10/14/25: Ghislaine Secret Meeting, Kamala Blames Voters For Loss, Foreign Leader Hot Mic Trump Business Offer

23:35She's saying people who just didn't vote. Okay, well, see, I'm not in that because if that was your number one issue, you kind of made the right call because at the end of the day, both would have probably kept the war going. To be honest, I'm not sure we get this ceasefire under a Kamala administration because I never saw the backbone and all of that behind them. They probably would have been more rhetorical about UN and all that, but I'm not so sure we end up here without somebody like Trump just going full retard and being like, hey, actually, it's over. I never saw Kamala or Biden with that ability.

24:08Maybe, you know, it's unfalsifiable at this point. But the point really gets to this whole you didn't vote. Let's go back to Hillary. We covered this extensively at the time. If the same number of black people vote in 2016 that voted in 2008 and 2012, Hillary wins the election. And what did the Democrats say? Instead of, why didn't these people come out to vote? It was, how dare you not come out to vote? It's your fault. Well, why? Let's do some analysis. Why did they not come out to vote? They thought by voting for Obama for twice that their lives would get a lot better, and they didn't. And they didn't think that Hillary would do much about it.

24:43Whose fault is that? To me, it's Hillary's fault. For Kamala, it's the same thing. If you look at some of the stats, if you drive out, let's say you're talking about Israel, If you drive out young people, she lost young men. Remember that? I mean, that's a huge deal. Gen Z, a lot of new voters, they swung to Trump. That is a systematic failure of the Democratic Party and of Kamala Harris, despite all the coconut memes and all this other bullshit. Turned out to be fake. So I just, you know, we can't absolve these people of responsibility. And like you said about go protest Trump. It's like, first of all, anyone who's like rabidly pro-Palestine is not pro-Trump at this point.

25:19It doesn't exist. So it's like calling out a coalition, which is entirely fake. And then also to put this whole legacy of if you think it's so bad, well, I mean, you also didn't give them the path or at the very least make a convincing argument. Because the argument and all of this, you know, we debated it here a million times about leading up to Trump about what the legacy of all that would look like. I think you were a lot more clear eyed than a lot of other shitheads on the left, frankly, who were like, oh, it won't be all that bad. I'm like, no, from your perspective, it's going to be fucking hell.

25:49Let's be honest. And it is from their perspective, which is kind of what a lot of people on the right voted for. But that's my point, though, is that there was an entire ecosystem of people who wanted to convince them that Trump was going to be the one who was going to be anti-Israel or pro-Palestine or whatever. And I think those people can be condemned. But to say not voting, like at least from a pro-Palestine perspective, to say not voting should be condemned is preposterous. It just absolutely absolves all the responsibilities and the systematic failures going back like 30 years inside the Democratic Party.

26:23So I need to see somebody grapple with that. And I don't see a single person. That's what I don't get about the Democrats. I'm like, you're so pathetic and weak. You're nothing. thing like here's here's the thing is like a couple things on that there is such a deep psychological helplessness to these people yeah like nothing's ever in their control nothing's ever in their power and the upside of that is if nothing's ever in your control or in your power then nothing's ever your fault and so you know there's always uh you know from the obama administration all the excuses about why the affordable care act really kind of sucks you know i mean the whole fight over corbin i talked to corbin trent yesterday um he used to work with aoc and he was saying we really need to internalize that the whole fight that democrats are picking over the shutdown is like we can't let normal obamacare come back like we have to keep these subsidies going because normal obamacare is so insanely unaffordable like it is unacceptable that's the fight that they pick so all sorts of excuses around why that was the best thing they couldn't get a public option was impossible invite administration all kinds of excuse oh we can't get minimum wage, the parliamentary and this and that.

27:30Like there's always some either villain within the Democratic Party or the Republicans, even when they're out of power and the opposition, they're just so powerful, can't possibly overcome them. And there's all this learned helplessness. And I think it, I genuinely think that the reason why they choose to take that mental tactic of pretending like everything is out of their control and out of their hands, even when, you know, you're the president of the United States and you control the Senate or the House or whatever. It's because they don't want to have any responsibility for their actions. And this is, you know, to go even one layer deeper, it's kind of a core ideology of neoliberalism, actually, of which both parties have been, you know, were very involved with supporting.

28:15Because what neoliberalism is at bottom is outsourcing your thinking to the markets. So you never have to make a decision. It's just, oh, well, the markets did their thing and this is what they want. And So I think it's very deeply ingrained in the psychology. But I've also been thinking about the other thing that you just said, Sokka, which is part of why Democrats have, even in Trump 2.0, now that they're, you know, they aren't the ones who are sending the bombs directly and many of them are still voting for it. but why they've had such a hard time separating from Israel and calling it a genocide and saying this is unacceptable and we have to stop it and forcefully resisting it, is because they know that they were complicit and they don't want to take responsibility for that.

28:57Yeah, that's true. They don't want to have to go back and say, you know what, we fucked up. And you guys, like you guys who were protesting us, you were actually right. You were correct. That, I think, would go so far. I actually think it would be so powerful for people to see genuine accountability, genuine reckoning with what they were complicit in. I think it would do so much to see that. And they're just thoroughly incapable of acknowledging that there was any error there. And so now you have a situation where we're in a ceasefire. We'll see whether it lasts or not. A lot of questions about that.

29:33There was hostage exchange, which all the Israeli hostages are now released. Palestinians got 2 ,000 of their hostages back from the Israelis. And you've missed your moment, really, to be able to have that reckoning. You've missed your moment to be able to really take a moral high ground over, you know, what the Trump administration has done here. Maybe it would have been concluded more quickly under Kamala. Maybe it would have been maybe they wouldn't have had the complete starvation. We know the Biden administration did push and, you know, maintain some higher level of aid than was maintained under the Trump administration, where he didn't have the total and complete starvation.

30:07We'll never know. And you never took the time. You, Kamala Harris, and, you know, others in the Democratic Party, but specifically you, never came out and said, I object to this thing that the Trump administration is doing on Gaza. Here's what I, if I was president, here's what I would have done differently. You never did that. So we have nothing to go on that you would have been different or better in any way. Yeah. And, you know, if you want pitch, perfect proof of all this, Obama and Mark Maron from Mark Maron's last podcast. let's take a listen you know as you get older michelle and i joke about this um no matter how much you you want to pretend otherwise you you're starting to get a little out of touch you're not completely you know plugged into the zeitgeist it happens naturally it just happens yeah i mean look i i don't my brain doesn't register tiktok yeah mine either The same way that it does my 16-year-old niece.

31:12Right. Right? You got to get a guy to do it for you. It's not just the technology itself. It's that I'm not plugged in. I'm not relating to the cultural stream in the same way that somebody who's 20 or 25 or even 35 is. But the brains have been broken through exploiting grievance and anger. And in talking about the left, the fact that so many decided to not vote at a protest because they didn't feel that the situation in Israel, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and whatnot was not going to be dealt with by Kamala or however that goes. So you get this protest vote of people not willing to make a compromise for what you used to talk about as the incremental progress.

32:07Yeah. The incremental progress. I got an email recently. I said, you seem very worried about the destruction of norms. Yet you always talk about how during that time period you talked about how those norms were bad. And that's why, because I lived through this shit, George W. Bush and Obama, who lectured me about all the norms of the whole. Meanwhile, what was happening? The entire apparatus of American life collapsed around us. We sacrificed our empire abroad for what? For Iraq? We sacrificed our economy in 2008 for the bankers. And through that entire time, we kept giving them, we said, please save us.

32:48We're going to vote for you. They said, oh, don't worry, we're going to pass the Affordable Care Act. I love your point. We can't let Obamacare return to normal Obamacare because that will fuck people over. What does that tell you about Obamacare? You know, we voted for the homeowners. What happened? We voted for prosecution. What happened? We voted for more regulation. We got fucking Dodd-Frank and now look at our economy right now. Same with getting out of Iraq. So their high-minded liberalism or their high-minded conservatism destroyed this country. And that's why I'm like, as bad, yes, I've become an acceleration, as scary and all these things may seem.

33:26I don't know. For me, I still have some faith that will return on the other side because I lived 25 years under their regime. I was born under Bill Clinton. Consider the progress of the United States economy and of U.S. foreign policy since that time that I was born in 1992. How can you still worship at the altar of these norms? You cannot. and so we can argue about what the norms and new norms and all that should be but I cannot live in a world where I have this motherfucker lecturing at me with his chin up again about how fine things are and about the better angels of our nature while shit just continues to get worse every single year.

34:02That is the thing that is very jarring. I listened to this whole conversation and I wanted to pull that TikTok point he made about how he's down to touch because I thought it was very, I mean it was one of the more honest parts of the podcast. He's like, I don't really get it today. Like I'm kind of out of touch. So that's why I don't say that much about politics because I don't really, I'm not really in touch with what people are thinking anymore. And I was like, wow, that that's actually interesting level of self-awareness. But I also want to say, I think being out of touch, like that's a choice, you know, like you could go.

34:31It's not like TikTok is not that hard to understand. You could go on TikTok. You would understand. I'm not on TikTok and I fully am understanding what's going on. It's not. Yeah. And also, you know, you choose who you interact with. Like you surrounded yourself with a bunch of like celebrities and rich people. And so, yeah, you're going to be on a touch. I mean, that that is a choice that you have made. So that was that was one piece. And then the other part, it's very jarring to see him still doing like a 2012 style of politics while the world is burning around you. You know, you said his his vibe is like, oh, everything's fine.

35:08And well, you know, we'll all compromise and we'll take the high road when they take the low road. It's like that shit is so far. We are so far past that. So, yeah, it felt like listening to him talk, it really did feel like a relic from another era. And I know we joke about like, let's say they got rid of term limits and you get the Trump Obama matchup. And, you know, we've always said, oh, like Obama would crush him. And I think Obama would have beat him in 2016. team i'm not so sure anymore because watching that he just felt so so far removed from the actual energy and the concern that people have you know this thing that he's always been accused of which has always been true of sort of like standing aloof that's what he does observing society from afar and not really feeling like he has a stake in it that was one thing in 2012 it's another one right now.

35:59Like when the shit is hitting the fan and, you know, kids are being, autistic kids are being stolen from their parents on the streets of Chicago, an apartment building raided and we just oversaw a genocide. Like in the moment of right now to do your just remove, I'm above it all and I'm just going to tell you from on high where things have gone astray, especially when you are a significant part of the reason that things went on this track because you promised, a hopeful, a different politics, and you didn't deliver for people in the way that people thought that you would. Yeah. I don't know how that would go over with the American people at this point.

36:37I'm not so sure. Look, that was from a left perspective, from the right. It's like, who flooded this country, Obama? You, all right? You're the one who chose all, like, basically cultural politics. He is literally the everything that went wrong. He was elected on a class anti-war message, and he turned it to become the cultural war president. That's who he was. That ultimately his only real legacy is like DACA, the Affordable Care Act. Oh, fantastic little contribution that you did there. And the woke era, it began under him in 2014. It was a disaster. Now, again, there's a lot of blame and all that stuff to go around, but you did not fulfill those core promises.

37:14And so the latter stage of your administration that set up the Trump victory is ultimate, like those problems were not solved under your administration. You could have headed off a lot of this. And so I think you're right. I don't think he would be Trump today. I absolutely, in 2024, I don't think there's a chance that he could actually come because - Because Trump is a creature of the moment. Exactly. And you're not. He's a monster, in my opinion, a monster of the moment, but he is a creature of the moment. And Obama is a relic of the past. Obama is a symptom and a relic of a time when we still had hope.

37:45If you're young, you actually don't remember that. You know, I was talking to a journalism class recently. These kids of like 19, right? They didn't know what the Mueller investigation was, Crystal. They literally didn't even remember Mueller. So that was eight years ago. So imagine trying to talk to them about Obama in 2008, literally ancient history. They have no memory of a time when we still had actual faith in our political institutions. And it's because of him that I don't personally. Between Bush and him, I said, this shit is rigged. It is fake. There is nothing redeeming left inside of these people, the Washington establishment or any of that.

38:21Now, yeah, I think there's a lot of criticism and stuff to go around, but you really have to remember how much faith everybody put in withdrawing from Iraq and 2008 and how things would go to where we ended up in, what is it, January of 2017 when Obama left office. If you didn't live through that, you can't understand how we actually got to where we are right now. Well, and this is, again, where the neoliberal impulse towards zero responsibility and helplessness comes in. because like you can't help but look your two terms in office were followed by Donald Trump. So you did you know that you were somewhat now the part of it I do think there was like a you know mass racial backlash to him like I do think that was part of what fueled the fire and Trump was part of that right with the birtherism conspiracy and all of that but that doesn't absolve you of like there was clearly there were a lot of exits off the the highway of where we we're headed to now.

39:17And one of the biggest ones was 2008. And then also he has stuck his hands back in our politics at strategic points to also make sure that the Democratic Party doesn't become a party of the now, like creatures of the now, to make sure that specifically the Bernie wing of the party is blocked, whether it was his intervention in the DNC race, obviously intervened extraordinarily in 2020. I mean, he's, he also is a big part of the reason why he's the one who anointed Hillary Clinton for 2016. Like she was his choice. So his fingerprints are all over the present day democratic party, which is such a failure.

39:57And there's, there's no reckoning. Who presided over the largest loss in black wealth ever? First black president. I mean, nobody ever grapples with that one. Uh, you know, you talked about racial backlash. Sure. A lot of white people in 2012 voted for him in Ohio. A lot of white people all over America in a lot of red states today put their faith in Barack Hussein Obama after four years. OK, no one forced you to do the Indiana. This man wanted to thank you. He won Ohio, won North Carolina. That's why everyone always talks about that race thing. I go, yeah, maybe in Alabama and all these places.

40:28He still won a lot of red states today. And even in 2012, you know, before all this happened. So, like, these people have agency, and they could have done a lot of stuff if they wanted to, to actually fix the country. So, anyway, this is a long way of saying a lot of it is Obama's fault, and you can see why I hate him so much. All right, let's get to Ken Vogel. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and black America is at a breaking point. Writings and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

41:04In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:52What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins and if you can hear me is where culture meets the soul a place for real conversation each episode I sit down with people from all walks of life celebrities thinkers and everyday folks and we go deeper than the polished story we talk about what drives us what shapes us and what gives us hope we get honest about the big stuff identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore loss that changes you, purpose when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down, faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers.

42:32Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

42:49What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

43:26It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Very lucky to be joined in studio this morning by Ken Vogel, who's a phenomenal reporter for The New York Times and also author of this new book right here. It is called Devil's Advocate, the hidden story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington insiders on the payrolls of corrupt foreign interests.

44:10So something that we are certainly very interested in here. can we've relied on your reporting so much on this show over the course of the year. So thank you so much. It's great to have you in studio. Yeah, it's great to be with you. I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you. It means a lot. Well, we had an abundance of examples of foreign influence just sort of out in the open. I mean, this is one thing about Trump 2.0. We already covered the comments he made about Miriam Adelson, like, hey, this lady, you know, gave me a bunch of money and then I did the stuff that she wanted me to do. So he tends to wear it on his sleeve a bit more.

44:36And we have another example of this. We can put this up on the screen. So this was from, you know, his recent trip in Egypt. And you can see him here with the Indonesian president who asked him if he can meet with his son, Eric, in particular. Now, Eric is not a member of the administration. Eric is running the Trump organization or is among those running the Trump organization. Trump says, yeah, sure. Eric's such a good boy. I'll have him give you a call. What did you make of this particular moment and the import here? Yeah, I mean, it really shows the degree to which Trump and the folks around him have kind of dropped the pretense.

45:12They are openly blurring the line between their foreign policy, U.S. foreign policy, and their business interests. And there was a telling quote that Eric Trump gave one of my colleagues, Ben, protests at the beginning of the administration. He said, in the first term, we did everything imaginable to avoid any appearance of impropriety. And frankly, we got crushed anyway and said that we had lost an absolute fortune. quote, we can't just sit out in perpetuity and I won't. I'm not in government. I'm in private industry. And he is, again, he's wearing it on his sleeve. He's admitting like this is what we're doing.

45:47And you can see why someone like the president of Indonesia or any other foreign leader or interest would want to do business with the Trump, you know, with the Trump family, with the various crypto interests, the real estate business, because there is this thinking that it is going to get you at the front of the line in terms of your asks on foreign policy, that is being able to shape the U.S. government by doing business with Trump or the people around him. If anything, this is a language they speak well. They're like, pay off the guy's son. Easy. You know, like we do that here all the time.

46:18You know, we set up shell companies or any of that. That's like a natural way. But one of the things I've always appreciated about your reporting is that you dive into the way that it sneaks its way through Washington. So some of the examples that you find here in the book are paying off of these various lobbyists, shell companies, and other things that will funnel around in order to obfuscate possibly what that influence is. Throughout your reporting, what did you find is the countries which are the best at their foreign influence operations? I mean, it is, to your point, Sagar, it is like this mindset that you see in the developing world and parts of like the post-communist world in the Middle East where they have this, you know, this is the way that politics works.

47:00If you want something from government, you pay the people in the government or the people around them. They're gatekeepers. And so we've always sort of had this conceit in the U.S. that, oh, no, no, no, we're different. We don't do that. We have all these ethics rules and disclosure rules and campaign finance rules. and lobbying disclosure requirements that essentially are the firewall that prevents that type of activity from happening here. And what I found as I reported the book that, no, actually, we're not that different. And it's not just the Trump administration and the Trump family. It goes back to Democratic administrations past and Republican administrations past.

47:32And the places in the world that are best at it are those that have that mindset. So they're the Ukraines of the world where it's this post-Soviet country where like, How do you get what you want? How do you become super rich? You're an oligarch who's able to like cozy up to the state and essentially privatize state assets and make them your own. And so how do you get that in the U.S.? If you're a Ukrainian oligarch, you pay Rudy Giuliani or you pay Hunter Biden or you pay Paul Manafort. You pay someone like that. And the thing that surprised me, particularly in Ukraine, but a lot of these other countries, is the bipartisan nature of this.

48:06It's not just that, like, you would pay, you know, a campaign aide for John McCain or for, you know, Bob Dole or for John Kerry. You would pay them all at the same time. They would be all on the same team working for Viktor Yanukovych in the case of Ukraine, where he had Paul Manafort and Tony Podesta and Tad Devine, who were in the U.S. They're like taking these principal stands and posturing about how they have all these, you know, how their involvement in politics is guided and shaped by some like overarching set of principles that align them with the red team or the blue team. Well, no, in Ukraine, it's the green team.

48:42And that green team unites the red and the blue team. And that's the money team. Yes. Talk a little bit more about the Ukraine example, because this one obviously is very big in the public consciousness. Hunter Biden, you know, Burisma, all of that. Like he claims, oh, I was just on the board because I have this expertise, had nothing to do with my father. I didn't give them any favors. I mean, what do you actually find in the book about the way that these relationships work, in particular when you have someone who is just selling basically their proximity to an administration? Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what he was doing.

49:14And that is, you know, the mindset. There was this oligarch, Mikhail Zolchevsky, who was the head of Burisma. And it's the quintessential oligarchic fact pattern where, like, he was in the administration of this corrupt strongman president that the U.S. wanted gone, Viktor Yanukovych, who, by the way, is the guy who was represented by Paul Manafort and Ted Devine and, you know, Tony Podesta. And they, as a result of this fact pattern where he's essentially privatized these state assets and made a fortune off of them, the U.S., the U.K. and the Ukrainian prosecutors were like looking at this guy and identifying him as like a poster child for the type of corruption that they were trying to root out under the new government.

49:57And so he hired a bunch of people, not just Hunter Biden, but former Polish president Kwasniewski, I think is how you say his name, to try to signal to prosecutors and international officials that like, hey, like, don't mess with me because I've got protection. You know, again, thinking in the way that like you think in Ukraine, that this is going to back away the, you know, the government officials from coming after you. And, you know, we do see examples. You know, the question is like, what did Hunter Biden actually do? We do see examples where he did recruit a lobbying firm that was going to do the lobbying and they did meet with people.

50:35And he actually met with people in his father's government, in the Obama Biden administration. What did he actually deliver? It's questionable. I mean, the prosecutor who they did want gone. And this is sort of getting in the weeds a little bit. But there's this prosecutor who has been at the center of the Burisma stories, a guy by the name of Viktor Shokin. And like the Democrats have suggested, oh, no, no, they didn't want, you know, Burisma was OK with this guy because he wasn't actually investigating him. Well, no, that's not actually accurate. He wasn't really investigating him in the traditional sense.

51:07But in the Ukrainian sense, he held open the possibility of investigations and used that to elicit bribes from the from Zolchewski, the oligarch who owned Burisma. So they did want him gone. And whether it was Hunter Biden or the people who he recruited, they were certainly helpful in effectuating that end result. And he was fired. And ultimately, the investigations into Burisma were dropped by the subsequent prosecutor before he ended up flipping sides and going into bed with Rudy Giuliani. It's been years since I've dealt it. Even hearing his name again, I'm like, oh, man, it's been a long time since we've come and all that.

51:42I used to say what I used to write about it, my editors would be like, can we write a story that doesn't read like it's like a game recap of the Polish national hockey team versus the Ukraine? I'm like, no. It is what it is. It is what it is, yeah. One of the things we talk a lot about here on the show is pro-Israel influence. But one of the things that they will often say is, well, you never cover Qatari influence. And so you are quite literally one of the experts on this. We pulled one of your older stories. Let's put F2, please. It's not fair, by the way. Up on the screen. Literally covered Qatari influence yesterday.

52:07But anyway. Whatever. All right. Still, you wrote this story after Pam Bondi was selected as the attorney general. You said as lobbyists, Bondi had clients including Amazon, GM, Uber, and Qatar. In the book, you also dictate some of the Qatari influence you've watched here in Washington. Tell us a little bit about that. How sophisticated is it? What is the money? And to what end are they trying to buy? What type of influence do they want? Yeah, I mean, they threw around huge sums of money, as you guys have noted, particularly in the first Trump administration, when they were locked in this regional imbroglio with Saudi and with the UAE over this boycott.

52:46And so it was multi-pronged. I mean, they had sort of set the seeds, sort of laid the foundation by cultivating a business relationship with Jared Kushner, who was the point person on sort of Middle East policy during the first Trump administration, now arguably again in the second Trump administration. But then that wasn't enough for them. That was sort of the, you know, the approach that I was talking about before with the Indonesian president, where they're going straight to the top. But they also did a very traditional influence campaign where they threw around a ton of money to lobbyists on both sides of the aisle and including Brian Ballard's firm, which was where Pam Bondi was employed before she was tapped as attorney general.

53:25And, you know, they did sort of curry favor with the administration and managed to get the administration to help resolve that boycott in a way that was to their liking. And, you know, there were a number of cases that came out of that where there was this—it's sort of ironic now, but there was a clampdown on this type of foreign lobbying during the first Trump administration as a result of the Mueller investigation and some of the spillover investigations. And it ended up leading to a deferred prosecution agreement in the case of a prominent Trump-connected lobbyist, Barry Bennett, where he didn't exactly plead guilty, but he admitted that he had violated Farah while he was representing the Qataris.

54:08And so it's ironic now that Pam Bondi, as attorney general, one of the first things that she did was decriminalize the prosecution of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and say we're not going to be allocating prosecutorial resources to going after these types of cases. So it's really – I didn't even take note of that actually. It's a free-for-all right now. That's why we need people like you. Yeah, exactly. There's so much stuff going on. I think oftentimes there's definitely a lot of division between the two parties in Washington. The place where they tend to come together the most is actually on foreign policy and oftentimes in a way that the American people are not particularly pleased about.

54:43How much of that owes to this, you know, wash this amount of foreign cash that this city is a wash in? And, you know, Ukraine's a perfect example. You talk about Tad Devine and Paul Manafort. This is a Democratic strategist and Republican strategist, like very bipartisan the way that this money flows. Yeah, I think a lot of it, a lot of what you're talking about where we're making these bargains with the devil, where it's like this particular country or leader or interest is not really aligned with our ideals about democracy and human rights and free speech and religious freedom, but they're kind of our best friend in the region.

55:18And a lot of the sort of casting of these entities as aligned with U.S. foreign policy is because of these lobbyists. You go back to Paul Manafort, who was really like the godfather of this industry. And what he would do during the Reagan and Bush administrations was go around the world and find, you know, sometimes really blood-soaked, brutal, you know, opposition leaders, guerrilla leaders or, you know, dictators. and take them to Washington and say, like, this person can be your bulwark against communism in whatever part of the world, whether it's in, you know, Marcos in the Philippines or Jonas Savimbi, the bloody guerrilla leader in Angola.

55:58Paul Manafort helped them win U.S. support, bipartisan U.S. support and funding by taking them to Washington and casting them as like a bulwark against communism. Well, fast forward till now, we have a very similar thing happening, but it's not about any particular ideological alignment. Rather, it's about like casting these people as like, this person is the Trump of the Balkans. And this person is the Trump of the Balkans because they have been prosecuted by, you know, prosecutors in their home country, or they've been sanctioned by the Biden administration. And therefore you, President Trump should take their side and, you know, give them a U S government funding and remove sanctions because they are a great example.

56:42This guy's got a$20 billion bailout. A great example. A huge amount of Silicon Valley guys were friends with him, pushed his administration. Now he needs a bailout. They're the same people who back Trump. And he gets this like sweetheart deal from the US government. It's, I mean, have you, actually I'm curious, have you heard anything about that? How exactly did all that come about? Yeah, we're doing some reporting that I'm not quite ready to reveal. But I mean, there are lots of examples. Yeah, South America is a good one because certainly Bolsonaro, they tried to help Bolsonaro overturned the election results.

57:12And then Trump tried to back off the Supreme Court. And Bolsonaro has a lot of these Trump allies, including Donald Trump Jr., who he's cultivated. And there were reports about Bolsonaro's son being in the White House early in this term. So it's another example where some of the framing has changed, like the way that these lobbyists and others try to cast these people as allied with the U.S. It's not like a Cold War type of framing. It's really like a cult of personality that they are aligned with Trump, and therefore they deserve U.S. government support and funding. And then the other piece, as you mentioned before, is just like direct cash infusions.

57:51And how much has his crypto coin and, you know, crypto holdings and the company associated with that, like how much has that fueled just inflows of potentially corrupt cash influences administration? Yeah, hugely. I mean, you know, Democrats and critics, I'm not like dismissing this criticism during the first administration made a huge deal of like foreign interest staying at the Trump hotel. That was a violation of the emoluments cause, you know, maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. Courts ultimately decided that it wasn't, but, um, you know, but at least there, there was like some service. There was some pretext.

58:23They were actually getting something. They were getting a night in the hotel or whatever. Uh, now it's like, just give me money. I mean, the crypto stuff, it's, I mean, I don't know where you guys stand. I know a little bit about where you stand on But like where your audience stands, like, but like it's arguable that like there's there's some value there. The value is in the eye of the beholder. But certainly like you're not getting so you're not getting a physical service or something like that. You are literally putting money in the Trump family's pocket because you believe in them or you think you can get something out of them.

58:55And we saw this most acutely with World Liberty Financial where Binance and the UAE finance a two billion dollar deal using World Liberty Financial. And like, what do they get out of that? They certainly get on Trump's good side. I mean, we'll see maybe if the deal goes through and is a great success. But there's an open question as to whether they're actually getting something other than the favor of the president for that$2 billion investment. Ken, please keep it up. Everybody go and buy the book. We will have a link down in the description for you to purchase it. Thank you very much, sir. We rely on you and we thank you.

59:28It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you guys. I'll be on with Ryan tomorrow, bro show, and then I'll see you all on Thursday.

59:481969. Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by Black people because of what happened in Alabama?

1:00:25After Montgomery Brawl. This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul.

1:00:58Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers, most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.