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Foreign.
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It's Friday, January 23, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions. It's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca. I'll tell you what I won't be watching this Friday night. Skyscraper Live is the Netflix special in which Alex Honnold, a free climber will attempt to climb the 10th largest building in the world in Taipei. And then afterwards tell me if he's done, sorry that I even have to care, or no, tell me that he's alive. And then I'll try to erase it from the list of things I worried about. I can't stop a BASE jumper or a free climber from doing the things they do. But you would think liability laws in Taipei might intercede and say if this goes wrong, not only is it not on us, since in our courtyard it will literally be on us. We're not going to do this. Really hate this stuff. And there is a downside. There was another story that I read that a base jumper recently skied off a 500 foot granite cliff outside Lake Tahoe successfully, quote unquote. Except I'm reading about it, others are reading about it, and this is an attractive nuisance. Or in the case of say, the Golden Gate Bridge, which I bring up for a reason, a lethal beauty. This was the, I think seven part series in the San Francisco Chronicle which chronicled all the suicides, all the people who have looked at that bridge and said, oh, it would be so easy and perhaps so poetic to end it this way. And the difference between a purposeful suicide mission and a suicide mission by percentages or degrees or with a 10 second delay isn't as big as you might think it is in that you might think, oh, people want to commit suicide, really want to commit suicide, and a BASE jumping parachutist off granite cliff really doesn't. But I think they might be close, closer than you'd imagine, because they have instituted and it's taken a decade, but they've installed a barrier outside the Golden Gate Bridge. And you know, it's prevented, it's stopped suicides, not by catching people, but just by saying we're going to dissuade you from jumping tremendously. They were down 87% last year. We went seven whole months where no one could committed suicide. Or what are we supposed to say now? No one died by suicide because of their own actions, which maybe includes the verb committed. See, of all the things that we do, we know how to torture the language. But we'll put on a gigantic Netflix special about a semi iterative suicide mission. And the reason that I say this isn't so cynical, it's nothing about the climbing abilities of Alex Honad or the wisdom. And I guess he's wise. He, he thinks he could do it and he's getting paid for it. It's that these things really do attract terrible ideas, among others. I mean, we put fences around swimming pools because they are attractive nuisances. Something like the Golden Gate Bridge or the most heavily advertised Netflix special since Logan Paul last got his ass beaten in. These are attractive nuisances and people will try these things. And I don't know what the societal good is. In a couple of weeks there'll be the Winter Olympics. There are many dangerous sports if you are a thrill seeker. Dangerous sports in the Winter Olympics, a luge participant, a luge athlete, died a couple of Olympics ago because the track was banked in such a manner, but also underlying the danger of the luge. But these sports are organized for a reason other than flirting with danger. They're arranged to do the cities Altius 40s ideal of the Olympics. Many Olympic sports are in quote unquote dangerous except in training activities. Skiing is very fast. Activities on ice certainly are. But they're organized and they exist to test competitors in a longstanding competition that satisfies something close to the ideals of the human spirit. Oh, here I am quoting Jim McKay in the beginning of ABC's Wide World of Sports. But base jumping or free climbing, it's more a solo pursuit. I'm not denigrating those pursuits as private pursuits. The problem is when they go public, they I do think are playing on our worst in syncs. And we're watching it to see if he does it, but of course we're watching it to see if he will die. And they have a 10 second delay that they're telling us about to reassure us that if he dies we won't see it. Although won't that really and truly disappoint? And if they have to use the delay, aren't they plunging their audience into a position they never wanted to? Won't they instantly regret the undertaking at all? So isn't the delay in admission that this is all a bad idea except in the case of spectacle and money? And I'm putting a third thing in there, which is the possibility of giving many others many bad ideas. On the show today I was thinking who would concoct such a special? And I thought of Satan. Which brings me to my next guest. For the full show today, we will be talking with Kenneth Vogel, reporter for The New York Times. And. And he, among other things, studies lobbying and tracks down the world of Farah, the Foreign Agent Registration Acts, and all the people who do register and don't and work on behalf of often quite ugly governments. The name of the book is Devil's Advocates, the Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Financial Foreign Interests. Kenneth Vogel, up next. I've just read a very good book by the New York Times, Kenneth P. Vogel. It is called Devil's Advocates, which is a great name. Is it a good enough name to justify the phenomenon that Kenneth P. Vogel is writing about? Probably not. Except, you know, I like good titles. Subtitle the Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests. That sounds bad. So does the devil part. Ken, welcome to the Gist.
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Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.
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Lobbyists, that's not just permitted, that's referenced in the Constitution, right? We can redress. We could ask the government for redress. You can't really ban lobbyists. You can regulate it, but you can't ban. Ban them, can you?
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No. And in fact, you know, this is something that comes up almost every presidential election cycle where it's popular to run against lobbyists and K Street and big donors and money in politics. And then once someone's in office, they realize either, hey, this system sort of worked for me, that I got elected in part because there were major donors and lobbyists who supported me. And also it's very difficult even if you, even if you had the impulse to actually go after them because of both the fact that members of Congress have also benefited from the system and also because there are these protections, First Amendment protections for both campaign financing and big donors and the idea that money is speech and also lobbying, the idea that you have the right to petition your government. That said, I think to most Americans it strikes them as sort of anti democratic, that people who have more money and resources, particularly foreign interests, as the subject that I pursued in my book, have the ability, because of those resources, to be able to get more access through lobbying and the ability to shape decision making at the highest levels of American government than regular people.
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B
Right? So the First Amendment petition the government for redress of grievances. It's like the Second Amendment right to bear arms. You can regulate it, we can even battle about how much you regulated. But the desire for regulation, the appetite, not even close to the desire to regulate the Second Amendment, which especially on the national level isn't that deep a desire.
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Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, every once in a while you'll see a big scandal. I mean, we just recently came out. There's a big scandal that sort of prompted me to write this book. That being the sort of Russia investigation into Trump, which really shone a light on, on the way that foreign lobbying has sort of helped manipulate foreign policymaking in the United States for decades. I mean, some of the key players in the Mueller investigation, Paul Manafort among them, are among, like, the forefathers of the sort of professionalized foreign lobbying industry. And so there were people who were like, suddenly their eyes were open to this and they thought it was the most outrageous thing. And there were a number of proposals to at least increase the disclosure and as you're talking about, kind of peck around the edges of what, you know, of foreign lobbying and of lobbying, you know, writ large. And they quickly realized that there wasn't the. There wasn't usually, like, in order to have like a major scandal, precipitate reforms, there has to be like, the public will. The public has to really pressure the body politic, the Congress, the administration, to enact these changes. And we didn't really see that. We saw a lot of outrage, but it was focused more on Trump than it was on the system.
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Yeah, this to me is a classic example of the Bannon esque flood the zone with shit working. If people had read your book, they might be outraged, but then again, if they had to prioritize, it would probably be 30th on the list of outrages. And also, I'll add this. Some of the, A lot of the attention in the first Trump administration was given to his use of, say, the Trump Hotel as a double bank shot way to make some money. And I do think. I know, I know, emoluments. There was an emoluments case that was proceeding especially in Maryland courts, but I just don't think that rose to the level of some of the things that are going on now.
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Yeah, that's right. I agree. And I think people got a little bit desensitized to it, you know, that there was all this attention about how this was like the death of democracy. And it's like, wait, you're telling me that like, so, you know, a handful of, like, wealthy foreigners or foreign government delegations stayed in his hotel and that's the death of democracy rack rates.
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B
And I even read the congressional investigations on this. Maybe I read your story. I don't know if you covered it, but some of the, you know, they chronicled every foreign government who was to have done it, and some of them stayed there for two days. You know, so you have like, the Mongolians paying $1,000, and then you ask yourself, all right, what's the baseline? What's the denominator? How much were they staying before Trump was in office? It's pretty probably $1,000 at. Not a Howard Johnson's, but a Four Seasons.
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Yeah. And I think that, like, the. The sort of degree of attention that was given to that and the way that Democrats seized on that, as well as the Russia investigation, frankly, like, you know, the fact that Mueller, I mean, probably get some heat for saying this, but the fact that Mueller and all these reporters who were. Who were dedicated to digging up the ties between Russia and the Trump and Trump campaign or Trump world didn't really find a smoking gun of collusion yet. That's what dominated sort of the bandwidth of the media and of Democrats during the first Trump administration. I think that actually had sort of a backlash effect where, like. And we actually, I don't. It's not just me enough to listen to me saying this. We actually talked to a colleague of mine, Ben Protest, talked to Eric Trump about this at the beginning of the second Trump administration and sort of asked him about, like, how they're gonna try to set. This was at the. Just as the crypto. The degree. The sort of crypto racket was becoming clear, for lack of a better word, and asked him, like, how are you going to separate the business of government from the business of the Trump family? And he basically said, look, we tried to do that during the first administration, and we just got killed for it. So this time, essentially, like, we're not going to be handcuffed. We're going to, like, pursue business aggressively. And I think that the combination of that they're feeling that they tried to do things that sort of more adhere to the norms. I think there's a justifiable pushback to that. But they. That's how they saw it. And then the sort of overwrought attention that was. That was paid to this stuff sort of gave them license or make them feel like they had license in the second administration to do some of this more brazen and more brazenly transactional dealings with foreign governments to include everything from the various crypto plays that I talked about to, you know, the acceptance of the Air Force One jet from Qatar on down the line, property deals in the Balkans. It's much more aggressive than it was during the first administration. I think it's partly because, and the attention is maybe not as focused and it's partly because what you're talking about with Bannon and the flood the zone, there's just so many outrages dealing with the interactions between the Trump family and their business and foreign governments, and I should say the businesses of the Trump allies and foreign governments, that it's really tough to keep track. And I think it's worse than what we saw in the first administration, but also tougher to keep track and to train the public focus on.
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Yeah. So as to the promise of the Mueller report and what the reality was, we could, I know you could probably recite all the caveats too. There is no such thing as collusion under the law. And it is not the case that he found no evidence of collusion. It's the case that he felt he could improve criminal conspiracy beyond a reasonable doubt. But then the caveat to the caveat is because it didn't seem to be there as one would really read the law. So I'll ask you to weigh in on this. Is the misstep of Mueller and everything around that, that there really wasn't anything there and there was too much hype and promise. And so it was the boy who cried wolf, or was the mistake more that Trump got away with it once, thus emboldening him to do it again?
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I think a little bit of both. You know, certainly there was some, the sort of like tone of the coverage and of the sort of vibe of the investigation was that there was going to be this big payoff at the end where, you know, we were going to see some back channel communication about WikiLeaks and the hacking of the, the ordering of the hacking of the dnc. And it was in some ways much more simple than that. It was just out of the open. Trump was said sad publicly. Russia, if you're listening, I'm sure you would be greatly rewarded if you could find those emails, you know, but it didn't, there was, there wasn't like the secret plot. And like, you know, part of it is because I, you know, having covered the first Trump campaign in a very up close way, like, I don't know that they were organized enough to collude. You know what I mean? It was sort of a bit of a clown show. And, you know, the, the, there were some interesting findings, including relating to Paul Manafort and his ongoing communications with this Constantine Kalimnik guy. I get into this whole backstory in the book. I actually broke that story of Constantine Kilimnik and his work with MANAFORT during the 2016 campaign when I was at Politico. And so like there, there is some there, there's now whether, I mean, the key question with that and Manafort sharing of polling data with Konstantin Kilimnik while Constantine Kilimnik is working for or at least in touch with Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch who's close to the Kremlin. And whether that made its way back to the Kremlin or not, you know, their excuse, which again is sort of like simpler but also in some ways worse, which was that Manafort wanted to show Deripaska and all these like Russia aligned Ukrainian and, you know, post Soviet oligarchs that he was right there. He was in the catbird seat sitting with Trump and he was helping to steer this campaign.
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B
And if Trump, I mean, that was his title, right? It wasn't.
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Yeah, but I'm saying he was the. So what there is like he's suggesting that if Trump gets elected, he will be able to, you know, curry influence and he'll have major juice in Washington. So he's sort of like, if that is in fact what they're doing, which is what they said that they were doing, trying to show these Russian and Russia aligned oligarchs that they have juice in Washington and would have even more juice if Trump got elected, it kind of shows that, like there is a whole industry behind this. It's not just about, you know, whoever wins. It's not just about like, you know, shaping the foreign policy of that person in a particular way. It's about having the access in a continued way to affect whatever result it is that you care to effectuate in American foreign policy. There are people who are willing to take the money to do that, and Manafort was one of them.
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B
So I'm going to ask you a lot about Manafort in a second because the book probably talks about him either the most or second most of all your figures. He's a fascinating guy and you talk to him a lot on the record. But was the theory of him giving polling data the real problem with it? So you just laid out, it bolstered his credibility in the eyes of these Russia aligned oligarchs. But I've heard a couple things. One is I've heard the dismissal of what he knows more than just regular polls. He has secret polls. What is he doing? He's just pulling down the 538 maps. I mean, he's got, he's got Something so much more in depth than that. So that's one. Was the potency of his polling anything special? But then I've also heard the theory what he's doing is telling the Russians who did try to interfere in the election where to spend their money. So take them both, if you would.
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Yeah, and I think the first one, it's not, I don't think there's a definitive answer. You know, we actually ran a correction to our coverage of this, but it was, it wasn't about whether the polling data was, was public or not. That's, that's sort of the key question. That's the question that you're getting at here, whether this was some proprietary information that they couldn't have gotten just by logging on to, you know, real clear politics. And I don't, I don't.
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But even if it was private, that doesn't mean it's better.
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Right.
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And also, and also, I know he's an oligarch, but how many times as a political reporter, you've been leaked a private poll? All the time.
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It's one tactic.
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B
Sorry, go ahead.
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Yeah, no, I think it gets to your second question, which is like, so what? So we had. They have polling. Maybe it's better polling. Maybe it's just regular polling. Like, what are they going to do with it? And, and this sort of the, the, sorry, the theory of the case here among folks who are sort of like the hardcore Russia gay truthers is that, well, this was used by the Kremlin to shape their social media disinformation campaign, which amounted to, like, you know, tens of thousands of dollars of ads on Facebook like that.
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B
A lot of it was spent in Idaho, by the way.
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Yeah, and like, some of the stuff was just so, like, I mean, stupid, frankly. Like, that's your grand plan to influence the election, you know. And then, you know, I should say, though, the rebuttal to that is it was such a narrow election. Like, who knows, maybe the stupid, like something that a more sophisticated consumer would look at and be like, that's not going to shape votes. Maybe it was enough to shape enough votes at the margins in these three key states. I, that's why I think, like, you know, it's, I'm reluctant to, like, entirely dismiss it out of hand, but nor am I sort of going to go to buy into it and believe that this was something that was in any way definitive in the election.
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B
Maybe if Hillary Clinton had got the secret poll, she'd have gone to Wisconsin anytime within the last couple of months before Election day. So Manafort, fascinating guy. Should he be thought of as the Bernie Madoff, which is the worst example of the misdeed or the malfeasance? Or should he be thought of more as the Charles Ponzi, the guy who invented the path to malfeasance?
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I think, I mean, those are, you know, both obviously quite loaded examples there, but he definitely.
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B
I'm not letting him off the hook, but, you know, he's serving jail time.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, he was, he was the sort of forefather of this industry. And, and this industry has, you know, a lot of shadowy characters and shadowy practices. So that there's, and I should say also, like, there are a lot of people who, like, even as they have sought to avoid the pitfalls that he eventually faced by virtue of his, like, complete flouting of the rules around this industry, there are still people in this industry who regard him as like, something of a hero. So now as far as, like, what, what he was doing and what he would say, sort of his defense of what he's doing and is that, you know, isn't it better for. Even if I'm representing, like, the worst people, the worst, like, regimes that have, like, are sort of like poster children for some of these things that we think of as anathema to American values about like, you know, they're violating human rights of their, of their subjects, they're stealing money, they're kleptocrats, they're, you know, they're anti democratic, they're not having elections or they're having sort of farcical elections. Isn't it better for us, Us, the US Government to have an open channel of communication with these folks? In a lot of cases, the US Government sort of official diplomacy is not going to have an open channel of communication because instead these regimes are non grata and they're sanctioned and they're closed off. And so what Manafort argues is I was helping to bring some of these regimes sort of closer to American values and American sort of strategic interests. And, and wouldn't you rather have someone doing that than having a complete blackout of communications? And that's, I think, a justification that a lot of the people use who represent some of the sort of like, worst clients in this space.
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B
Yeah. And also, is it up to the private citizen to have more ethics or morality than the elected official? I mean, Jonas Sevimbi, let's get into him. So Jonas extends his war, his. The wind beneath his wings is Paul Manafort. You know, Case can be made that but for Manafort's engagement, hundreds, hundreds of thousands of people would live. However, like I said, what did the US Government do about it? What did the US Government do to put this guy on a no go list? Nothing. Quite the opposite. Many elements of the US government were in fact supporting him for much of the time. So why should the private individual be more moral or ethical, I guess would be the argument.
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Right. And he, I'm not going to make the argument for it, but like, he would say that, like he was doing a service with the US Government. The US Government had had an interest here, even though there were so many distasteful elements of what Savimbi was doing in the civil war that he was prosecuting that like he was a bulwark against communism, that the Angolan government was aligned with Cuba and China and the sort of communist powers of the day. And that that was the great sort of geopolitical tension of the, you know, in the world at that time was the Cold, Cold War. And so Manafort was essentially dealing with these distasteful actors and not just in Angola, in the Philippines with Ferdinand Marcos and, and he was selling them to the US as like, these guys are going to help staunch the spread of communism in their respective parts of the world. And that was a goal of the US Government. And whether it was, you know, whether it was sort of ill conceived or not, and whether the Cold War justified some bad behavior, it was, it was official US Government policy to stop communism. And Manafort would argue, and he did, that his clients were, were like carefully curated to effectuate that, that result.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And the dossier on his client list was dubbed the Torturers. The torturers list. What about now? Another. Oh, this is what I want to ask you. So when you interviewed him, give me the circumstances of that. He was already convicted for many crimes. And what was right, what was motivating him to still talk to you? Some reputation burnishment. He couldn't stay out of the spotlight. He wanted to correct some of the specific records that maybe were surprising to you, that were important to him. What was it?
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I think all that. And one more thing, and just to further sort of set the context and the timeline is he had gone to jail for violating the Foreign Agents Registration act for his work in Ukraine, among other things, tax crimes, banking crimes, other things, financial crimes. And Trump had pardoned him right at the end of the first Trump term. So he's out and he's still quite toxic even in Trump world. But in some parts of some quarters of Trump world, but, but like around the world, among, like, potential future clientele. So he is trying to get back in the game at that point and wants to both, yes, burnish his historical bona fides or, you know, to burnish his reputation as the forefather of this industry and sort of talk about the tactics and techniques that he used that were so innovative that so many other people are using to this day and also show, hey, by the way, I still have value. I can still be, you know, sort of help you figure out how to navigate Washington, particularly if Trump. And at this point, Trump is. It's already clear that Trump is gonna run again, particularly if there's a second Trump term. And so it turns out that, you know, he ended up getting sort of refurbishing his reputation in Trump world. The corners that were sort of leery of him and became like, you know, sort of have, have like a full, not, if not full entree, at least entree to like, some parts of Trump world and was able to market himself around the world as the guy who could get you in with or sort of position you, you respect the foreign clients, foreign, you know, oligarchs or foreign politicians. As someone who has, who is able to navigate Trump and the way that he did. It's quite interesting, Mike, is the, that like, you know, back in the day he would, you know, hang his hat on sort of these Cold War dynamics and say that all you need to do to get in with President Reagan or the first President Bush is be like an anti communist warrior. And so now what he does, and he's gone around the world, he signed at least a couple of clients for whom he sort of deployed. This pitch is to say, and help them make this pitch is to say, just like you, President Trump, I have been persecuted unfairly by the deep state and by the Biden administration. So he did that on behalf of a politician in Albania who was sanctioned by the US Government who was trying to get off sanctions before the election, and then also in Republika Srpska, this Balkan Serbian area of territory of Bosnia, Herzogen Gavina, he, he worked with briefly this guy who was sanctioned. And by the way, he was sanctioned under the Obama administration through the first Trump administration and the Biden administration into the second Trump administration. But what he did was he recognized that, hey, there's this Trump is emboldened and he's, he's getting more into foreign policy and he's projecting the same sort of grievance politics that animated his second or third presidential campaign onto the world stage. And so this guy's name was Millarad Dodec. You know, he had Rudy Giuliani come and interview him. He had Mike Flynn out on Twitter talking about how this guy is just like the Trump of the Balkans. And guess what? It worked. The Trump administration lifted the sanctions on this guy.
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B
Yup. What a cast of characters. Is he still as rich as he once was with the ostrich skin vest?
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A
I don't think so. I think that's the motivation for him at his advanced age. He's in his late 70s, still trying to do this type of business. Is that the legal fees and the time in prison and on house arrest really took a chunk out of his finances.
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B
And we'll be back with Kenneth Vogel in a moment.
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A
Foreign.
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B
We're back with Kenneth Vogel, author of Devil's Advocates. So let's talk about the other guy who is a prominent player in your book, Robert Strict. He's probably a Manafort type. Inherited the label of Manafort. Manafort laid the groundwork of how to do what he's doing. Giuliani did it a bit. But when it comes to this younger guy without much of a profile, who or what does he illustrate about the points that you're trying to bring out?
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A
Yeah, so the reason I thought he was interesting is he was an outsider. I mean, he had tried to be an insider through, through the first Bush administration. He had, you know, done some low level lobbying and lived in D.C. and after, after Obama won, he was kind of cast out. He was, he was like exposed. He had like one trick which was like, you know, dealing with some people in the defense establishment to help win contracts. And then new administration doesn't have the access and so he kind of bounces around and he, he owns a winery in Oregon. He tries to buy a security guard business. He does a bunch of things, none particularly successfully, but he's looking for a.
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B
Way bouncing at some point. He's bouncing checks up and down the Pacific Northwest. Stiffing contractors.
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A
Yeah, stiffing his landlord. He had a bunch of like, you know, legal troubles related to his, his debts and the like. But he's constantly looking to get back into D.C. and he, like, wants to be an insider. And so he volunteers a little bit on Trump's 2016 campaign, establishes some alliances with influential people in Trump world, including Corey Lewandowski, who was the first Trump campaign manager. And Trump wins. And all of a sudden all these well established gatekeepers, keepers in D.C. are the ones who, you know, who had Worked and sort of maintained their access and influence from administration to administration, regardless of party. Sort of playing the bipartisan, you know, permanent Washington establishment game of going in and out of government. All of a sudden they're the ones who are on the outs and Trump has no connections to them. And it's kind of, it's really disruptive to K Street and the lobbying and influence industry and, and it allows for folks like Robert Strick who have some, you know, some claim to having some real connections to people in Trump world, which is a pretty small circle at that point. It allows them to suddenly market their services to some like quite well paying clients, not just around the world, but domestically as well, and say, hey, I'm the one who can help you navigate this strange new administration that doesn't have any connections to all the people who you been paying for years and years and years. And so he does manage to get his foot in the door and quite quickly become sort of a poster child for this dynamic where like, you realize that, you know, these, these lobbies realize that there's more money to be made in the foreign world because there's sort of more stigma and more reputational risk. And the further you get into it, the more you realize actually there's even more money to be made among the shadow, the more shadowy and sort of tight, toxic clientele here. And so Strick, actually he, he makes a ton of money quite quickly and he's talking to me about it and he dubs it the Shitbag Business. So that was actually the title that I wanted to use for my book, the Shitbag Lobby or the Shitbag Business. But the publisher didn't think I'd be able to sell it because I wouldn't be able to say it on, you know, TV or what have you. But thankfully I can say it on your podcast, I hope.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I think the book how not to Give a Fuck really didn't go well. Are you kidding? Go the fuck to sleep. I think putting or fucking the title is actually a rocket ship to success.
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A
Good, good.
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B
Did he stay on this side of the law, our side, the good side?
- [32:41]
A
I mean that's the one thing that he, he sort of like hung his hat. He actually says that Manafort is his spirit animal, except he's more focused, he strick on the legal side of things. So he, he went, he went the opposite route and he really like over disclosed to the point where it was almost like he was using this Foreign Agents Registration act and the database as like a marketing tool, you know, he would like, register for clients for whom he had, like, the barest amount of, like, interactions and overstate the degree of his effectiveness and what he was doing. And so I thought he was an interesting character to focus on, both because he was coming at it with fresh eyes and because he was emblematic of this sort of disruption of the influence industry that happened under Trump and because, because of that sort of smoke and mirrors element to it where he's exaggerating his, his involvement and his effectiveness, even though there is some kernel of truth in a lot of the stories. And that in many ways I thought was like, that's how lobbying works. Like, there's never going to be, you know, a bill that passes where the President's gonna sign and say this lobbyist was the one who got this done. You know, it's always sort of, you know, there's always a little bit of opacity where the lobbyists are trying to exaggerate the degree to which they were, they were the determining factor in getting something done or killing something. And the clients are kind of left guessing. And that's even more the case with these foreign clients who have less sophistication and less sort of grounding in the way that American politics works and therefore in some ways more susceptible to being sold a bill of goods by these lobbyists who are exaggerating their influence.
- [34:21]
B
Did Rudy, did Rudy Giuliani ever provide a true and valuable service to his clients with Giuliani associates?
- [34:30]
A
At one point, I think yes, like early on, he had a number early on, which is to say like either between his mayorality and his 2008 presidential campaign, but even more so after the 2008 presidential campaign, like he really tried to build a business and he had, you know, very experienced sort of security career security professionals around him. And the service that he provided was doing these types of security and law enforcement and anti terrorism studies for governments around the world. But it's interesting because even back then, a lot of these governments, sure, you know, that maybe they want and they have a need for this type of service, but they really saw it as like, we're paying America's mayor. This guy's got serious juice in Washington and in the US and like this is sort of non lobbying lobbying where like, he is kind of a, he is, he's, he's peddling influence even if he doesn't acknowledge it and says that actually the service that he's providing is security consulting. So that was kind of where he was when Trump emerged. And Trump like, like strict but, you know, sort of different backstory. Gave him a chance to sort of reboot his relevance, and he seized it. And suddenly the demand for his services, he continued to say that they were just security consulting, but at this point, it was pretty clear that, like, people were seeing him as a liaison to Trump. He was Trump's personal lawyer at one point. You know, he was regarded as a possible Secretary of State, which is bizarre to think about now, but he. He was. There was. There was quite a demand, there was quite a market for his services in the first Trump administration.
- [36:11]
B
Yeah, and he, like Manafort, like Tony Podesta, who you don't write so much about, they loved living large. They were driven by avarice, cupidity, whatever you want to call it. And I wonder if I had a lot of psychological questions about the makeup of. Of these people, but this is my, I don't know, conclusion thesis. They had so little regard for their clients or the goodness of what they were doing that money was the only way to actually get any satisfaction or to keep score within their job. Many. I'm not even talking about someone who works for an ngo, but there are many other people who do well and do good. You know, this construction. But maybe these guys just knew flat out they were not doing good, so we. We might as well do well.
- [37:02]
A
I mean, even. Even as they are, even as, like, that argument is becoming harder, harder to make that there is some good there, some of them are still making that argument. You know, we talked a little bit before about Devon Archer and like, Hunter Biden. You know, he acknowledges freely in his memoir that, like, no, he needed money. And like, this Burisma payday was like an easy one for very little work. Work. And the reason why it was, was because at the beginning of it, or for most of it, actually, his dad was the vice president. That was the guy who oversaw Ukraine policy. And so, like, he sort of recognized that, like, yeah, like, these. These people want something from me and it's not good. But he would say and. And continue to say, continue to say to this day that, like, he saw Burisma as like a bulwark, as like a. An important pillar of Ukrainian independence because. Because this was an energy company. What did Russia really have on Ukraine? It was the ability to turn on and off the natural gas spigots. And, like, wouldn't it be better if there were. If there was, like, Ukrainian energy that could be harnessed by the country and it would sort of bolster their independence?
- [38:14]
B
So even as he's told me, the Same thing. Like originally, it starts off with decent enough intention, but then it quickly becomes clear that there is, it's unavoidable, especially in that part of the world and especially, especially with that sector, not to have corruption. And so I just wonder at the time. And you didn't interview him, right? Most was with Hunter. It was from what he revealed in his memoir mostly.
- [38:39]
A
I mean, I talked to him off the record, which I don't use obviously, because it was off the record. But yeah, so I didn't interview him on the record.
- [38:45]
B
I guess I just was wondering at a time when much of the Democratic political class was acting apoplectically that anyone would make any accusation that what Hunter was doing was untoward in relationship to his father. I wonder what. And you know, they were saying it's just pure political hit job. I wonder what Hunter was thinking. Do we know if Hunter was. I mean, maybe he appreciated the fact that MSNBC would talk about this unconscionable smear against Joe Biden. I don't know. Maybe Hunter was saying, well, you know, maybe there's a little something to that.
- [39:22]
A
I mean, it was my sense that he was, he was not just like cheering on the pushback, which, I mean, very valid point that like, in retrospect it just, I think some of that, if you went back and watched it, the defense of Hunter is like, you know, well meaning and experienced international executive who like, is earning his money by doing something that's good for the world is sort of laughable. But like he, you know, at the.
- [39:49]
B
Time of mind that Hunter's Hunter. But Joe is totally separate. He was in charge of rooting out corruption in Ukraine in the Obama administration. That was his job.
- [39:59]
A
Yeah, and it was more than that. I mean, he did that around the world. And I write about other examples where he is leading an anti corruption initiative or encouraging an anti corruption initiative in Romania. And Hunter Biden is working for one of the top targets of that anti corruption initiative, a Romanian real estate magnate who was on trial for like a total, you know, sort of oligarchic fact pattern where he got a sweetheart deal on some land and then he, he, he was alleged to have bribed someone who was involved in investigating whether the land deal was corrupt. Anyway, you know, yes, it, this was, this was a fact pattern that Hunter Biden recognized could be quite lucrative for him, that his dad was seen in a number of these countries as like the sort of overseer of American foreign policy and particularly the anti corruption initiatives that were targeting some very wealthy interests. Who had a lot riding on and a lot of concern that the US Was the one who was pushing the prosecutors in their respective countries to go after them. And Hunter Biden was seen as, as like the way to get out of that. And that's a very, that's a, that's a mindset that you see a lot in the post Soviet world or, you know, parts of the Middle east, you know, North Africa. That this idea that, like, the way you either get something from government or stay out of government's crosshairs is you just throw a bunch of money at the family or the allies of the, of the ruling party. And, and so, you know, when I went into this book, I thought, like, yeah, that's, that's the way that, like, they see the world, but it's not the way, you know, they're not going to. Just because they see the world that way and they throw a bunch of money at like, Americans, it doesn't mean that, like, that's the way that the US Works. And like, we don't do that. We have all these rules and all these laws that are supposed to prevent that type of thing from happening. And I don't think you have to look very hard in this current environment and the Trump family and their business to start to wonder like, hey, maybe it is actually like, maybe we're not so different from these parts of the world that have real pay to play political cultures. So we went far afield from Hunter Biden, but I think he was, he was sort of pushing Democrats through, you know, people around the administration to take this hard line against us by telling them there was nothing here. This is all bullshit. Even as he seems to have acknowledged in his memoir and subsequently that, yeah, this was a bad look. And if you read the emails that were in his laptop, which was another thing that they went out of their way to deny and sort of shoot down as Russia disinformation. You see that he's aware, he's sort of like sensitive to this perception that what he's being paid for is influence and access and he wants to try to disabuse, at least publicly people of that notion that that's what his foreign class clients and business partners are getting. So it's not like he's sort of caught off guard here or in hindsight, he's realizing that this is what they want. He knew it. Right? He knew it all along.
- [43:02]
B
Yeah. So I just want to emphasize to the listeners, Ken just mentioned something you might not have heard of because this was a Story he broke, and he broke it before the book, but it's that Hunter Biden pursued a deal. I'm reading the headlines in the time to sell land around the US embassy in Romania. This is 2015. Joe Biden is in charge, has a large portfolio rooting out corruption in these former Soviet parts of the world. And this was one of the things that, you know, Hunter Biden was doing. The Chinese were also involved. It, I guess, went by the wayside. People are people moved on to other or less. HUNTER biden NEWS but what I wanted to ask you was we know that he had his legal entanglements around taxes and around the gun charge, which I thought was constructed unfairly against him. But what about actual illegalities from the lobbying? So I'm not even asking about the explicit connection to Joe Biden, but from what you've reported, does he have any exposure if someone wanted to really dive in about him either violating Farah or violating any laws that we have related to lobbying?
- [44:13]
A
Yes, 100%. And you don't have to take it from me. You could see, you can read, if you read not even between the lines. If you read the filings in the, the special counsel's case against him over the taxes, the one to which he eventually pled guilty, there were, you know, as they were sort of pretty far down the line trying to negotiate a guilty plea. The prosecutors basically said, we had like, we have evidence that you violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And it was in this Romanian case, case, they say that like, he had signed a contract or it wasn't even him, it was his associate, this guy, Rob Walker, had signed a contract with this Romanian real estate magnate that was sort of presented as a property management contract, but actually it was intended to. The Romanian was paying them to try to influence the US Government to get the US Government off of his back in this prosecution or decide get them to try to dissuade the Romanian prosecutors from continuing to bring this case against him. And they sort of suggested like, hey, you know, we're not going to charge you with this. I mean, they said, we're not going to charge you with this. But just so you know, this is out here and we wrote about it at the time, we, my colleague Glenn Thresh and I in the New York Times and said this was like a hardball tactic by the prosecutors to try to get him to plead guilty to the tax charges. Because there's sort of an implied threat that if you don't, we have more that we could bring, including charges for violating this Foreign Agents Registration Act. And that was just one example. I found that on behalf of Burisma, Burisma was trying to do some geothermal business in Italy. And I ended up getting this letter that Hunter Biden wrote to the US Ambassador to Italy at the time who was a family friend of the Bidens, trying to get trying to get him to help broker some conversations between the Burisma executives and the exec, the the government in Tuscany, the region of Italy, which is apparently rich with geothermal resources. So, like there are a number of examples where what Hunter Biden did, I think probably did clear the bar for registration under this Foreign Agents Registration act, which he did not do, therefore, he is violating Farah in those cases or there's a case to be made.
- [46:28]
B
Kenneth P. Vogel writes for the New York Times about all of this. And you've read the stories, but now you could read them all in one book called Devil's Advocates, the Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden and the Washington insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests. Thank you so much, Ken.
- [46:46]
A
Hey, it was a pleasure. Thanks, Mike.
- [46:53]
B
And that's it for today's show. Cory Warr is the producer of the Gist. Kathleen Sykes helps me with the Gist list. Gray Pesca Profundity's piece out today. Jeff Craig is in charge of moving images. You know, he also does some audio editing. I don't like to brag too much about Jeff. Multi talented fellow. Leah Yan is the production coordinator of Peach Fish Productions. And Michelle Pesca is the COO in quite a coup for Peach Fish Productions, Peru. And thanks for listening.