the should. So the question, and we've all agreed here that we think that Trump is not going to act or fire anybody, because I think he likes them all. He's not going to give up Hegseth after the fight to, well, what will Congress do?
- [29:18]
Unnamed Panelist
What will Congress do? They have oversight over all of these people. So what will they do in their oversight role to hold them to account? We, as you said, Tulsi Gabbard and couple other folks are testifying right now or today before Congress. Will they, will they drag Hegseth and waltz before Congress and just question them? I have a lot of faith in strong national security Republicans like Tom Cotton and others in the Senate that they will have to make some sort of plan here. They'll have to do something. I hope they will do something, but that's part of their role. And I mean, this is exactly the kind of behavior that should get someone dragged before Congress.
- [29:53]
Seth Mandel
By the way, again, I'm sure I.
- [29:55]
Unnamed Panelist
Could have, would have here, but I.
- [29:56]
Seth Mandel
Think the political implications will depend on who knifes who, because there's a bunch of people on the chain that were not quoted in the story. I mean, Tulsi Gabbard doesn't chime in. There's people, there's other people on the chain. If this becomes and stays a big story, then there's going to be some behind the scenes. There's going to be some leaks, some strategic leaks. Maybe Jeff Goldberg will assume they came from Walt if they do. But no, but there's going to be, you know, some, you know, some, some backroom stuff and, and an attempt to, you know, to make others in chain look bad as probably going to divide along ideological lines. You're probably more likely to see people like Walton Hegseth line up where they are and, you know, Baby Tulsi and the vice president line up where they are. And I think that there's just, this is one of those situations where somebody, you know, people are going to. It's kind of a prisoner's dilemma in a way. And I don't think that the Trump people are very good at recognizing the prisoner's dilemma. They tend to join in and, you know, somebody's going to sell someone out. So I think that's probably the political implications we wait to see is, is if there's infighting behind the scenes or if Stephen Miller can keep this group from running its mouth to reporters and, you know, and repositioning themselves behind the scenes.
- [31:24]
Abe Greenwald
But also the thing, you know, my question is, what is Trump gonna say? Because he weighs in on everything all day, every day. And, you know, he's, he's the one who's. Can't keep his mouth shut about anything. Is he gonna.
- [31:36]
John Podhoretz
Well, he is allowed to raise everyone.
- [31:37]
Abe Greenwald
And say, oh, this is nothing. And what's that?
- [31:43]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, well, he hasn't done it yet, which is important. Right, right, right. Trump has not weighed in to say I love Pete Hexf and the Atlantic is failing. And I like Bill Goldberg the wrestler, not Jeffrey Goldberg the editor or something like that, and sort of made light of it. So, so that hasn't happened. Right. And in Trump, and in Trump time, it's been like five years. Right? It had. We found out about this yesterday afternoon. It's. We're taping this at like 9 o'clock on Tuesday morning.
- [32:18]
Abe Greenwald
There's a truth coming. There's a truth coming on.
- [32:20]
John Podhoretz
Well, no, I mean, that's okay.
- [32:23]
Abe Greenwald
You know, my.
- [32:23]
John Podhoretz
Well, then that'll be the answer and.
- [32:25]
Abe Greenwald
It'Ll be, it'll, it'll have a. You should see what the. But the Biden team was making policy on Facebook.
- [32:33]
John Podhoretz
Right. Or not. Or maybe, or maybe he'll, maybe he'll be upset and maybe, you know, upset with Waltz or maybe, you know, it is interesting, though, because the kind of the, the Tucker whisperer. Right. Vance does say that condescending thing that Seth mentioned in the text chain about Trump not really understanding the implications of this. So his capacity to go to Trump and say, you really have to get rid of, you know, Walt is compromised because he sounds like he's, you know, oh, the old man is too stupid to understand what you guys have hypnotized him into doing. Like, Trump's not gonna like that.
- [33:19]
Unnamed Panelist
It's funny because that is the one thing people think. I mean, Trump's ego and narcissism we've talked about many times. But the thing he seemed to hate the most in his first term, and that I think Vance's remarks suggest, is he hates thinking he's being managed by others.
- [33:34]
John Podhoretz
He.
- [33:34]
Unnamed Panelist
Absolutely. And that's when he goes truly rogue. It's like, oh, you think you're managing me? I'm going to fire this general. I'm going to do that. So that, for Vance was a. Was perhaps not well thought through in terms of what he was on foreign policy.
- [33:47]
John Podhoretz
Worse. Worse than in other areas. Right. That's why he didn't like McMaster. He thought McMaster gave him lectures. He didn't like Bolton because he thought Bolton was trying to teach him something and they were both stupid and boring. Or McMaster. I don't think he ever said McMaster was stupid, said Bolton was stupid. He said McMaster was boring. McMaster is anything but boring. So it was interesting that he thought McMaster was boring.
- [34:12]
Seth Mandel
Anyway, it's also the wider approach of the administration, which is that Trump likes the idea that he's pursuing peace through strengths, and he talks in slogans about that, and he wants there to be consequences. You know, when people shoot at American ships, we're going to fire back 10 times as hard because, yeah, that's how you regain deterrence and whatever. Trump has a sort of we should look strong on the world stage thing. And so Vance is coming into conflict with that. He's going to come into conflict with that repeatedly, I would think, because Trump wants to do things that look strong and he's not interested. He's not as interested in the details. You know, J.D. vance, in one sense was right, which is that J.D. was wrong about the specifics of this particular incident. But he. He latched onto something that is a Trump, you know, branding that undermines the Trump branding, which is that sometimes you just have to punch the other guy in the nose and, you know, and make your. Make your presence felt. And JD is going to be against that sort of action 100 times out of 100.
- [35:25]
John Podhoretz
So, you know, administrations are supposed to contain people with differing policy views. And that's why there are processes. That's essentially why there's a national security advisor. Because the idea is that the Defense Department is going to have one view of something. The State Department may have another view of something. The CIA may have a third view of something. Somebody whose only interest is not institutional but is the President's interest in an area where there is very little bureaucracy, where there can be capture, unlike State, defense and CIA could take these views, try to collate them, and present the President with a series of options or a series of, say, well, Mike believes this and JD Believes that and, and, and, and Pete believes this. And, you know, here are your options on a piece of paper. Choose A, B or C. Right? That's what the idea of the office is for. And so there should be no problem with there being an isolationist voice in that sense. You know, during the Reagan administration, there were major differences of policy between George Shultz and Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. And they were conducted in a series of warring speeches. Bob Kagan wrote a lot of the Schultz speeches. Other people in the Weinberger's world wrote speeches that were more, you know, sort of conventionally old. Right. Semi, you know, like not wanting to use military power, not wanting to use America. You know, oddly enough, the shoes were on different feet. Right. State was sort of more belligerent than defense. This was all, as I say, conducted in public. There were fights over things relating to the economy and the supply side economics vision versus the deficit vision in the first Bush administration. That's good. That's like intellectual ideological ferment. It's not chaos. So again, the problem here is not that we're seeing it. We're allowed to make judgments on who we think. Therefore, when we see someone's in power or someone's not in power, we can say, well, the President is trending in this direction or the party is trending in that direction and depending on where you stand. And obviously we stand very much opposed to this JD Vance idea of the world. You sort of know where your enemies are and how to fight them. And that's one of the salutary effects of this article, is that it gives us a sense of what the game board is in the Trump administration and who is fit, who is in what position and where to look as these Congress conversations get hairier and the world gets more complex.
- [38:21]
Unnamed Panelist
But now we need Trump to be the queen of hearts and say, off of this head.
- [38:24]
Seth Mandel
I just more than that we need, you know, the problem is that it's not one of the advisers is that it's the chosen successor for the party.
- [38:33]
John Podhoretz
Well, he's not chosen yet.
- [38:35]
Seth Mandel
Well, I mean, yeah, it would be a mistake.
- [38:38]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [38:38]
Seth Mandel
The idea is that Trump picked him because he, he won. He, he assumes that this is a good general direction for the party and he's in. Since he's not running for reelection, since he's a lame duck, it does give JD Vance a clear leg up, at least on the rest of the party or, you know, a head start in that sort of thing. So it's more like he's, you know, and JD sees himself as that. So it's less. JD's in the administration. Less because he's seen as a, as an adviser, especially on national security matters, and more because I think from his position, he's waiting in the wings.
- [39:12]
John Podhoretz
But you're absolutely right, he's not, he's.
- [39:14]
Abe Greenwald
Not waiting quietly in the wings. And I don't know how Trump is ultimately going to take to, you know, he's, he was a big part of the, of the Zelensky blow up. He's the one on this chain saying, I don't think the President understands how this contradicts his message to Europe. It's kind of surprising how he's out there.
- [39:38]
John Podhoretz
Well, we'll see. It's a long way to go. And I was just thinking, and I even alluded to this yesterday, I mean, you know, Vance is front running, right? Like let's, you know, so in a, in a, in a long, in a, in a long horse race like the Belmont Stakes or something, right. Which is twice the length of the Kentucky Derby or the, or the Preakness, you know, the horse that jumps out to the lead at the beginning is never going to win. You know, like someone's going to lap him and then just, you know, and except in very rare cases, like that's not a good strategy. Someone has to be in the lead at some point. But like he's front running, got three and a half years to go. Three, you know, three and even three and a half years till the convention. And you know, if there is going to be any kind of a controversy over who's going to succeed Trump and he's not just going to walk in, you know, he's playing his hand very hard very early, getting a lot of stuff on the record that maybe other people can keep their powder dry on and the possibility of the classic thing where someone comes out of nowhere and seems to you know, have something that Vance doesn't have, or Vance gets involved in messes that he can't clear his hands of, clean his hands of in years two and three. You know, like, I wouldn't just put it in the bank that he's the successor. Like, it would be a real mistake, you know, to, to, to, to be there, because it doesn't really necessarily happen that way. Okay, so political consequences. I would say the political consequences are nil because nobody, no real American, not real America, but no American out of the elite, understand, you know, it's a signal. This. They're doing emails, it's a document that was attached. It's not secure, all that, that. This is an argument for, you know, for people to be having at a, at a, at a higher level than the public's engagement.
- [41:50]
Unnamed Panelist
Okay, no, no, I'm going to defend our public here on this because that could be true if there isn't a thoughtful. Because we don't have a thoughtful opposition in this country right now, the democrats in disarray, etc. Etc. But I think it would be quite easy for a thoughtful, moderate Democrat to make the case, not about, not about the details, but just to say we're trusting we've placed our security in the hands of people who are using these, who don't even know that they shouldn't be using this app, who we're being spied on by China, who is that?
- [42:19]
John Podhoretz
So name that person.
- [42:20]
Unnamed Panelist
Well, exactly. That's the issue.
- [42:21]
John Podhoretz
I mean, there you go.
- [42:22]
Unnamed Panelist
That. Well, Fetterman could do that. I mean, anyone can't do everything.
- [42:26]
John Podhoretz
I know I can't be the one Democrat that we mentioned out of the, out of the 75 million Democrats in America who can stand up and really, you know, take a position that isn't on the left, but isn't Trump. Like, they can't be that there's one person in the United States.
- [42:43]
Unnamed Panelist
But competence. But competence and the lack thereof is exactly why Trump won another term. And I think a Democratic Party that wanted to win elections again in the future should focus on that. Not on the personalities, not on Hegseth having been on Fox News, none of that. They won't. They'll take the easy path, I think. But I do think the average American would be concerned about this and should be concerned about this.
- [43:06]
John Podhoretz
You would think, but I don't know that you want it to be true.
- [43:10]
Unnamed Panelist
Yeah, I know.
- [43:11]
John Podhoretz
And you want them to be harnessed into understanding how true that should be. But I just don't know that your hope is not illusory.
- [43:20]
Unnamed Panelist
Yes.
- [43:20]
John Podhoretz
No, it usually is, I think is my problem. I wanted to highlight a pretty remarkable story in the Washington Free Beacon this morning and I got to pull it up because of course I'm stupid and I didn't have it pulled up before. It is by Scott Johnson, one of the founders of Powerline, and it is about. Where is it? I'm sorry everybody. It is about the most.
- [44:00]
Unnamed Panelist
It's on our text chain.
- [44:02]
John Podhoretz
Thank you. I will click through Is about the most egregious case of COVID fraud that we have yet seen, as far as I know. And it is in Minnesota. It's the country's largest Covid fraud and it involves a group called Feeding Our Future. I'm just going to read you a little of Scott's piece. A cast of almost entirely Somali immigrants is charged with siphoning some $250 million from the federal child nutrition program administered by the Minnesota Department of Education into their own pockets between March 20 and in January 2022, when federal agents assembled from around the United States to raid the many scenes of the crime around the Twin Cities. Since then, 70 defendants have been charged, 37 have pleaded guilty and seven have been convicted in the two trials conducted in the case. So far, the others have yet to be tried. Minnesota, mostly the Twin Cities area, is home to some 100,000 Somali immigrants, the largest Somali population in North America. Who's among them? Just anyone want to take a quick stab about the of course, the most prominent Somali immigrant in the United States, Representative Omar. Representative Ilhan Omar of the Twin Cities. Starting in the 1990s, the State Department directed thousands of refugees from Somalia civil war to Minnesota. As Kelly Riddell reported in a 2015 Washington Times story, Minnesota affords these refugees, quote, some of America's most generous welfare and charity programs, where Dell quoted Professor Ahmad Samatar of St. Paul's McAlester College, quote, Minnesota is exceptional in so many ways, but it's the closest thing in the United States to a true social democratic state. Minnesota's Somali community has been a fertile source of recruits for ISIS and al Shabaab. The FBI's Minnesota Field Office has accordingly related substantial resources to terrorism related issues. But the Feeding our future case represents old fashioned corruption of two federal nutrition programs and regulatory waivers were adopted by the Department of Agriculture and the Minnesota Department of Education on account of COVID leading this just sort of like spigot of money to flow to this one program, $200 million to this one program. And here's the great detail. Amy Bach is the name of the founder and executive director. And the ringleader of the fraud scheme was just, I believe, convicted of a court. This is the piece that the conviction is what led to Scott publishing this piece. She certified the accuracy of the ludicrously inflated meal claim she submitted for reimbursement. She herself received $1.9 million of this money. Other defendants expended proceeds intended as reimbursement for meals served on cash purposes, with luck, for by buying luxury automobiles, deluxe homes, and commercial properties in Minnesota, Ohio, Kenya, Kentucky, Turkey, and Kenya. Salim Saeed, whose Safari restaurant on Lake street in south Minneapolis netted $5.5 million, reported approximately $600,000 in annual revenue in each of the three years prior to the onset of COVID then made a couple million dollars a year, said he was serving meals to 5,000 children a day, seven days a week, every month. Was lying. And so here is the final great detail I got to read to you. This is a Somali immigrant named Abdi Hakim Osman Noor. He testified that he was at a wedding in January 2022. And here's what he said. We witnessed a wedding of a young Somali woman who works at the Office of Feeding Our Future last night. What happened at that staff member's wedding was contractors gifted the young woman in charge of coordinating the program gold worth $10,000 each. So much gold that it was wheeled in on a gold tray. The people who gifted her that entire tray are the very contractors in charge of. Of that delivery. So Covid money to the tune, $250 million is converted into gold coins brought as wedding presents in 2022 to a contractor by other contractors. And this is so you could put this together. And it is the perfect storm story, right? Covid money spigot with unbelievable amounts of fraud and a program directed toward Somali immigrants who are running a scam through the Minnesota Department of Education and the Biden Department of Agriculture to steal taxpayer money. So that's my.
- [49:37]
Unnamed Panelist
Requested by a liberal white woman. Like the whole thing?
- [49:42]
John Podhoretz
Yes. Okay. So aside from this just being a notable story, and of course, also one of these drop in the bucket story. So this has been going on now, right, for three years. The trials are now, you know, coming to fruition with these 37 convictions and all of that. But you know that this happened everywhere, right? And we had, like, essentially $4 trillion in extra spending as a result of COVID So this is one case where the behavior was so egregious that it's beyond all reckoning and beyond all belief. But this is part of the COVID story that remains untold. Or that because everybody was implicated in the federal government in the two administrations before this one, probably nobody really wants to look under the hood.
- [50:42]
Abe Greenwald
Right. On either side, you know.
- [50:44]
John Podhoretz
Right.
- [50:45]
Abe Greenwald
Because a lot of this, you know, But Trump initiated a lot of programs and things and spending and repurposing and ramping up production of things. A lot of it fizzled, didn't pan out. No one knows where those resources actually went to what purpose. So, yeah, right.
- [51:08]
John Podhoretz
So the PPE loans, which were. Which, again, probably will have turned out, if they ever find out the truth about this, to be the single larger, most defrauded program in the history of the federal government, aside from the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is a source of unbelievable levels of fraud, the likes of which, you know, the planet has barely ever seen. But. So the PPE was a way of privatizing unemployment insurance. Right. The idea was federal government will give you a loan of up to $250,000 for your business as long as you keep people employed. If you can demonstrate that you didn't fire people, you kept them employed and you spent that entire loan on their salaries and benefits. Once that money is used, if you can prove to the federal government that you used it for this purpose to keep people employed, that loan would be forgiven. So it was, in fact, a kind of corkscrew way of keeping the unemployment rate lower, of keeping it low, and of keeping people employed during a crisis, even if people would ordinarily just lay people off because they didn't have work for them. So even though I think that program was probably insanely defrauded, nonetheless, it had a purpose. It had a complicated, larger social purpose that is probably will be unduplicable and was a very much a sort of like an emergency measure of the moment, and people could sort of understand why there would be waste and fraud in such a thing. And then overall, it probably was a net benefit to the country that people, you know, that the unemployment rate didn't reach 50%, as opposed to 32%, which is, I think, what it reached in the three or four weeks after the shutdown in, in March of 2020. But we just haven't even begun to go there. And then this weird fact that an immigrant population relatively homogeneous in a. In a liberal leftist city, terrified of its own shadow, was basically going to be able to act with complete impunity in stealing massive sums of money. So there's another reason Trump got elected that people don't, I think, have. Have really not taken the measure of.
- [53:33]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, well, they. There was a. You know, my favorite story was that, you know, in. In early 2021, they passed the American Relief Plan, right. And that we had about $122 billion in aid, education related aid, aid to schools and affiliated institutions. And then a year and a half later, maybe more, I mean, towards the end of 2022, a local, you know, affiliate of one of the news stations out in California, where a lot of the money went, obviously, because it's a large state with large school districts and politically influential, dug into what money was spent and found that basically none of it had been spent. And then others started looking around, and then at some point, the Department of Education had to publish its own statistics on what had been granted and what was being spent and stuff like that. And it turned out that over, like a year and a half after the emergency relief funds had been sent to schools, about 12 billion of 122 billion had been spent, which is almost difficult to wrap your head around. That 100 billion out of a little more than $100 billion had not been spent on these students. So this was a problem throughout all these different programs in Covid, which is that, you know, they basically gave favored political constituencies the opportunity to distribute funds, and the money just sat there. And in fact, I believe. And I don't know the numbers, but I believe that Doge is. Part of what Doge is doing is clawing back some of that money. Doge has been looking at unspent Covid money and saying, well, Covid been over for a while, so if you don't. If you didn't need the money by now, then you have nothing to spend it on. That is Covid related in the year 2025. So, yeah, and I think that that's. That's kind of the underlying thing with Doge, really, is that, you know, they sort of know that there's all this money floating around in getting into the wrong hands, helping favored constituencies, you know, whatever. And Doge was. I think that the idea behind it really was this is happening all over, and let's just stop wasting all this money. Some of that is actually being done, still clawing back, you know, millions and maybe billions in Covid relief money. And my sense is that there are, for enterprising journalists, there are more stories like the one that you just read, if they like to look into it.
- [56:26]
John Podhoretz
You know, and it's not just journalists. I was thinking about this, that both in the Civil War and in World War II, and remember those were popular wars in the sense that, you know, the populations, the northern population fighting the Civil War, wanted to fight the war and win. And obviously In World War II, America was united, 90% behind the war aims, the war efforts, huge surge of patriotism and all of that. And nonetheless, the government contracting was problematic in both wars. And there were two very important commissions convened by the. By the Senate during the Civil War. It was the Wade Commission. And even more importantly, for historical reasons, in 1943, a commission was established under the leadership of one obscure Missouri senator named Harry S. Truman to investigate war, war profiteering or the smuggling of goods. The. The stuff that you read about in Catch 22 that Milo Minder Binder is doing on the base in catch 22, you know, like selling everything and having a black market and everything and all of that. And that, you know, these were major stories both in the 19th and in the 20th centuries about using, you know, noble efforts to do something to save the country, where people were stealing from the government and from their fellow taxpayers and all of that in order to line their own pockets. And there was a lot of outrage about it. And the country lined up behind these commissions and Truman ended up. FDR ditched Henry Wallace as his vice president. And because Truman had made himself a national figure because of the. Because of the Truman Commission, he became the Vice President, United States. You know, again, providential historical moment there. Truman would never have gotten the job otherwise. I'm still at a loss as to why the Senate, and maybe the Senate under Thune or something like that, has not. Has not convened a similar commission to look into Covid. This was the largest amount of peacetime spending on an individual thing that has ever happened. Right. And a floodgate of money, and that means fraud and all of that. And. And theoretically, all the receipts are around, and you don't want the pat. You know, you don't want the, you know, the evidence trail to get cold. This happened because somebody served as a confidential witness to the FBI and various other people and said they're stealing all this money here at this feeding our future. And then law enforcement got involved. But I'm now talking here politically about the Senate, which has subpoena powers and, you know, can. And all of that. And I think it's a huge political missed opportunity. But what for Republicans.
- [59:27]
Abe Greenwald
But, John, if it's as widespread as we're saying, I mean, wouldn't the fear be that everyone has their hand on something that went terribly wrong here? Yeah, I mean, there's.
- [59:40]
John Podhoretz
That is the fear.
- [59:41]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah.
- [59:43]
Unnamed Panelist
Well, and like my colleague Matt Weidinger at AEI has done excellent work looking at specific programs and fraudulence and waste. And there are people doing this work at many levels. But it did take a whistleblower tattling on people, as well they should, informing about what's going on. And I wonder as well that there's more interest on the Republican side right now in what might be called NGO social justice grifting. That's that politically has more of a payoff like going after Stacey Abrams, you know, environmental justice stuff.
- [60:13]
John Podhoretz
That stuff was also a lot of that stuff somehow got in on the COVID space.
- [60:19]
Unnamed Panelist
Yes, it got in the COVID and in the infection.
- [60:21]
Seth Mandel
Our future, which is a class inflation.
- [60:23]
Unnamed Panelist
Reduction act, is full of that kind of social justice drift.
- [60:26]
Seth Mandel
Republicans are forward thinking. They'll know that this stuff was bound to hit Gavin Newsom, and they will. You know, if they're thinking two steps ahead, Republicans in the Senate will, will see a big fat target.
- [60:39]
John Podhoretz
Right. But Abe is right, like, you don't know what you're going to dig up and you don't know if you're going to find out that if you're, you know, Senator so and so from Wyoming and you get on this committee that your largest single donor didn't steal $10 million in PPE money and then you're going to have to expose that guy and then it's going to be like, well, what did you. Maybe he gave you the money? And then you destroy yourself. Like, there's no question that you can see why this is something that people would want to stay away from. Just historically, it has been a thing that people do and that this country has done to make a reckoning of massive infusions of federal spending and the effect that they, the distortive effect they can have on people because greed is a, you know, elementary human, you know.
- [61:24]
Abe Greenwald
It'S really part of this is a function of the hysteria that seized everyone when, when Covid hit and we didn't know what was happening. It was like, oh my God, this is the worst thing that's ever happened on the planet. Do whatever, rubber stamp everything. You know, we have no idea how big this is going to be, how much we need, who needs what? Just go, go, go. You know. Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's a big part of it.
- [61:51]
John Podhoretz
And everybody felt that way. I mean, I actually don't think, I do not believe that there was anybody outside of Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution who thought that, you know, Covid was only going to, you know, kill 5,000 people, and that everybody was just wildly overreacting. Like, like everybody felt this way, and there was that sense of, like, drop all of the barriers, like, just, you know, turn the hose on because, oh, my God, you know, 10 million people are gonna die. Right.
- [62:26]
Unnamed Panelist
But an excellent lesson in the virtues of a genuine conservative approach to politics, which is a reminder that when you tear all the barriers down, it's very difficult to rebuild them after the fact. I mean, once the floodgates are open, the dam is never rebuilt.
- [62:40]
John Podhoretz
Right. And of course it did. Then. Trump's behavior during COVID did make it very difficult for there to be a. A strong ideological division between the parties when they basically agreed, sort of like 2008. In the, you know, in the fall of 2008, they agreed that there needed to be massive federal intervention into the economy to save it from destruction. That's a view that ordinarily a Republican would not take. Right. But, you know, Bush supported. You know, Bush supported. I can't remember those initials. Turf and talc. Or tarf. G. Tarp. Thank you. TARP and Tisk. There were two of them or something. TARP and talf. Anyway. And so, you know, there was a blurring of the. Of the lines. Like, you, You. You didn't know that there was. There would be any difference in the COVID approach between the two administrators. So that wasn't going to be a voting issue, like. And so, you know, that ended up to redounding against the benefit of the Republican candidates in those two races anyway. All right, so want to congratulate Scott Johnson of Powerline on publishing this remarkable piece in the Free Beacon. Go to the Free Beacon and find. You can find it there. We will be back tomorrow. For Christine, Seth and Abe, I'm John Pod Horiz. Keep the count. We far.