3542 - Accountability for Gaza, Putin's End Game w/ Matt Duss and Candace Rondeaux

Summary

Podcast Title: The Majority Report with Sam Seder
Host: Sam Seder
Episode: 3542 - Accountability for Gaza, Putin's End Game
Release Date: July 21, 2025
Guests: Matt Duss (Center for International Policy), Candace Rondeau (Senior Director of Future Frontlines and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University)

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Introduction

In Episode 3542 of The Majority Report with Sam Seder, host Sam Seder delves into pressing global and domestic issues with insightful guests Matt Duss and Candace Rondeau. The episode focuses on two main topics: the accountability of the Biden administration concerning the Gaza conflict and an in-depth analysis of Vladimir Putin's strategic objectives amidst the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

Accountability for Gaza

Discussion with Matt Duss

Matt Duss, Executive Vice President for the Center for International Policy and co-host of the Undiplomatic Pod, provides a critical examination of the Biden administration's handling of the Gaza situation. The conversation highlights the complex interplay between U.S. foreign policy, Israeli actions, and the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza.

• Biden Administration's Role:
  Duss criticizes President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for their perceived inaction and insufficient accountability regarding the escalating violence in Gaza. He emphasizes that the U.S. has continued to supply arms to Israel despite clear indications of violations of international law.

  "Their decision was just, all right, Biden has laid down the law. He will not stop supplying arms to Israel. We will find other ways to maybe work within the boundaries that Biden has set." (25:31)

• Israeli Leadership Under Netanyahu:
  The discussion points to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's leadership as a significant factor exacerbating the conflict. Netanyahu's political motivations and ongoing legal troubles are cited as reasons for his aggressive stance in Gaza.

  "Netanyahu was making decisions based on his own personal political fortunes. He understood that if the war ends, he would face a reckoning." (25:31)

• Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza:
  Duss sheds light on the formation of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, questioning its true intent and suggesting it serves as a tool for furthering the displacement and suffering of Palestinian civilians.

  "The Gaza Humanitarian foundation is not about providing aid. It's about using aid as a weapon, denying aid over here and providing aid over there to get people to move from here to there." (27:53)

• Call for Accountability:
  Emphasizing the need for genuine accountability, Duss argues that officials involved in the current crisis should face prosecution to restore trust in democratic institutions.

  "Accountability, action, prosecution, indictments for those who are responsible for trying to seal our democracy is essential for us to make sure that this never happens to our country again." (35:04)

Putin's End Game

Conversation with Candace Rondeau

Candace Rondeau, author of Putin's Sledgehammer: The Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos, offers a comprehensive analysis of Russia's strategies under Vladimir Putin amid the protracted conflict with Ukraine.

• Russia-Ukraine Conflict Overview:
  Rondeau discusses the prolonged nature of the war, highlighting Ukraine's resilience and Putin's incremental territorial gains. She underscores the existential nature of the conflict for Ukraine and the strategic objectives Putin aims to achieve.

  "Putin is determined to press whatever little advantage Russian troops have in the east... the struggle is existential for a lot of Ukrainians." (49:10)

• Wagner Group's Role:
  Delving into the activities of the Wagner Group, Rondeau explains its transformation into a tool for Russia's covert operations, including sabotage and espionage across Europe.

  "The Wagner Group brand is still very much alive and still deployed... they pay in crypto." (60:50)

• Impact of Sanctions and Economic Strain:
  The discussion covers the effectiveness of international sanctions on Russia, noting the growing economic strain and its potential to weaken Putin's regime.

  "These sanctions are starting to bite, are starting to have an effect. There was a meeting just last month involving Russia's economists... 21% inflation, nobody can sustain that." (55:36)

• Alliances and Geopolitical Shifts:
  Rondeau highlights the deepening ties between Russia and China, emphasizing the strategic challenges this poses to Western alliances and global stability.

  "The way Washington's foreign policy establishment has thought about the war is that you can divide [Russia and China]... it's not going to work for so many different reasons." (66:45)

• Domestic Russian Politics and Propaganda:
  She explores how Putin's regime utilizes propaganda to sustain support domestically, framing the conflict as a battle against the West and manipulating public perception to justify military actions.

  "This is 100% a war against the west and the United States first... It's really challenging for Russians to look across the border and not see a version of ourselves." (64:44)

Key Insights and Conclusions

• Failure of U.S. Foreign Policy:
  Both guests critique the Biden administration's foreign policy, arguing that a lack of accountability and decisive action has contributed to ongoing humanitarian crises and emboldened adversarial leaders.

• Netanyahu's Political Maneuvering:
  Netanyahu's prioritization of personal political gain over ethical governance is identified as a driving force behind the intensified Gaza conflict, exacerbating regional instability.

• Wagner Group as a Proxy Force:
  The Wagner Group's evolution into a state-backed proxy for Russia underscores the complexities of modern hybrid warfare, blurring lines between state and non-state actors.

• Importance of Genuine Accountability:
  Emphasizing the necessity for real accountability, the episode calls for legal and political repercussions for officials complicit in perpetuating conflicts and undermining democratic principles.

• Geopolitical Realignments:
  The strengthening alliance between Russia and China poses significant challenges to Western foreign policy, necessitating a reevaluation of strategic alliances and defense mechanisms.

Notable Quotes

• Sam Ceder on Deportation Case:

  "This is just appalling." (04:07)

• Matt Duss on Disinformation:

  "No. Yeah, too many Palestinians have died. Which is a formulation I cannot stand." (39:47)

• Candace Rondeau on Wagner Group's Activities:

  "They pay in crypto." (60:50)

• Russell Vogt on Biden's Foreign Policy:

  "He clearly bears enormous responsibility here." (35:04)

Conclusion

Episode 3542 of The Majority Report with Sam Seder provides a critical examination of pivotal global issues, emphasizing the need for accountability in U.S. foreign policy and offering a deep dive into Russia's strategic maneuvers under Vladimir Putin. Through informed discussions with Matt Duss and Candace Rondeau, the episode underscores the complexities of international relations, the ramifications of political leadership, and the enduring impact of proxy conflicts on global stability.

Transcript

[Sam Cedar]

You are listening to a free version.

[Emma Vigeland]

Of Majority Report with Sam Steder.

[Sam Cedar]

To support the show and get another.

[Emma Vigeland]

15 minutes of daily program, go to majority SM please. The majority Report with Sam Cedar. It is Monday, July 21, 2020 25. My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five time award winning Majority Report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, usa. On the program today, Matt Dust EP for the center for International Policy, co host of the Undiplomatic Pod.

[Candice Rondeau]

On.

[Emma Vigeland]

Joe Biden's lack of accountability for Gaza and the horror that's going on there now. Then we'll be talking to Candice Rondeau, senior director of Future Frontlines and Planetary Politics professor of practice at Arizona University, author of Putin's Sledgehammer, the Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into mercenary chaos. Meanwhile, UK, France, 25 other countries call for an immediate end to the slaughter in Gaza. Meanwhile, Trump goes tried and true to deflect from Epstein racism against Native Americans and a former fake birth certified president. EU to ramp up retaliation versus Trump's tariffs. Republican Republicans appear to be steering us into a government shutdown in October. Russell Vogt says a second rescission bill is now on the way. It's Harvard v. Trump today in a US district court in Boston over Trump's canceling of $2.5 billion in federal grants. And don't threaten us with a good time. New York loving Andrew Cuomo says he's going to move to Florida if people don't vote for him for mayor.

[Sam Cedar]

He'll move from what, Westchester county to Florida.

[Emma Vigeland]

I think there's a quick flight. What is that airport, is it not?

[Sam Cedar]

There is a quick flight.

[Emma Vigeland]

There's Westchester Airport.

[Sam Cedar]

He doesn't have to drive over an hour to real New York City airports.

[Emma Vigeland]

Trump's Favorability ranking sinking Favorability ranking sinking along with his immigration policy. Omer Fateh wins the Democratic DFL endorsement for mayor in Minneapolis.

[Matt Duss]

Let's go.

[Emma Vigeland]

The first challenger to win in this century. And after 40 years of legally living in the US an 84 year old goes to renew his green card and is disappeared, thought dead, and then apparently ends up in a country he has no connection to. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome ladies and gentlemen. Thanks so much for joining us at the beginning of the week. It is Funday Monday says Emma Viglund.

[Sam Cedar]

Hello.

[Emma Vigeland]

And when Emma Viglan says that, you know, it will be a fun day for sure.

[Sam Cedar]

I mean less fun. But I just the story about that 82 year old man from Pennsylvania. He was deported to Guatemala. He's been in the United states since the 80s because he got political asylum fleeing Pinochet and the Chilean dictatorship down there. So, like, this is.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah, we'll do that, bring that, we'll go through that. The specifics. I mean, there's not much more to it as far as people know. But we'll go through the specifics in the fun app. But it is just appalling. And I would imagine you could draw a line from when some of the Democrats decided they were going to care about people sent to a gulag in El Salvador. And through all of the images we saw as to why Trump's immigration policy is so poorly ranked in polls. But it would be very helpful if there was an opposition party that provided folks with a different perspective on these things other than just not in charge.

[Matt Duss]

It's interesting, the ICE Twitter account doesn't seem to be touting that removal, instead focusing on people who they can accuse of crimes. So it's just interesting the type of things that get highlighted and the propaganda that, oh, we're just going after bad guys that are making communities unsafe. No, this is disgusting.

[Emma Vigeland]

We'll get more into that as the program goes on. Last week we, I don't know if we said this on the air, but we were talking in the office about Donald Trump unable to shake this Jeffrey Epstein stuff. Now, apparently he has ordered Pam Bondi to release the grand jury stuff. The guys who actually worked on the grand jury said, we keep those reports very, very brief purposely so that we can, you know, roll things out to a grand jury. There's not much there. There, there's a lot more stuff that the FBI could release. We'll see if that satisfies Donald Trump's minions. But the one thing that Donald Trump always does, and we were wondering why he hadn't done it, was how can he go about demonizing people of color in this country in some fashion? Black people, Native Americans. That's his go to, to distract when.

[Sam Cedar]

He doesn't like a news cycle.

[Emma Vigeland]

Colin Kaepernick, not available, apparently. So I think Donald Trump knows of one other black guy and he set Tulsi Gabbard out. You remember Donald Trump very mad at Tulsi Gabbard for telling Americans that Iran is not anywhere close to developing a nuclear weapon. And so how does she get herself back into good graces? Well, she basically fabricates a scandal. It's fascinating.

[Brett McGurk]

And I understand that there is more, perhaps, that you are going to come out with next week. And I was told that that's why they raided Mar A Lago, that they wanted to find the Trump Russia documents that indicated there was absolutely no collus and that there was no evidence to even start such an investigation. But Trump didn't have it there in Mar a Lago, but that's why they raided his house in 2022. Is that correct?

[Tulsi Gabbard]

I don't have the details on the specifics of the Mar A Lago Mar A Lago raid itself. Those are within the possession of the FBI.

[Emma Vigeland]

Pause. I just want to make it clear what that response means. I didn't get the memo. I was supposed to lie about that.

[Russell Vogt]

You're.

[Emma Vigeland]

Are you looking at this week's script or next week's script? Because that's not the memo I got about that. Now, let's be clear. She released information last week that said there was no evidence that Russia had the ability to change the outcome of the election via our voting machines. And in 2016, it was quite clear in 2017 that was, that was reported multiple times that there was an attempt to breach in one or two places around the country, but there was no wholesale or broad threat to the integrity of the actual voting tabulations in terms of Russians. So she's just reiterating this stuff and trying to conflate it with what the, the other accusation was is that there were tons of Russian operatives working out of the, what they called the Internet Research Administration, the ira. I can't remember exactly what it. And she doesn't even touch that.

[Sam Cedar]

No, she's just doing this, I mean, incredibly bizarre Internet Research Agency. Yeah. And this is notable that this is on Fox Business, given the fact that I think around 24 hours prior to this appearance, Trump had filed some frivolous lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch because the Wall Street Journal published the contents of the letter he, he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein. So the reason that the FBI had to raid Trump's Mar a Lago, you know, compound back in 2022 was because they requested all these classified documents that he had hoarded in his bathroom or they were moved into the bathroom and he had refused to return them or only partially returned some of them. So they had to execute the search.

[Emma Vigeland]

I like to read in the bathroom.

[Matt Duss]

Secret document where Obama Guilty, guilty.

[Emma Vigeland]

I like to read in the bathroom.

[Matt Duss]

Put the secret document where Obama admits to framing me underneath the toilet paper.

[Sam Cedar]

So that's what the allegation is now, is that he was right to hold the documents because they contain the smoking gun about Obama not being accurate about Russian.

[Emma Vigeland]

Release them.

[Matt Duss]

Just put them underneath the plunger, please.

[Emma Vigeland]

God.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

I don't have the details on the specifics of the Mar A Lago. Mar a Lago raid. It's. Those are within the possession of the FBI. But there's no question in my mind that this intelligence community assessment that President Obama ordered be published, which contained a manufactured intelligence document. It's worse than even politicization of intelligence. It was manufactured intelligence that sought to achieve President Obama and his team's objective, which was undermining President Trump's presidency and subverting the will of the American people. So, yes, next week, we will be releasing more detailed information about how exactly this took place and the extent to which this information was sought to be hidden from the American people, hidden from officials who would be in a position to do something about it. And that's really the point here that I think is most important. Maria, and you said it in your opening. Accountability is essential for the future of our country, for the American people to have any sense of trust in the integrity of our democratic republic. Accountability, action, prosecution, indictments for those who are responsible for trying to seal our democracy is essential for us to make sure that this never happens to our country again.

[Russell Vogt]

Ask the moms.

[Emma Vigeland]

I mean, I agree with that last part. And it would have been great advice for her to have given to Barack Obama in 2016 or 2008, frankly, and to Joe Biden in 2020, who she endorsed exactly when he decided to get Merrick Garland, the most feckless AG we could have possibly imagined. Here is Donald Trump with a AI Again, this is all just part of his distracting from the Epstein stuff because they were nipping at his heels. And so what he basically did to his followers is, I'm going to throw at them the black guy. Here we go.

[Sam Cedar]

There's no audio to this, by the way, because.

[Matt Duss]

Well, there is, but it's the YMCA's Village People. Village People's YMCA songs.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah, we can't play that.

[Sam Cedar]

You'll be shocked to hear here.

[Emma Vigeland]

It's Trump sitting down with Barack Obama. He signals to somebody, and then people come in to arrest Barack Obama. There we go.

[Sam Cedar]

They also show him in, you know, a jumpsuit in prison at one point.

[Emma Vigeland]

Whatever. Let's go on to the part that's. That is also more relevant, and that is the Trump goes on because it's not enough. People are not thinking enough about Barack Obama. Trump moves over to. He can't find Colin Kaepernick is not around, apparently and so he immediately goes to the next best thing. And here he is on Truth Social. My statement on the Washington, he calls them Redskins has tonally blown up, but only in a very positive way. I may put a restriction on them that if they don't change back to the original Washington name and get rid of the ridiculous moniker Washington Commanders, I won't make a deal for them to build a stadium in Washington. The team would be much more valuable and the deal would be much more exciting for everyone. Cleveland should do the same with the formerly Cleveland Indians. The owner of the Cleveland baseball team, Matt Dolan, who is very political, has lost three elections in a row because of that ridiculous name change. What he doesn't understand is that if he changed the name back to the Cleveland Indians, he might actually win an election. Indians are being treated very unfairly. Make Indians great again. Mega. I mean, this is an old playbook and it very well may work.

[Sam Cedar]

Josh Harris says he's not changing the name. The new owner, I mean, the Commanders have had now with drafting Jaden Daniels, number two overall last year, the most success that they've had almost entirely in my lifetime. There's only now it was between the Commanders and the Cowboys, the last NFC teams that hadn't been to an NFC championship. And like that, they were the record holders. Now the Cowboys hold it singularly, which is very, very gratifying. But why would they change the name after having such a successful year, except that like Trump is undemocratically holding the city of Washington D.C. hostage because they want this old RFK site back and they want to build a new stadium.

[Emma Vigeland]

Oh, I don't, I don't know if it's going to work in terms of him getting the name change. Yeah, the, that's not the agenda.

[Sam Cedar]

But to distract it.

[Emma Vigeland]

The agenda is to give his MAGA followers a different bone to play with. And that, and in that regard, I think it's going to, I think we're going to start seeing Fox News is going to be talking about the, you know, the NFL for the first time in ages. You know, they're all slagging the players of the WNBA because you know how important women's sports are and women in women's sports are to them.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah.

[Emma Vigeland]

And we're going to see the whole MAGA right wing universe is going to zero in on this Obama stuff and this, you know, football or baseball story that Trump wants them to, and they'll do it gleefully and it's going to be amusing to watch. But the bottom line is the Epstein stuff I don't think is going to go away. At one point they'll run out of like, interest in this and Trump will have to come up with another racialized controversy so that they forget the fact that their daddy was so intimately involved with a guy who was running a pedophilic trafficking network.

[Matt Duss]

So we're gonna change all the symbols back to what we, what they were when we were kids. All the symbols. We're gonna change all the symbols back. Gonna have our old symbols back.

[Emma Vigeland]

All right, Couple words from our sponsor, then we'll be talking to Matt Dust. It's been brutal this summer. Like in New York. Oh yeah. I don't remember a series of, of 90 degrees days in a row and we're not even into August yet.

[Sam Cedar]

Yeah.

[Emma Vigeland]

And every year I'm like, well, I can get through it with this crappy air conditioner. And then I'm like, well, maybe I'll get it at the beginning of next year. And then I'm like, well, I can't buy it now because it's the peak of season to buy a new air conditioner. The only thing that is saving me is are my Cozy Earth sheets. They are temperature regulating and basically helps me also with my mood because I get angry when I'm hot. Cooler sleeping conditions apparently may actually boost your serotonin levels.

[Sam Cedar]

Whoa.

[Emma Vigeland]

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[Sam Cedar]

That's good.

[Emma Vigeland]

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[Candice Rondeau]

All right.

[Emma Vigeland]

Quick break. When we come back, MATT D. We are back. Sam Ceder, Emma Vigland on THE Majority Report. It is a pleasure to welcome back to the program Matt Duss. He is the executive vice president for the center for International Policy. Also, you still doing your podcast?

[Russell Vogt]

Yep. I'm diplomatic with my buddy Van Jackson and my colleague Julia Gledhill, so people should check that out.

[Emma Vigeland]

Okay. And we'll put a link obviously, to that in our podcast and YouTube description. So, Matt, I want to first start about well, let's, let's take the broader view and then we'll get to your piece on, on, on Biden, because both these things sort of start in the same place on some level, which was a piece in the Times, I guess it was a week or two ago, outlining how essentially Netanyahu has been keeping the assault on Gaza, I don't really know, you know, the genocide on Gaza alive and active to maintain his own political fortunes. And that seems to have given a permission structure for a lot more mainstream reporting over the past two weeks, ranging from Ezra Klein had a piece in the, you know, an op ed, but more reports on the daily killing of dozens upon dozens of Palestinians just looking for food aid. We have starvation. I mean, what, what is your sense of what's happening now?

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah, I mean, I do think that that big New York Times magazine piece, I believe it was last weekend.

[Emma Vigeland]

Kind.

[Russell Vogt]

Of laid it out in a way that was just inescapable. But I would say, like, what was new? There was only the details. It was deeply reported. It gave a tick tock. But this has been clear for a very long time. This has been clear within weeks after October 7 that Netanyahu was making decisions based on his own personal political fortunes. He understood that if the war ends, he would face a reckoning. He was already under indictment for corruption. There were massive protests against him because of the judicial reform efforts. And then Israel faced the biggest, most catastrophic security failure in its history for which he was clearly responsible. There were even, you know, reports, you know, that Biden himself clearly understood that, that Netanyahu's own concern for his political career was what was driving decision making. But of course, Biden never really did anything about it. And I do think that's that's part of what, what's going on here as well. I mean, for a long time, especially for, mainly for Democrats, you had a Democratic president who continued to pretend that what was happening on the ground, clear to all of us, was not really happening, that they were doing their best to try and make things better. And I think, you know, with, with the end of the Biden administration and Trump coming in, I do think this has freed some people in the United States, leaders who should have spoken up before now, let's be clear, but also others in Europe who have taken a, you know, are taking a bit more of an independent approach from the United States, though not nearly enough to speak out a bit more. But I also think the key thing is just this, this, this has been so relentless. You mentioned the nearly 100 people yesterday killed in Gaza trying to get food from this ridiculous new, you know, food. This aid scheme that they've created in Gaza, having destroyed, you know, the actual functioning organizations and infrastructure that is supposed to be delivering aid and which still could, if only Israel would still allow it. This is a daily occurrence now where you have dozens, sometimes over 100 Palestinian men, women and children who are just gunned down trying to, you know, to find desperately needed aid, all while being herded from place to place throughout Gaza whenever Israel chooses to deliver evacuation orders to move them from from point A to point B to point C.

[Emma Vigeland]

I mean, I get the point of like it opened up Trump sort of like taking ownership of America's role relative to Israel has opened up things a bit for folks. But it really does feel like this is more recent than that. Right. I mean, we're in month six or seven now of the Trump administration. You know, maybe, maybe you give them a month or two to make it not look so explicit that you're, you know, this is a partisanship thing. How much of this is that there is a sense that Netanyahu is weak and that what is what Israel has been doing has been so egregious that there is an attempt to make it about just Netanyahu, like as if he is not been a fundamental creature. The guys had what he's the longest running prime minister the country has ever had. He has been in like active in Israeli politics for 30 some odd years, like as a central figure.

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah.

[Emma Vigeland]

And there is no indication that he himself, you know, has had too much jeopardy in terms of like elections per se. It's been more, you know, criminal stuff. How much of this is a sort of an opportunistic time to sort of say, like, okay, maybe we can make this more about Netanyahu than something fundamental to the system of government that Israel has?

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah, I don't know if I. I mean, there's always been an attempt to kind of make this about Netanyahu. I don't know if that's necessarily new. I mean, if you go back to Chuck Schumer's speech on the floor of the Senate over a year ago, I mean, that was, you know, he kind of came out and said, Netanyahu is a problem. Israel needs new elections, it needs new leadership. And, of course, Netanyahu is a particularly, in many ways, uniquely pernicious figure, not just in Israeli politics, but I would argue in global politics. But I think that's only part of the story now. I think what's really one thing that's important now is the creation of this Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Just that was stood up just a few months ago as part of this, you know, quote, this plan to provide aid to Gaza while they have diminished and weakened and ejected, essentially all of the organizations that have been traditionally providing aid to Gaza and can capably do that. Because people should understand, and I think many people do, humanitarians certainly do understand, professional humanitarians who work in these conflict regions understand that the Gaza Humanitarian foundation is not about providing aid. It's about using aid as a weapon, denying aid over here and providing aid over there to get people to move from here to there in order to corral them inside essentially what are concentration camps. And I think, just as this has become so explicit, you've got these American mercenaries essentially guarding this food, who are opening fire on Palestinians along with IDF troops, along with the usual chorus of Israeli officials who can't help but be public and explicit about what they are trying to do, which is to thin out the population, to move them to a place where it could be potentially more easy to expel them ultimately from the territory of Gaza.

[Sam Cedar]

And Gideon Levy wrote about this explicitly in Haaretz, just about how it's a plan for ethnic cleansing and it is a concentration camp. Using those terms, can you describe what's happening right now with the Israeli military operations in the north and how for the past month the plan has been to corral around 600,000 Palestinians? That's what they say. We don't know how many are left, just to be clear, but that's the number they're putting out there, corralling them into Rafah in the south?

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah. No, you what the plan seems to be to corral, you know, probably more than 600,000. You have, you know, over 2 million Palestinians. But again, we don't know how many have been killed. It's almost certainly far more than the nearly 60,000 that we know of, given all the people who are buried under the rubble, people who will die very soon from disease, people who are dying of starvation. But to corral this mass of people in essentially 20% of Gaza, corral them into 20% of what was already one of the most densely populated areas in the world. And so I think, yes, Levy wrote. And Israeli American scholar Omar Bartov in a piece in the New York Times just last week said, I resisted the term genocide. I will now use that term very, very clear for others like Aryeh Nair, who is, was the one of the founders of Human Rights Watch. He wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books over a year ago pointing to Israel's denial of aid and its use of food as a weapon. That for him answered that question. Yes, this is clearly the showing intent to carry out a genocide. And I think it's just, you know, I don't know, someone commented, I saw earlier today that the dam is now breaking. I hope that is true. I wish that were true. But the fact that we are almost years into this and we're still discussing this question, I think it's just staggering.

[Emma Vigeland]

I want to talk about your piece about the accountability of those who, of Biden and those who are around him. I mean, on one hand, as a political matter, I think it has become increasingly clear that Harris, a big part of her loss is, I think, can be attributed at least, you know, and we'll never know for sure, all the different factors. But I mean, to her refusal to provide any daylight between her and Biden, even going so far as denying a Palestinian lawmaker an opportunity to speak at the dnc almost, almost seems spiteful. It was so far behind. And I also, just to add to this as a political matter, you know, CNN showed a poll the other day, I guess it was two weeks ago, that Democrats have really dramatically moved from where they were eight, eight years ago on Israel. And surely the Harris campaign must have known this, right? Like, I mean, as just sheerly, as a sort of like a cynical political question to not provide any daylight. There is, it was absurd. But we also have a blob, as it were, to use a term, that we don't hear that much anymore about the foreign policy apparatus that surrounded Biden. And to the extent that Biden knew what was going on, I'm sure he. You knew enough to appoint these people at one point. But talk about, like the notion of accountability, why they should be held to account.

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah, I mean, with Biden, and I think you're right, first of all about Harris. If she didn't understand that this was going to be a major issue, she should have. Clearly there is an entire consultant class in the Democratic Party closely tied with a donor class that wants things to be a certain way. That is frankly, detached from the clearly expressed opinions of a growing majority of Democrats. We've seen this in the polling for a year. This is a big problem on a whole range of issues. And you know, I think we need to acknowledge the Palestinian demonstrators, the pro Palestinian voices in the party were asking for such a bare minimum from Harris that she could not even give. And again, that really needs to be understood as a major mistake. Even if that was not the determination to failure that lost the election. I think the failure to kind of tell the truth about what everyone could see was happening in Gaza signals a failure of courage on a whole range of other issues. That is why it's becoming a litmus test for the Democratic Party. As far as Biden. Listen, Biden, I think clearly was detached on a whole range of issues. This was not one of those issues. He is, he's someone who regards himself as a foreign policy guy. And one of the issues that he cares and is involved most in is Israel, Palestine and the Middle East. This is what I've heard from multiple people. It's like, yes, he could be detached and kind of not sweating the details on a lot of things, but he was very engaged on this issue and I think so. He clearly bears enormous responsibility here. His view of the US Israel relationship for many years has always been that the United States just supports Israel unequivocally and unquestioningly and unconditionally. And that's what we saw. Despite the fact that Israel was clearly in violation of US Law of international law, there was never a moment, except for that one brief moment when Biden announced a pause on the shipping of the largest bombs of, you know, 2,000 pound bombs, I think it was. That was the only time Biden made any move to withhold weapons, which he should have done almost immediately when it became clear that Israel was violating his laws. But you also have other key advisors around him like Brett McGurk, the Middle east advisor, the key Middle east person on the National Security Council, obviously Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Amos Hochstein, another top advisor on the Middle east, and Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State. These, I think, are really top decision makers. And their decision was just, all right, Biden has laid down the law. He will not stop supplying arms to Israel. We will find other ways to maybe work within the boundaries that Biden has set. But what you end up with is the United States and the Biden administration helped perpetrate a genocide. That is what we need to understand. And if we want to take the law seriously, I think we need to have real accountability, not Washington accountability. Because in Washington, when you say accountability, what that essentially means is, okay, we all agree a bad thing happened and we really hope it doesn't happen again, and we're going to pretend to care about it until you get distracted by something else. No, I mean real accountability, first of all, that none of these people should ever serve in government again. Let's just start there. The idea that these folks could just kind of like, you know, kind of, you know, slink back into public life and into positions of authority. I don't, you know, have any, you know, doubt that, that, you know, it's already happening and it will happen. But I do think we need to be having a conversation about what, what, what, what it really means to press these people for, for, for answers about what they knew and when they knew it. And this is part of what my article is about. It's not just that they continued supplying arms when it was quite clear what Israel was doing. That, that, that. That civilian suffering was not an unintended consequence of Israel's policy. It is part of, of Israel's policy, and they knew this, but they continue to mislead the American public and the global public about this. You can point to, like, you know, John Kirby and all these other spokespeople who are constantly pressed on these questions, and they're like, oh, we're not really seeing evidence of that. No. Yeah, too many Palestinians have died. Which is a formulation I cannot stand, as if, you know, because. As if there's some kind of acceptable number of Palestinian civilians who could be killed, and we have now exceeded that. And that's a bad thing. Their whole approach to this was essentially a disinformation campaign about what was really happening in Gaza so that they would not have to really confront the question of ending military aid.

[Emma Vigeland]

And we know now what their understanding was contemporaneously because Matt Miller has come out and conceded that, yeah, one of the spokespeople. So what would be. I mean, what are the mechanisms for something like this? Like, how do you, how do you say, you know, the, the voting public is just not, you know, with all Due respect to them and us, just not that savvy. I, you know, the number of Americans who would know the name Brett McGurk is probably, you know, too small to count. And. Or, you know, what's the difference between Phil Gordon and Brett McGurk? You know, the.

[Russell Vogt]

It's a big one.

[Emma Vigeland]

It's a big one. But I'm saying nobody would know that. Phil Gordon, being Harris's primary foreign policy adviser and one of the architects of the, of the. The Obama nuke deal. What is the mechanism to sort of do this? Or is it like one of these inside. Like, is it just in. And how do we help with that project?

[Russell Vogt]

I mean, right now, I mean, let's just say if we had an actually functioning Congress, I think this is the kind of thing that Congress would be doing oversight on. You would have had hearings on this, pressing these officials well over a year ago, given that, what they. Because every time they want to supply new weapons to Israel, they have to kind of. They, you know, they're essentially saying that we, you know, we judge that Israel is not in violation of U. S. Laws, and that was a lie. Israel was clearly in violation of US Laws. That's something the US Congress should care about, given that the US Congress passed those laws. Unfortunately, we don't have that Congress. Okay. I mean, there were efforts by people like Senator Van Hollen, like Senator Sanders, a number of people in the House to press on these questions, but they were not able. You know, unfortunately, even though you got a number of senators and members of Congress joining with those efforts, you did not see a kind of a critical mass in Congress. And I think that's a real tragedy. So let's just say in a dream world where Congress was doing its job, you would have already had all these people called to the Hill to testify under oath about what was actually going on. So in the absence of that, you're left with, okay, articles of people, people like you guys raising this, helping people understand what was done here, just raising as much as possible public awareness and awareness in the policy establishment about what these people did and what they're going to carry with them, because we will not be done with this in our lifetimes. I need people to understand that the tale of this catastrophe will be very, very long. We will be dealing with the consequences of this, you know, for. For a very, very long time.

[Emma Vigeland]

What is Brett McGurk doing these days?

[Russell Vogt]

Well, he's a. He's a CNN contributor and he's also an advisor at Lux Capital. So, yeah, it's you know, he decided to just play right into the every, every worst stereotype of a corrupt Washington official and, and just roll right out of the White House into a, into a, well, a well paid CNN gig and working for, you know, you know, a Capital Advisor account. Meanwhile, the head of Lux Capital, a few weeks ago as Israel had launched its war on Iran, was dreaming about all the investment opportunities in a new Iran. So that's Brett McGurk.

[Emma Vigeland]

Weren't they also, like talking about we'll get in on this venture for new hotels in Gaza?

[Russell Vogt]

I hadn't seen that, but that doesn't surprise me. That is very much in keeping with, you know, just how ridiculous these people are.

[Emma Vigeland]

Horrible. Well, Matt Duss, we will link to your piece in the is it Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy magazine.

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah.

[Emma Vigeland]

And appreciate your coming on and talking to us about it.

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah. Thanks, Sam.

[Sam Cedar]

Thanks, man.

[Emma Vigeland]

All right, folks, we're going to take quick break. When we come back, Candice Rondo. She is a senior director of Future Frontlines Planetary Politics, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, author of Putin's Sledgehammer, the Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. We'll be right back after this.

[Candice Rondeau]

Sam it sa.

[Emma Vigeland]

We are back. Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report, it is a pleasure to welcome to the program Candace Rondo, she's a senior director, Future Front Lines in Planetary Politics and professor of practice at Arizona State University, author of her latest, Putin Sledgehammer, the Wagner Group and Russia's Collapse into Mercenary Chaos. Candace, welcome to the program.

[Candice Rondeau]

Thanks for having me on.

[Emma Vigeland]

So let's I want to get into your book a little bit, but broadly speaking, give us your assessment of where we're at in terms of the capacity both for Russia and Ukraine to maintain these fighting. I mean, things with Donald Trump, it feels like changes week to week in terms of our support of Ukraine. And it's sometimes hard to know how much of this is real and how much of it is sort of some type of posturing and for whom even that posturing would be. But what's your assessment?

[Candice Rondeau]

Well, one thing I think that's really important to understand doesn't really matter, you know, if Trump is up or down one day or even if Putin is up or up or down one day. The Ukrainians are very determined to keep fighting this war. Yes. They have challenges with munitions. They have challenges with arms. The onslaught of attacks that we've seen in the last month or so, drone attacks on Kyiv, 700 drones launched in one particular instance, certainly is having an impact on the psychology and the morale of Ukraine, for sure. At the same time, the struggle is existential for a lot of Ukrainians. And, yes, there are cracks in the surface, certainly, when it comes to unity. I think there's a lot of questions about Volodymyr Zelenskyy's staying capacity, just politically speaking, because he's. Obviously, he's over his term as president. But structurally speaking, this war is really, for Ukraine, an existential war in which most Ukrainians agree that capitulation to Putin, whether in the form of a ceasefire that's temporary or something bigger, ultimately means the erasure of their civilization and their culture. On Putin's side, he is determined to.

[Emma Vigeland]

Can I ask you, before we get depressing, before we get to Putin's side, do you have a sense and is there any way to know, like, what. What constitutes the threshold for. For the. What is the existential threshold, in other words, like, how much. Where does it cross over? That is it. Are we talking about the Donbas? Are we talking about Crimea? Are we talking about, like, you know, at what point does it become existential, or is it on the outskirts, sort of the, you know, pre2014 borders?

[Candice Rondeau]

Well, that's hard to say. I will say that the attacks on Dnipro, which is, of course, a town at the threshold in the east, near Donbass, I think a lot of Ukrainians have long thought of Dnipro as kind of the furthest edge of sort of democratic Ukraine. I would also say that anything that looks like the fall of Odessa, where essentially Ukraine would be unable to really access its way to the Black Sea and the ports there, which, of course, are extremely important for export of grains and other materials. It's how the economy survives, basically, you know, something that sort of changed the status of Dnipro and changed the status of Odessa, I think, would call into question the current state of this strategy in Ukraine.

[Emma Vigeland]

Okay, fair enough. And so give me. You were about to give us an assessment of. Of Putin in Russia. What is that?

[Candice Rondeau]

So much like Donald Trump, you have to kind of look at Putin in terms of his rhetoric and then his actions, and you have to find a way to square the two, which often doesn't really compute. Right. It doesn't really work out. There's a lot of irrationality and illogic on the surface when you look only at the rhetoric Putin has shown through his actions, that he has continued to press and press and press whatever little advantage Russian troops have in the east. And we have seen incremental Gains, you know, to the tune of sometimes meters a day, you know, occasionally miles a month. And so we have now not exactly momentum because that would suggest that things are moving really fast. And obviously we're three years into what was supposed to be a three day war, and things aren't moving as fast as Putin had hoped. But I think he sees that in addition to this incremental gain on the territorial front, there's also political gains with the unity or disunity of NATO. And we've seen that on display again and again. I would argue that the NATO summit that we just had in June was a pretty good sign of the continued disunity that Putin is hoping to exploit and expand. We don't have unity on the spending, we don't have unity on the deployment of weapons. The only shift that we've really seen is obviously Donald Trump's most recent statement that Patriot missiles would be sold, missile batteries would be sold to Europe and other munitions would be sold to Europe as a kind of proxy in a stopgap measure. But Putin has shown that he is willing to go pretty far. He has made an alliance with North Korea. We've seen North Korean troops inserted into Kursk, right into that border region near Ukraine. We've seen African troops even. We've seen deals with Iran to build large scale drone factories. We've seen cooperation with China. So the determination is there even if the resources are not. And I think ultimately what we're starting to see also though are cracks within the economy. These sanctions are starting to bite, are starting to have an effect. There was a meeting just last month involving Russia's economists, economics ministers and central bank making some pretty grim prognostications about the state of the economy. 21% inflation, nobody can sustain that. So I think the concern here now is will this 50 day marker that Trump has thrown down come and go without any additional sanctions? The third country sanctions that have been long threatened, and if they are put in place, what's going to be the effect on the global economy? And how long can the United States and NATO kind of withstand, most likely the political pressures that would come because of the prices at the gas pump that would be evident Right, right after those sanctions were put in place?

[Emma Vigeland]

And are there political threats for Putin in this context, or is there a system such that he spends an inordinate amount of time making sure that those threats are, in one fashion or another, neutralized, for lack of a better word?

[Candice Rondeau]

One thing that the Wagner group experience kind of gives us as a lesson is that Putin's regime is extremely brittle, and the security regime is very fragile. He is always, like many other rulers in Russia before him, worried about the potential for a coup or some sort of internal rebellion. And, of course, a war of this scale always raises that threshold of risk, because if it doesn't go well, and it hasn't, there have been almost a million casualties or more, actually now on the Russian side, and about 400 to 500,000 on the Ukrainian side. Those are big numbers, and they're not the kinds of numbers that you can just easily hide or brush away. So I think that the concern about the fragility of this internal security and the people that surrounds himself with is always a serious concern for Putin. And to some degree, I think it may be one reason why we've seen, for example, some of the escalation in sabotage attacks across Europe. That suggests to me a certain level of desperation to change the terms of the war, expand it beyond Ukrainian territory, and pull Europe deeper into a conflict that it doesn't really know if it wants to fight.

[Emma Vigeland]

Let's talk about that, because there was just, I guess it was the last week that there were three British nationals who were arrested, ostensibly working for the Wagner group, involved in some type of espionage. How widespread is this? Because I don't know that we hear that much about it. And how effective is it? Is the idea that it's supposed to make Europeans less interested in supporting Ukraine or, like a. Like, fearful that they're being drawn in to create that sort of, I guess, fear? Or it seems to me it could also cut the other way, where if there's a genuine fear, that. And my sense is I haven't had a lot of conversations about this, but from what I've heard, I know Europeans who have a genuine fear that Russia is going to come rolling through Europe. I mean, I don't know how rational that is, but that seems to be in the air. Give us a sense of what the Wagner group has been up to in terms of that type of espionage and if it's having its desired effect.

[Candice Rondeau]

Yeah. So the three nationals that you're referencing who were just arrested, they were charged with firebombing a car that used to belong to the Prime Minister of the uk, Keir Starmer, and also a property that I guess he still owns, but belongs to another family member. And what's interesting about that, actually, all of that kind of unfolded the week that I was in London covering a case, a different case entirely linked to the Wagner group, involving the prosecution of a total of eight British guys, young men, all of them, with the exception of one, who had also been recruited via Telegram and a Wagner Group affiliated channel known as the Gray Zone. And it seems in both of these instances, the Wagner Group sort of figured very prominently, mostly as kind of the bait for young men who were kind of looking around for something to do. And the tactics have been seen in other places. I also covered a case in Poland and Krakow involving two Russian nationals who are fomenting Wagner Group propaganda. This is just as Wagner was Falling apart in 2023, summer of 2023, these two guys were also arrested. So the Wagner Group brand is still very much alive and still deployed and used by the GRU Intelligence Wing, which is kind of the main arm of the military intelligence of the Kremlin. And although the actual organization itself, or the network that propped up the organization, has more or less been reorganized into three or four different branches, including most notoriously, the Africa Corps, where Wagner affiliated forces now fall under this broad rubric of expeditionary forces in places like Mali and Central African Republic and so forth. So Wagner is still alive as an idea and as a brand. And the GRU has been very good at exploiting its reputation to attract people to undertake criminal enterprises that ultimately result in. They do pay. They pay in crypto.

[Emma Vigeland]

So the GRU sort of just runs it through, I guess, the, for lack of a better term, shell brand of the Wagner Group at this point.

[Candice Rondeau]

Exactly. Yeah. They pay and they pay for criminals who are in their 20s getting 5,000 or 10,000 bucks to set fire to a warehouse with Starlink components in it is pretty good money. But to answer your question about what's the strategic purpose of all of this, it's twofold. One, it is certainly devised to slow down deliveries of things that are really important to the front, including Starlink terminals. I'll just note that Starlink figures in several different sabotage cases, including potentially the incendiary devices that were found on DHL cargo planes a couple months back, both in Germany and then on the way to the United States and Canada. So there's clearly a kind of tactical goal in slowing things down, slowing down the delivery of important goods to the front. But there's also the psychological effect, and that is to kind of say, we are everywhere. We can reach deep beyond our own borders, beyond Ukraine's borders, and we can penetrate and we can expose the weaknesses of an alliance that says that it is not at war with Russia, but Russia believes that it is at war with that. So it's kind of an interesting Sort of asymmetry of conceptions of exactly what's going on.

[Emma Vigeland]

How much impact has it had tactically and how much impact has it had? I mean, it doesn't feel like strategically it's had that much of an impact, but maybe that's just because we're sitting here and, you know, don't hear that that much of the news. You know, I guess it would. We would see it strategically more in. If we were maybe situated in Europe and, and reading European news. But tactically and strategically, how effective has this been?

[Candice Rondeau]

So tactically, I could say it's probably been pretty effective at the sort of level of taking out logistics hubs and raising the cost for those who service Ukraine. I talked to some of the victims in the case, in the East London case where this warehouse was burned down. It was a nice Ukrainian couple who'd been emigrated to the UK years and years ago to start their own logistics business. And they're basically operating at one third of the rate that they were a couple of years ago. This is largely because of the strain put on the logistics lines. In fact, one of the guys that I talked with who was a manager at the warehouse, said he was actually on his way to Minsk to meet with other Ukraine logistics providers because they were really in crisis over the raised cost, first of all, for insurance, for bringing things to the front line, but then also the depletion of demand simply because people are afraid of sending things over. So it certainly has had a tactical effect on some level. And I think the strategic effect has been to really test the intelligence coordination between these rather disparate countries that, you know, frankly, you know, the United Kingdom is no longer part of Europe and so now finds itself in the crosshairs at a time when it, you know, has weakened capacity to really coordinate with its other NATO partners. And the strain, of course, with the United States under Trump has not helped things. So I think it's had an effect. But it's true that if you're not sitting in London or Brussels, it's harder to kind of see it up close.

[Sam Cedar]

In terms of, like, how Russia is selling this to the public. You touched on it briefly, but is it framed as this kind of battle with the United States by proxy? Is it about the Western world? What are some of the kind of domestic arguments that Russians are hearing about this multi year long war at this point?

[Candice Rondeau]

This is 100% a war against the west and the United States first. And that is always the bigger picture and has been for a very long time. Putin was, I think probably not as convincing with that rhetoric when the invasion of Crimea happened in 2014. And there are a lot of reasons for that, you know, simply because actually you didn't see much of a united response from the United States in Europe. It was sort of a little bit patchy. However, since then, of course, there have been sanctions, there have been a real targeting of the economy of Russia. And so on some level, after eight years of all of that, it has convinced a certain part of the population that the forever war is with the United States and NATO. However, I think that there's a lot of conflict. I think psychologically for Russians, it would be a little bit like if we went to war with Canada and tried to make it our 51st state. Right. I mean, you know, it would be really hard for us to kind of look across the border and not see a version of ourselves. And I think the Russians really experience that when they think about Ukraine and vice versa. There are really lots of close ethnic and family ties, so it's really challenging. Ukraine itself, you know, on the one hand, seems to have kind of fallen under this kind of rhetoric for the domestic audience in Russia being sort of this neo Nazi, new enterprising sort of government under Zelenskyy. Of course, that's ridiculous, but it can be convincing enough when you have this kind of psychological tension and cognitive dissonance going on.

[Emma Vigeland]

How much, from your perspective, I mean, I understand from the Russian perspective, this has been a war waged against the United States and the West. How much, from the perspective of the west in the United States has this become a, like a proxy battle and an offensive one, let's put it that way, as opposed to, you know, an agenda that was sort of like, foisted on them. Because my sense, you know, I still remember Barack Obama in 2012 laughing at Mitt Romney when Mitt Romney says Russia is our number one foe. And I certainly got the sense that, at least from that administration, they want to make China our foe and that Russia was just a, you know, whatever. It's not going to have that much of an impact.

[Candice Rondeau]

Right. A regional power. Right. That's sort of faded in its capacity to really challenge the United States. Is roughly what Obama said, the problem. Listen, this is not just an Obama problem. It's not a Trump problem. It's not a Biden problem. The problem inside Washington with the way we conceive of the tensions with Russia and China is that we kind of think that they need to be somehow they can be divided from each other, and there's a failure to understand, especially now, how closely Russia and China have drawn closer to each other economically, politically, how dependent Russia is now on China for purchases of oil and energy, as well as for exports of dual use technologies that it needs to fight its war in Ukraine. But the fundamental kind of structural flaw in the way Washington's foreign policy establishment has thought about the war is that you can divide the two and that somehow even this talk of a reverse Kissinger move to kind of isolate China by pulling Russia closer into the orbit of the United States through some sort of of progressive appeasement of Putin and his demands vis a vis Ukraine and Europe. It's not going to work for so many different reasons, but largely because of that inextricable bound between China and Russia economically, which only grows by the day. The more Russia sinks economically, the more it needs outside help. It's not going to get it from the United States. Right. So the challenge is, how do you fight a war that nobody believes is actually happening? And I think you're right, Sam, that the United States and its allies, although increasingly Europe, I think, seems to have now a new mind of its own. But certainly until very recently, the west has sort of taken on this idea that the war is defensive and the fate of the outcome of the war is really up to the Ukrainians. And we've seen this movie before in Afghanistan, we've seen it in Iraq. It's sort of like we don't really want to own fully the full outcome and implications of wars that we both finance and try and fight through proxies.

[Emma Vigeland]

Lastly, I gotta ask you about this because it comes up obviously in your book which outlines, I guess, the rise and the fall of the Wagner group. But one thing that just stuck out for me was that the Internet Research Agency was launched. I don't know if it was specifically the Wagner group as a branded that way, but it was launched by Prigozhin and we just had Tulsi Gabbard come out. Now, granted, this is project Forget about Jeffrey Epstein, but claim that the Obama administration lied to the American public when they said that there was evidence of Russian interference in the election via largely the Internet Research Agency. She's claiming that they said this even though they had evidence that Russia was not able to hack the elections in terms of like literally change the vote count. So there's a little bit of a conflation there. But tell us about what that role was in 2016 in participating in the election, the 2016 election.

[Candice Rondeau]

So the reality is, no matter what Gabbard says the Internet Research Agency's interference campaign in the 2016 election actually predates 2016. As far back as 2014, late 2014, there was evidence of Facebook accounts that were stood up under sort of fake and false enterprises by parts of the troll farm that belonged to glavsat, which was kind of the original name of the company now known as the Internet Research Agency. And it was a bit of an experiment, and it was an experiment in exploiting some marketing and advertisement campaigns online, using exploiting weaknesses within Facebook's content moderation, and also Twitter, Instagram, some other places as well. It was a pretty vast and sprawling enterprise. Didn't cost very much, only a few hundred thousand dollars, as far as we know. But what we do know is that thousands of of fake accounts were spun up on social media sites, and they were used to create divisions between Americans over not just the elections, but all kinds of issues. Russians really use these very divisive techniques using Black Lives Matter activists and kind of corralling the opinion of also white supremacists on the other side, getting people to show up at anti Hillary Clinton protests. You know, it was kind of remarkable, the breadth of it. And as you probably know, and I talk about this in the book, a couple years after all of this unfolds, there was actually a court case against Yevgeny Prigozhin and several others who were implicated in the Internet Research Agency plot, ultimately the government. And this was, of course, the Mueller investigation. The prosecutors were leading that. Ultimately, the prosecutors were forced to drop the case because they would have had to reveal so much about their sources and information that it wasn't worth it. So this is kind of a kind of gray mailing that was happening where, you know, revealing classified evidence would be much more of a threat to the overall national security than actually prosecuting the case in the first place. It's a really complicated situation, but I can say with confidence and that Gabbard is simply wrong. And, you know, there was plenty of evidence available. Still today, there's a digital trail showing how closely Yevgeny Prigozhin was involved in fomenting this campaign to disrupt the elections in 2016.

[Emma Vigeland]

It's fascinating stuff. We will put a link to Putin's sledgehammer, the Wagner group, and Russia's collapse into mercenary chaos. Candace Rondo, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

[Candice Rondeau]

Thank you.

[Sam Cedar]

Thank you.

[Emma Vigeland]

All right, folks, we're gonna take a quick break and head into the fun half of the program, where things are gonna be fun.

[Sam Cedar]

Oh, yeah.

[Emma Vigeland]

Things are gonna be fun and I am in it to win it. Oh, yes. We'll, we'll talk about Andrew Cuomo's threat. I mean, this is blackmail. This is blackmail. You don't say to everybody, vote for me or I'm going to move to Florida. Is he blackmailing Florida?

[Matt Duss]

It feels like two for one.

[Emma Vigeland]

DeSantis better, better get on it or he's got a new sheriff in town.

[Sam Cedar]

They got prisons down there, right, for people that are supposedly violent sexual criminals. I don't know.

[Emma Vigeland]

Feed them to the gators? Is that what you're saying?

[Sam Cedar]

Just throwing it out there. Open them up and just put Cuomo in.

[Emma Vigeland]

We'll see. All right. We will get there in a moment. Just a reminder to your support that makes this show possible. You can become a. A [e-mail] when you do, you not only get the free show free of commercials, but you also get the fun Half. Join the MajorityReport.com. don't forget AM Quickie AM Quikie.com. get the day's news in an email brief. Whitney and Corey do an amazing job on their respective days. So check it out. Also, we got merch. There's not going to be many max left. Our max left hats are selling max.

[Sam Cedar]

Their max max sell.

[Emma Vigeland]

And so there's not going to be max time to get them. It's going to be min time to get them. Also just coffee. Fair trade coffee. Check it out. You can get the majority port blend and if you use the majority, if you use the word majority as the code, you'll get 10% off. Matt. Left reckoning. Yeah, left reckoning.

[Matt Duss]

We talked about real estate in space and also the globalize, the intifada, obsession by media and the infantile way. That whole discussion is being led by folks and different squad votes on Israel. So check that out. Patreon.com left reckoning for the Sunday show.

[Emma Vigeland]

See you in the final half. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now. But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look back and go like, wow, what, what is that going on? It's nuts. Wait a second. Hold on. Hold on for a second. Emma, welcome to the program. Matt, Fun pack. What is up, everyone? Fun hack.

[Candice Rondeau]

No Mi Keen, you did it.

[Emma Vigeland]

Fun Pack.

[Sam Cedar]

Let's go, Brandon.

[Emma Vigeland]

Let's go, Brandon. Fun hack. Bradley, you want to say hello?

[Russell Vogt]

Sorry to disappoint everyone. I'm just a random guy.

[Emma Vigeland]

It's all the boys today.

[Russell Vogt]

Fundamentally false.

[Sam Cedar]

No. I'm sorry. Women.

[Emma Vigeland]

Stop talking for a second. Let me finish.

[Sam Cedar]

Where is this coming from?

[Candice Rondeau]

Dude.

[Emma Vigeland]

But. Dude, you want to smoke this seven egg? Yes. Hi, me.

[Russell Vogt]

You're safe.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yes. Is this me?

[Candice Rondeau]

Is it me?

[Emma Vigeland]

It is you.

[Candice Rondeau]

Is this me? Hello?

[Russell Vogt]

Is this me?

[Emma Vigeland]

I think it is you. Who is you?

[Candice Rondeau]

Luck.

[Emma Vigeland]

No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? We can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism. I'm gonna go Libertarians. They're so stupid. Though common sense says of course.

[Sam Cedar]

Gobbledygook.

[Emma Vigeland]

We nailed him.

[Sam Cedar]

So what's 79 plus 21?

[Emma Vigeland]

Challenge. Man. I'm positively quivering. I believe 96. I want to say 857-21081, 3, 8 9, 11.

[Matt Duss]

For instance.

[Sam Cedar]

3, $400. $1900.

[Emma Vigeland]

5, 4, $3 trillion. Sold. It's a zero sum game.

[Candice Rondeau]

Actually.

[Sam Cedar]

You're making me think less.

[Emma Vigeland]

But let me say this.

[Russell Vogt]

Call it satire.

[Candice Rondeau]

Sam goes satire on top of it all.

[Russell Vogt]

Yeah.

[Tulsi Gabbard]

My favorite part about you is just like every day, all day, like everything you do.

[Emma Vigeland]

Without a doubt. Hey, buddy. We see you. All right, folks, folks, folks.

[Sam Cedar]

It's just the week being weeded out. Obviously.

[Emma Vigeland]

Yeah. Sun's out, guns out. I. I don't know.

[Candice Rondeau]

But you should know.

[Emma Vigeland]

People just don't.

[Matt Duss]

Like to entertain ideas anymore.

[Emma Vigeland]

I have a question. Who cares?

[Matt Duss]

Our chat is enabled, folks.

[Emma Vigeland]

I love it.

[Sam Cedar]

I do love that.

[Emma Vigeland]

Gotta jump. Gotta be quick. I gotta jump.

[Russell Vogt]

I'm losing it, bro.

[Emma Vigeland]

Two o'. Clock. We're already late and the guy's being a dick. So screw him. Sent to a gulag.

[Brett McGurk]

Outrageous.

[Emma Vigeland]

Like, what is wrong with you? Love you.

[Candice Rondeau]

Bye.

[Emma Vigeland]

Love you. Bye. Bye.