80-Year-Old Man Loses War

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21:48I'm a huge fan of Willys. It's really great. Please enjoy life in the high country. Go to drinkwillies.com and use Coke Rogen. I want to touch on all the political implications of all this for the midterms and beyond. There's a question of how long it will take for high gas prices and other straight-related disruptions to end, a question of whether Trump and Republicans will be able to just move on from Iran and pretend like it never happened, even if the next phase of negotiations hasn't led to a deal by November. And then there's the question of what Democrats say about any of this over the next few weeks and months.

22:23Tommy, you want to take the I know you have some thoughts on the last one, especially.

22:26Jon Favreau:Yeah, I think that being a Democrat in this situation is very hard because we are trying to be responsible. And, you know, if a Democrat was cutting this deal, Barack Obama was making this agreement. Republicans would say you're weak. You're a coward. You lost, you know, rinse, repeat on Fox News ad nauseum. And it's a simple and powerful message, you know, strength versus weakness. Our job is harder because, again, ending the war was the best of a bad set of options. But we need to explain why Trump starting the war has made us worse off as a nation. Because I think we just need to kill in finally this neocon argument that you can bomb your way to peace.

22:59Jon Favreau:We heard this in Iraq. Somehow it wasn't discredited then. Now we're at war with Iran. And it's just a nightmare. And so, again, it's repeating that we failed on the core objectives. and just arguing that we could have gotten the deal Trump will potentially get after the 60 days of negotiation without ever going to war. The original sin was not in 2018 just trying to renegotiate the JCPOA. And I think Democrats need to be more full-throated in support of diplomatic solutions to problems, stop being afraid of their own shadow on this stuff, and more full-throated about why regime change wars in the Middle East are a disaster.

23:34Jon Favreau:I thought we'd all gotten there, but apparently not. The good news is this war is extremely unpopular, like shockingly unpopular. 60 days from now is what, like mid-August. And so two possibilities, well, a whole range of possibilities, but two possibilities are there is a deal, in which case Trump will do everything he can to make it seem like he did this amazing move to start the war, to get us to a position to negotiate the deal. And that'll be about selling. that'll be about us make telling just the story of how we got here and how stupid and dangerous and bad it was and then the other is god only knows the kind of chaos that could happen in the next 60 days you know there's algae in the he drained the fucking reflecting pool to paint it blue but the algae's back he's not you know he's he he does not have some magical ability to avoid the realities of the world and uh like the i think i we will it will be so close to the election by the time we either get to a deal or don't, that we will be able to, I think, make it a big part of people's dissatisfaction with the economy, the high cost of living and everything that will carry on for weeks from now, if not months from now.

24:42It's also like the straight over moves is

24:43Jon Favreau:not a valve you turn on and off. It's not like gas is now flowing. It's like oil futures prices can go down quickly, but tankers will now have to come out and then future tankers will have to go back in, load up their gas and then transit it. Like I think there's already reports that these oil and gas companies are kind of moving cautiously because they don't know like this isn't a final deal. There's no agreement. There's no nuclear agreement. Trump is threatening to go back to war. And so I just don't think this is going to be resolved quickly. It'll take months probably. I think even under the best case scenario, gas prices come down between now and November, but they don't end up where they were before this conflict started at all because it's just going to take time.

25:22Even the most conservative economic estimates are saying that. I also think Like for Democrats, you go out there and it's like Donald Trump just spent the last year embroiling this country in a war that he lost that cost us upwards of maybe$100 billion. And then however many more billion dollars people paid in higher fuel costs. And he hasn't seemed to have learned any lessons, nor have the Republicans in Congress. And if you return a Republican Congress to him, they're just going to create more war. They're going to jump into more wars. He's still talking about Cuba. He still has Greenland on his mind.

25:54Like the guy is a bloodthirsty maniac and so are the Republicans in Congress who approved it. And do you want them to spend even more of your money on more war? And making the, like, what did this war get us? It got us nothing. Nothing. Nothing. It got us nothing and it cost us a lot. 14 people died, thousands of people dying in the region. And it made us less safe. It didn't make the country any safer. You know, when we talk about like, you know, like costs being higher, like, and it's always very abstract. Like people's lives are ruined by the fact that suddenly their fuel went up where they suddenly didn't have access to raw materials.

26:28Like this had a huge ramifications for the global economy that we felt for a very long time. And by the way, everyone who's just predicting, oh, this is when this is when gas prices will go down. This is when oil prices will go down. The market says what the oil is worth right now. The market says what the gas prices will work. If people thought and knew that the prices would go down, they'd already be down. People have no idea what the future holds because we're dealing with fucking maniacs and the complexities of reopening the strait and all the rest. Nobody knows what gas prices will be in September or October.

26:55If they did, that's what the price would be. Yeah. So one funny footnote on the timing of when the Iran agreement was announced. The Iranians didn't want to do it on Trump's actual birthday. So they waited until it was Monday in Tehran just to be as petty as fuck, which got to hand it to him, I guess. Yeah, I guess. It was it was they literally used the time change to keep both Trump and the Iranians happy. So then Trump could say he announced it on his birthday. But the Iranians can say, no, we didn't. Because it was Monday. It's your 80th birthday. It's adults who care about their birthday. Everything being about Trump's fucking birthday.

27:29It is also embarrassing. The Iranians feeling like they can get one over on Trump by kind of holding it to not sign it technically on the birthday is stupid. But it's a response to dealing with a guy that clearly wanted the fun of signing the thing on his fucking birthday. That's what you have when you have a world run by tyrants. They're all just little petty bitches. It's unbelievable.

27:45Jon Favreau:So dumb. Of course, none of this stopped Trump from celebrating the deal or himself. He threw a low-key party at the White House Sunday night where the South Lawn was transformed into a Vegas-style UFC arena that hosted a cage match attended by 4 ,000 lucky guests and broadcasted to Paramount Plus subscribers. The$60 million event paid for by the UFC and other sponsors was truly surreal to watch. Here's some of what it looked like. I'll just sort of narrate this for those of you who are just listening. Here's Trump and Dana White walking out of the Oval. There's a flyover. I love a good flyover.

28:21And here's an actual eagle. That's cool. Also pretty sick. There's the fight. One of the fights, yeah. There's a little evil Knievel action happening. This is one of the fighters walking out from the Oval.

28:39Jon Favreau:America is a man. Am I right, America? Yeah. Even the crowd is like, you're a dick. And that was Josh Hokett, who won the heavyweight fight. He's apparently said that before. This is like a bit of his. He said it before in a fight. He put it on his Instagram last year. And so, you know, I don't know if that makes it better or worse. It's a far-right mega thing. They've been saying it for a long time. Yeah, but for him especially is what I'm saying. So what did you guys think of the fight? So I feel like everybody combined a bunch of things. Like one was just the brazen corruption of the whole thing and having Bud Light sponsorships on the White House lawn and the crypto stuff and all the rest.

29:19The fact that Donald Trump made this event about him and not the country, I think that's a big part of it. If this were a Democratic White House that also had poetry slams and readings by Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and other kind of sophisticated events. And then one day Barack Obama was like, guess what? We're going to have motorcycles jumping over each other on the South Lawn. I'd be like, that's great. Having an eagle fly around and land on somebody's arm during America's celebration. That's great. All these sort of busybodies on social media being like, Thornton Wilder once visited the White House.

29:50Like, guys, can you please not be a bunch of prissy, stuck up people? People like fucking motorcycles. I have no problem with that. That is entertaining. And it could be on the White House lawn. Zero problem with that. It is the corruption and the making it about him and it being a right wing MAGA thing. Like that is the problem.

30:08Jon Favreau:Yeah. Presidents hold events on the South Lawn. Sometimes it's a concert. Sometimes it's the dude in a bunny suit rolling Easter eggs. Sometimes it's a cage fight. It's like it is what it is. That didn't bother me either. The corporate sponsorship stuff that we're going to get to in a minute is where it gets really gross. But just politically, I don't know that it was smart for Trump. I think UFC fans will love it. Trump super fans will love it. Regular people that are pissed about inflation are just going to be like, what are you doing? How are you spending your time this way? Reuters did a poll.

30:34Jon Favreau:Just 16 % of Americans said it was appropriate for Trump to hold the ultimate fighting championship event for his 80th birthday. Well, 46 % said it was inappropriate. The rest were like, whatever. I don't care anymore. So whatever. It is what it is. But also, there's a lot better sports to watch this weekend. The Knicks won the NBA championship. There's a million World Cup games. The Stanley Cup finals were on. I was doing other things. I don't have Paramount Plus, so I couldn't even watch it. We have Paramount Plus for some kids' programs. And it was so I watched the whole thing and I tried to watch it as someone who was just like, OK, what if I was not really paying attention to politics?

31:08What would this look like? And like, first of all, the production value outstanding. A plus. It looks great. Like the whole event looked really cool. There were like and like there are some UFC fighters who have commented publicly about how this is like a gross thing to do and cynical for the president to make it all about him. And we're going to talk about the corruption and all that. The parts that made it more about Trump were the parts that you're like, what is this? you know and first of all also the fights weren't that great which like i'm not a ufc person but it was like all of them were kind of quick and over first round knockouts yeah and they were like knockouts but it was i don't know it was just and then you see like it's just like that the number of times it panned to trump and then it talked about trump and then like then there's mark zuckerberg and then there's the president of crypto.com and all this kind of shit and so like all of the accoutrements around it were like could get really annoying but the fight itself and the And the way it looked with the White House in the background, like looked pretty cool.

32:01But this is where like you will. We should talk. We'll talk about the corruption. But this is where you can't separate the fact that he is so corrupt from the event itself, because Donald Trump is trying to steal the like patriotism and excitement and prestige of America's birthday and kind of put it on himself. But the end result is really just he gets his stink on like the White House and the event itself. Because if you didn't know that this was so partisan and so corrupt and such a boondoggle and such favoritism and just so much corporate interest, then like maybe it wouldn't be so terrible to have a flyover or to have Marines standing behind a fighter or whatever.

32:39It may not be the kind of thing I would normally want to watch, but it wouldn't be so despicable. But to use the military and to use these symbols for such a corrupt practice, I think, is why the whole thing becomes so sordid and ugly. Yeah, I will say the walking the fighters out through the Oval and the dip room and having all like the Marines there saluting that. Like it was that that part was like a little. Well, you're just because it's a for profit event. And because a for profit event and the whole America 250 thing, too, because it's like whatever president is is is leading the country when it's America's 250th or 275 or 300, whatever you get to do your own thing.

33:16Right. but they sort of went out of their way to make it feel exclusionary to anyone who wasn't MAGA and just in the way that they did the event, right? Like they could, and not just by being a UFC fight, you could have done a UFC fight that still seems welcoming and unifying to most of the country. This is where we're like, we're back to where Trump was in the first term where he was always taking pictures in front of the desk. They're fucking tourists because they know they don't belong and so they walk through this gold-plated room that looks like it has a gold fungal infection and kind of they show through these fighters walking through all the rooms.

33:49Like a bit like the kind of, it reminds me of like when like human beings in some apocalyptic future stumble upon a museum and they're walking through, looking around being like, who built this? How is this even here? Like that's sort of the feeling of it to me.

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35:16It would have been entirely possible for Trump to throw himself a$60 million UFC birthday party without also turning it into an orgy of corruption. But that would take all the fun out of it. First, the broadcast itself. Dana White originally said that the fight would be free on CBS, now owned by Paramount. But it ended up on the$9.99 per month Paramount Plus instead. Paramount is, of course, owned now by Trump ally David Ellison, who had a front row seat to the fight two days after Trump's DOJ approved his latest acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, which includes CNN. I think there was also like a brunch or a dinner for David Ellison that weekend, too.

35:56Big party for that. So everyone is celebrating the big merger. As for Trump himself, ahead of the fight, the president quietly purchased between 15 ,000 and 50 ,000 worth of stock in TKO Holding Group, which owns UFC. Which is nothing for him, but like optically so stupid.

36:10Jon Favreau:You know what I mean? Just don't do that. Just doesn't care anymore. There were also some tweets that appeared to be between Eric Trump and UFC commentator Daniel Cormier looking for inside information for betting on the fights. The Cormier is saying publicly that his account was hacked. Not to fear, the fight still offered plenty of opportunities to make the Trump family richer. Take a listen.

36:28Mark Warner:Tonight's$250 ,000 performance bonus in USD1 is presented by World Liberty Financial. Closed captioning for tonight's broadcast is brought to you by TrumpCoins.com, the official UFC 3 and 250 special edition medallions. This ballot is proudly sponsored by Truth Social, the real voice of President Trump. Download Truth Social today. Jesus. Well, I was watching that at home. That's what I was like. This is just, it's too much. If you didn't catch all that, one of the official sponsors of the event was the Trump's family crypto operation, World Liberty Financial. We've talked about this a lot here.

37:03for this event they created a 250 000 bonus pool for the fighters uh which is to be paid in their stable coin usd1 um and then you heard there was also a sponsorship plug there for trumpcoins.com which is selling commemorative medallions designed by president trump uh at prices up to 12 000 a piece uh coin heavy event real coin heavy just an idiot tax whoever's buying these fucking coins reacting to a bunch of these stories the white house said that donald trump only acts in the best interest of the American public. And that his assets are in a trust managed by his children. So what's the problem, guys?

37:37Jesus Christ.

37:37Jon Favreau:I mean, politically speaking, Trump should be furious that this thing was on Paramount Plus, right? That limits the distribution. That hurts him, right? This is his propaganda event. Why is it not seen by more people? So you're like, okay, I get what Paramount Plus got. They got to add subs to get people to buy this. What's the kickback? I'd like to know. The crypto stuff is disgraceful. Remember, like, USD1 is their stable coin. Remember that Trump's got the Emiratis to use their stable coin in this transaction when they invested$2 billion into Binance that made it the seventh biggest stablecoin in the world.

38:07Jon Favreau:And then Reuters did this big investigation of the Trump family crypto assets. They found the Trump family has made$2.3 billion in profit. And then, of course, on the other side of that, you have a million retail investors who have gotten fleeced and have taken$2.3 billion in losses. So this is just an ongoing show of the way they're using crypto just to wring money out of their followers. I find the Eric Trump, what's his name? Daniel Cormier thing. Makes no sense. Like Eric Trump, so the story is he DMed the guy, said, hey, is this fight rigged? Because I want to bet on it. And then Cormier is like, no, I got AI hacked.

38:45Jon Favreau:What does that mean? You posted the tweet. It didn't make sense when Eric said he deleted it because it was fake. But then why would he have posted it? Eric Trump was the first time I believed it might be true was when Eric Trump posted it. Yes, me too. and then and then daniel cormier he was asked about it at the fight and was just like that's crazy why would anyone believe that and then he like tweeted are you all stupid why would you but like you posted it it's interesting because if you look at the exchanges that they posted or the dm that they posted it's very um it's not like it's not as obvious as like hello is are there any fights rigged i would like to bet on them like it's like you play how's it going and he's like oh i didn't expect to hear from you man how it's good good to see you and your family at the fight can't wait he's like hey he placed any bets and then he just keeps going he's like all all right, fine, I'll get to it.

39:26Any of the fights rigged? Who knows what's real or what's fake anymore? Anything could have happened. Could have been hacked. Someone could have done it. I don't know, but - Yeah, well, this is the problem with these people being - And they don't tell the truth. Corrupt liars. They're corrupt liars who, it is completely believable to me that it's fake. It is completely believable to me that it is true. You have no credibility as human beings. I would not be surprised in either direction. You are completely morally vacant operators who are profiting every day off the office. We can't take your word for it.

39:50Maybe we'll never know the truth because everyone around you is a liar, But that's the price of being so dishonest, I guess. Celebrity attendance at the event was mostly limited to the MAGA billionaire sector. In addition to David Ellison and the crypto.com CEO, MMA enthusiast and masculinity advocate Mark Zuckerberg was in attendance. Maybe not quite out of Dulles baggage claim yet were executives from Anthropic who apparently flew to the Capitol last minute to meet with the Trump administration on Monday. On Friday, the administration slapped export controls on the company's top AI models, which forced Anthropic to take Fable 5 and Mythos 5 offline.

40:32Anyone want to talk about what this is all about with Anthropic and whether it has anything to do with their earlier dispute with the Pentagon? This to me, actually, similar to the Eric Trump thing, it's because we know that they picked this fight with Anthropic a few months ago. So it's actually hard to know what's true. If you read the details, there does seem to have been a legitimate concern with access to the models that were raised by Amazon and others. But then it appears the administration, which has a vendetta against Anthropic, maybe went too far in its reaction. And now the executives have to fly to D.C.

41:04to make nice because it's not about what's in the interest of the Pentagon or the country, but it's about personal relationships and ego. And so they have to figure out how to smooth things over. And it is just very hard to tell the difference between penalizing Anthropic because it's now an enemy of the administration versus actually stepping in because there may have been an issue or if it's somewhere in between.

41:27Jon Favreau:Yeah. I mean, so there was a concern about Anthropic's model and the ability for it to find cybersecurity vulnerabilities and exploit them. So they limited the distribution. And then these researchers at Amazon got access to Fable 5, which is like mythos with guardrails that they released to the public. They were able to trick it, essentially, into giving them restricted information. And then the Amazon CEO tattled to Scott Besson about what happened. Now, normally, like, that's what he did. And normally, I'd be like, actually, that's good. That's like how the system should work because you want, you know, sort of a circuit breaker there in some way to prevent the distribution of these models to bad actors.

42:02Jon Favreau:Like what the administration did was they cut off access for foreign users. but yeah I mean it just the thing that was so odd about this is all the little Trump propagandists went to Twitter and they try to dance on Anthropic's grave and they gave all of us reason to think oh actually this is just part of this ongoing pissing match between Anthropic and the Pentagon and um because Anthropic doesn't want to create autonomous killer drones or be used in bulk mass surveillance of American citizens yeah it was hard to read between the lines in the Axios story about it too, which is also, it's like, you know, that the Axios story sort of came mostly from the administration.

42:40And there's some administration official on background saying like, the real problem is they don't know how to, Anthropik doesn't know how to communicate with this administration and the ideological differences are really getting in the way. And it's like, what does that have to do with a potential security vulnerability that you're saying was the root of the problem here? What does the ideological differences in communication have to do with anything? Also, if you know that, if you have insight enough to know they're not communicating effectively with you, then it seems you know what they're trying to communicate.

43:06Just call them. Yeah. Hey, like, you're not being nice enough in how you're handling me. You have to, if you want me to do what you want, you better be a little bit more sensitive to my issues and my needs.

43:16Jon Favreau:Inanthropics, preparing for an IPO. It seems like a great way to damage them in advance of that. Yes. Yeah. But for what it's worth, we should say Dana White and a bunch of other participants at the White House event condemned the comments about Michelle Obama, which was nice to see. Now, the right thing to do would be Donald Trump to call Michelle Obama and say, I'm so sorry, that was disgusting. But that will obviously - But the White House spokesperson wouldn't even make a, just sort of brush past it, refused to apologize. In the moment, you can actually see Rogan's face as soon as he said it and Rogan was sort of like, he like backed away like, oh God.

43:44Do you see what small his tie was? It was very small. It's like a half a tie. It went to here. You could tell that like, yeah, the Dana Whites, the people, and Donald Trump was like, yeah, like Donald Trump was probably like, yeah. He probably loved it. He's reposted stuff like that in the past. Well, the guy then gave his like medal to Donald Trump, the guy who made the comment and Donald Trump accepted it.

44:02Jon Favreau:So it's just I mean, Trump posted a video of the two of them. Right. Those apes. Yeah. Sort of six months ago through the looking glass on that one. One more corrupt date that broke as we were preparing to record this. Gavin Newsom said in a video Monday morning that he and his wife are being targeted by Trump's DOJ, saying that federal agents have been knocking on the doors of their family, friends and former employees. In Newsom's words, he said they're digging through, quote, years and years of documents and, quote, abusing the grand jury process, trying to, quote, look for a crime. Then there was this line.

44:31Donald Trump isn't just coming after me because of my mean tweets. He's coming after me because I'm considering running for president. He then went on to attack Trump on corruption for several minutes. We didn't get a ton of detail from Newsom's statement other than the DOJ seems to be focused on Jen, his wife. I saw some takes about how this will be great for Newsom's potential presidential campaign and fundraising. Sure. But it also seems like a like a fairly chilling preview of what's to come in 2028 for any Democrat who runs for president. I don't know. What do you guys think? Yeah, look, it's nice to say it's great for fundraising before we know any of the details about what the charges could be, how serious it is, what they're trying to do.

45:08But I don't think anybody, even if it does make them get some attention, is excited to find out that there's a grand jury trying to indict you. And we have gone from Pam Bondi, who was as like pliant and willing to do Trump's bidding as you could imagine, until we got to Todd Blanch, who's somehow even worse. Trump just put his personal attorney in charge of the Southern District of New York. We have a completely politicized Department of Justice, unlike anything we've ever had before in our history. And part of the job will be about not only preventing those things from impacting our politics directly, but also figuring out how to create guardrails and fix it in the future once Trump is gone.

45:52Jon Favreau:Yeah, as much as I can understand the kind of galaxy-brained political takes, Like the human take is Gavin Newsom sits down at dinner and is like, hey, honey, this is going to help me in the early states. Like, what are we talking about here? It's like horribly chilling for your wife to be potentially prosecuted by the Department of Justice, even if she did nothing wrong. It's scary. It'll cost them money. It'll cost them time. Yeah. Look, the maximally cynical view is that Trump is doing this because he thinks Gavin's talented and a possible competitor to the Republican Party and wants to take him out of the race preemptively by going after his family.

46:21Jon Favreau:Maybe it's all on the merits, right? There was a Gavin Newsom's former aide was just prosecuted. Maybe it's coming out of that. What we know is Trump has openly called on his attorney general to go after his enemies. He just tried to install Bill Pulte, a man with no national security experience, as the director of national intelligence solely because that man has shown a creativity in using his access to information to go after Trump's critics. So it seems like part of a pattern. Yeah, I mean, it is the cynical view. It's also the like everything we've seen from Trump over the last decade leads you to believe that whoever he thinks is leading in the race for the Democratic nomination.

46:59He's going to look to see if there were any kind of possibilities for investigation. Right. Like that's all it takes, too, is. So, yeah, so Gavin Newsom's former aide, right, who ended up, you know, being convicted or taking a deal or something based on activities that preceded her time working for Gavin Newsom at all. But doesn't matter, you know, like Jen Newsom has some kind of a nonprofit. And is there is there questions about the nonprofit and the payments like any any thread that that Trump and the his administration can pull on any of these potential contenders? They will. And probably knowing that they can't actually investigate all of them at once when they're all on the primary stage together, they're going to go after the people who are leading in the polls.

47:43And really, I think the only way you're going to avoid investigation from Donald Trump is if you were last place in the polls and suddenly surprise everyone and then win win a race. And then, you know, then they'll get an investigation going pretty fast. Yeah. But that's how it's going to go. We need like a junior soprano to be the kind of to be the face of the operation while Tony's running things behind the scenes. I saw Ben Jacobs on Twitter was like, this is a good case for Hunter Biden being the nominee since he was already pardoned. Can't be investigated again. Don't give him any ideas. He's already flooding himself for this.

48:14But that, I mean, it is, it's pretty, to me it was like a preview of even now where we're like, okay, Democrats could do all in the midterms, everything's fine. Like we're heading to 2028 and the idea that this is just going to be some kind of a fair fight. And even if there's a lot between Donald Trump refusing to leave the White House or running for a third term and then everything going swimmingly and nothing happened. There's just a ton of room between them. I think we just can say whoever is the Democratic nominee, regardless of what investigation to launch for the primary, there will be an intensive effort to try to paint them as a corrupt criminal between sort of say sort of June and the election.

48:53They will use all the power at their disposal. They will try to muddy the waters. And by the way, like part of this is, this is why selective prosecution is so dangerous. We live in a free society. And we know that if you start digging into anyone's finances, taxes, history, you can try to drum something up. You can find a discrepancy. You can find something that you can use to bring to a grand jury. Like that is what it is so dangerous to have a DOJ like this. And you know that the pliant right-wing media, if they find anything, they will say, well, look, this was a legitimate investigation. They found this IRS discrepancy.

49:27This needed to be punished and without sort of any understanding of how dangerous it is to have people being chosen as targets to look for crimes. Did Gavin front run this?

49:37Jon Favreau:Yeah. Yeah. So the Times story, I wonder if they had a call from the Times saying we're running this and they got ahead of it or how this went down. Because the Times story does have some Newsom officials on background in there. and it also has some officials I guess from the Justice Department as well though the Justice Department won't comment officially obviously they also said that it was like started by federal officials in California not in Washington the investigation but I do think that it was we haven't talked about like the politics of this but I thought it was smart that Newsom got out ahead of it and was able to frame it as Trump coming yeah I mean like it just shows how much communications have changed over the last decade or two Because normally when there's some sort of criminal prosecution or investigation, you don't say anything.

50:23Jon Favreau:You let your lawyers speak or you don't comment and you don't want to put anything else in the public domain. They view this as a PR battle, which tells you, you know, they probably feel confident about the legal side of things and they just want to get ahead of the political fight. I also think this is going to be a collective action problem because everyone's interests are obviously not aligned here. But for the other Democratic and no one's announced yet, so it doesn't work right now. But as we get into this, like all the other Democratic candidates, someone gets targeted like this. Even if it's your potential rival, you got to go out and say that it's absolutely bullshit and stick up for them.

50:56They all get sticked up for each other. Yeah, I think that's also free, by the way. Like, I don't think there's a lot of equity for Pete Buttigieg saying, like, I think Trump has a point about Newsom. Like, I don't think there's a lot of votes in that. There's a difference between waiting to get asked about it and saying that and then coming out strongly. Yeah, that's true. And saying it's going to be a fucking problem.

51:11Jon Favreau:What about going down to John Bolton's prison and singing him some sort of song through the bars? Yeah. Is he? Where is he right now? Because I saw his comment. He cut a deal, right? He's cutting a deal, but he could, I don't think it's gone through the process yet, but I think he could get up to five years even with this deal. I thought it was just money. I thought he was just paying money. The reporting I read was fine and potentially up to five years. Hopefully for his sake that there'll be some leniency. but like the dude was like sending emails to himself and to his wife and daughter with classified information.

51:43Jon Favreau:It was like the dumbest thing you could possibly do. Look, I've said this before. I'll say it again. I hate what Donald Trump has done to the DOJ. I will not be angry if James Comet goes to prison. Wow. 86, 47 over here. Listen, I'll obviously be upset about the injustice, but I'm just saying he could use a couple of nights behind those bars to think about what he's done. I'm just, he's so tall and he's made so many mistakes. I think it's morally reprehensible I don't think it's a good thing I'm just saying I think he'll think a lot about what he does everything he does I think that has been an imprisonment all of its own sure I don't think he needs to see that actually inside of a jail cell just saying no worries a Bulwark exclusive stare up at that ceiling run that tin cup across the bars James Comey MSNBC reports that the Trump administration has been pressuring DOJ officials to come up with a case against Gavin Newsom of course No.

52:33Yeah, I mean, so there you go. All right, when we come back, Tommy talks to Senator Mark Warner.

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53:51Jon Favreau:My guest today is vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the senior U.S. senator from Virginia. Senator Warner, thanks for doing the show. Thanks, Tommy. So we are speaking on Monday afternoon, in Pacific time, we're still waiting with a bated breath to see if we'll ever see the actual text of whatever Donald Trump negotiated with Iran about their, you know, the Strait of Hormuz. What do you know about this digitally signed memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran? What do you make on sort of the leaks and reporting on it so far?

54:19Mark Warner:I know Zippo. I know nothing more than you. And I think, frankly, even my Republican Senate friends have not seen any of this. We do wonder whether this was time for his birthday or to try to affect the markets today. We do know I think this is less than what it appears. And we knew at some point Trump was going to declare victory. And the sooner we get out of this war of choice, the better. But if as you know, I hate to kind of like suck up, but if you look at your tweets today, you are absolutely right on all four of the goals that Trump laid out. We're not close to any of them.

54:59Jon Favreau:Yeah. It sounds like we maybe have an agreement to have more talks where they will try to get to an agreement that's about the nuclear program, the ballistic missiles, support for proxies, et cetera. But it's all forward-looking as far as I can tell, right?

55:12Mark Warner:Yeah. The things we do know are this. The regime is more hardcore now than it was before. The new leader since we killed his dad, his wife, his kid, more hardcore. We do know that the Iranians have been masters for years at trying to hide the ball on their enriched uranium. And the idea that we're somehow going to get this without troops on the ground or by some international agreement, God willing, but I'm not going to hold my breath. The fact that the DOD and Hegsef misrepresented how much we had taken out of the Iranian ballistic missiles, obviously not the case since They're still shooting them off, and that doesn't even count their drones.

55:52Mark Warner:And then we've taken what was an international open gateway of passage straight up Hormuz, and Iran will have something to say on a going forward basis. None of that makes us, none of that makes our Gulf allies, none of it even frankly makes Israel stronger than when we started 107 days ago.

56:11Jon Favreau:Yeah, I mean, Senator, I noticed in the run-ups of the war, the Iran hawks trotted out of the new talking point, which is that Iran could create a ballistic missile arsenal that was so great that it might be able to prevent the U.S. and Israel from taking out their nuclear infrastructure in the future. So I did want to ask you about the state of that ballistic missile inventory and their capacity to manufacture new ballistic missiles. What do we know that you can discuss publicly?

56:37Mark Warner:Well, we know that we have degraded some – it's both the missiles and their launchers. We took out some of them. The earlier estimates – and I can say this because it's in the public – that we had eliminated 70%, 80%, 90 % are just factually not true. And they have had – many of the launchers as well are still existing. They can obviously reconstitute some of these missiles. We have not been able to blow up how all that started. And these missiles are significant. But again, we took down many of them. But as we go into this war of choice, what we have done, and this is the part where the Iranians, I think, will come back, unfortunately, and bite us, is they have been dribbling out their missiles.

57:25Mark Warner:We have been using both with the missiles and the drones, very expensive interceptors that cost, you know, two and a half million dollars apiece. And they have bled down our supplies, our supplies, Gulf allies, even Israel supplies, so that if they have anything close to what we presume, they can continue to bleed that down. And at some point, we won't have the capacity to take them out. One of the reasons why it was so insane that we didn't take the Ukrainians offer in December where they were going to say we will give you our anti-drone technology, which they have the best in the world, which could have at least taken down the Iranian drones.

58:05Jon Favreau:Right, right. And you mentioned the new sort of set of leaders. I mean the previous supreme leader of Iran was quite well known. He'd been around for a while, as were a lot of the senior members of the IRGC and the Iranian military. then Israel and the U.S. killed a lot of them. Now Iran is led by this new crop of leaders. The Supreme Leader's son is apparently really wounded and in hiding, but presumably more hardline than maybe his father, since we killed his dad, we killed his wife, we killed his kids, I think, reportedly. Now there's a new crop of younger IRGC generals who seem to be more firmly entrenched.

58:40Jon Favreau:Trump keeps saying that the new crowd is more pragmatic. What do you know about the new crowd? There is absolutely zero evidence that anybody in the new crowd is more pragmatic, that is more westward leaning.

58:54Mark Warner:They may live in fear. I think we have put fear of God in them. But the idea that they're more willing to make a deal, there has been no evidence to date that I've seen any intelligence on that. And matter of fact, the structure in Orion was they always had – they have a government and they have a former military that's a little bit separate from the IRGC. The one thing that is the case is that the government, which was sometimes more moderate in the more traditional military, they have lost power in this last 108 days. So IRGC, more radical, more in power.

59:31Jon Favreau:Excellent. A big win for us. What we think is maybe the outlines of a future deal would require Israel to honor a ceasefire in Lebanon against Hezbollah as well. Do you have any confidence that Netanyahu or Hezbollah will honor that ceasefire? Because it seems like Netanyahu has a pretty decent political incentive to blow up the deal given the initial response to it in Israel.

59:52Mark Warner:I have no confidence that Bibi, who's got his own political problems, and I think in many ways has really hurt Israel's reputation in the region and around the world. And in the, again, tragedy on top of tragedy, I think there was a moment in the fact that Israel is negotiating with the Lebanese government. If we could have actually put some oomph behind that and helped the Lebanese government, who does have a military, actually disarm Hezbollah, the people of Lebanon might have come out of this better. They are not now. And instead, you've got the Netanyahu government bombing not only the Shia, but unfortunately, Druze, Christian and Sunni villages in the south.

1:00:35Mark Warner:And my fear is pushing some of the Lebanese, you know, back into the hands of Hezbollah.

1:00:41Jon Favreau:Yeah, and it sounds like Israel has not agreed to pull its troops out of Lebanon. My understanding is they're occupying, you know, up to sort of six miles over the border. I'm just wondering how an ongoing occupation is not likely to lead to renewed, if not increased, conflict. Was that called a softball question? Yes.

1:01:02Mark Warner:You know, it's like, yeah, and we've seen, you know, Bibi's got his own political problems. He's under indictment. He has to maintain this far right agenda. And my fear is not only Lebanon, but what also is taking place, and one of the reasons why I voted against even giving any more bulldozers to Israel, The other tragedy that's taking place is what's happening on the West Bank as the Israeli settlers, frankly, do awful things on some of the Palestinian villages.

1:01:35Jon Favreau:Yeah, just big picture. I mean, I'm struggling with how to talk about this as a Democrat, because I think the best option available to Donald Trump was ending the war as soon as humanly possible for a variety of reasons, but especially because I was worried that this was going to lead to a famine in places like Sudan and mass starvation and death because fertilizer and fuel just wasn't getting through the strait. At the same time, I don't think we should give Donald Trump a pass for launching this catastrophic, unnecessary war because all the outcomes he might get through this negotiation process he could have gotten just by talking to them in the first place and not bombing them.

1:02:11Jon Favreau:So how are you thinking about how to talk about this?

1:02:14Mark Warner:Tommy, that is a very fair question. I don't want to – Trump gets no credit for this war of choice and where we are. And that doesn't even count the$100 billion of assets we've lost in the region. It doesn't cost the$60 billion of increased gas prices. It doesn't cost the effect of in Sudan and elsewhere. But I'm not going to, you know, but the question is, I'm not going to just blast him for ending it because ending it was, you know, this disagreement will not stand the test of any scrutiny. You know, I'm not going to give him credit, but I'm glad he ended it rather than continued where what could have led to even a worse circumstance.

1:02:59Mark Warner:So I actually think on this one, there is no way even a Trumpian figure can turn this into anything other than what it is, is that we, America, and our friends are in worse place than we were at the end of February.

1:03:13Jon Favreau:Yeah, agreed with you there. Switching gears a little bit. So Trump tried to install a man named Bill Pulte as the director of national intelligence. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why you think he made that selection, whether Pulte even would have met the statutory requirements for the job. I should say he yanked Pulte's nomination after Democrats in the Senate said, hell no, no way. And did that selection make you even more worried about how Trump might abuse the intelligence community?

1:03:40Mark Warner:Absolutely. Bill Pulte is a third generation rich kid who literally got thrown out of his own family's company. Right. And then taking what would be a relatively benign oversight of the mortgage, Fannie and Freddie, was able to take private information about Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve, Adam Schiff, one of my colleagues, and weaponize that. I do think figures in the White House tried to prevent Trump from doing this. But as always the case, Pulte or whoever speaks to the president last, he got him put in. And this came at a moment in time when we have to reauthorize something called Section 702, which is a critical intelligence tool that the Bidens, Obamas, everybody supported.

1:04:36and we've used our leverage to say, you know, we're not going to reauthorize 702 if Pulte is

1:04:42Mark Warner:there. Now, my concern, frankly, is 702 has got enough bells and whistles and audits that if he misuses that, it will be, I think we'll find it. I'm more concerned about the fact that this guy who doesn't even have a national security clearance suddenly gets the keys to 18 agencies, maliciously or not gets exposed to things that could be a huge security risk. And our challenge right now, and this goes down the rabbit hole, Trump has finally appointed somebody else, someone who I've worked with at times. I still need to ask him. Jay Clayton, who was the former SEC head and the current U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Manhattan, I want to make sure he's not going to interfere in our elections and basic constitutional rights.

1:05:31Mark Warner:But if we delay getting him in, Pulte could still serve and there's nothing we can do as an interim for a few days. And I think the Democrats in the Senate will have to decide, do we waive to get this through? He will get confirmed. I hope the sooner or the later so that we don't have Pulte in this office, hopefully ever.

1:05:50Jon Favreau:Oh, so that's why you're trying to fast track Jay Clayton's nomination to try to shrink the amount of time that Pulte could be in that job?

1:05:57Mark Warner:Yes, sir. And again, and it's like, and the irony, and here's the thing, I had huge problems with Tulsi Gabbard, the current. She was going to stay until the end of the month. Pulte tried to fire her and they advanced her leaving date till this coming Friday. If she would just, I never say, I want to say Gabbard stay, but if she would stay until the beginning of July, we could get it done in two weeks. Whether we get it done in one week will be, frankly, up to my Democratic colleagues who, you know, they can vote against Clayton. They can vote against 702. But please, let's separate keeping Pulte out of the job and the renewal of Section 702.

1:06:42Jon Favreau:Yeah. I'm with you on prioritizing keeping Pulte away from all of that information. I did want to ask you about FISA Section 702, though, because for those who aren't familiar, this is a provision that lets the intelligence community get information from American telecom companies to turn over the electronic communications of foreign persons located outside of the United States without a warrant. And civil liberties advocates have long been concerned about 702 because of the potential for abuse and also because communications to and from American citizens and those foreign persons are often captured in the process without a warrant and could be reviewed by people investigating the information.

1:07:23Jon Favreau:So in the past, I have mostly felt like on balance that Section 02 was defensible for a variety of reasons. It is the thing that national security professionals will tell you is the most important tool in their toolkit. But I'll tell you, after the Pulte selection, I no longer have confidence that Trump won't use all of these tools to abuse his authority. So why am I wrong? Like, why am I wrong that Democrats should fight this?

1:07:50Mark Warner:Well, first of all, Section 702, which has had prior abuses, we've gone through three rounds of reforms. The FBI used to be very callous about how it used it. They went from only 60 % compliance to 98 % compliance on making sure that appropriate checks and balances are dealt with, number one. Number two, my concern with Pulte is so great, not about 702, because there are enough reporting that he will at least be discovered. Now, that may not assuage you, but there will be an audit trail, whereas he could try to get other information that doesn't have near the same audit trail. And then I do think there is a – one of the things that took me a long time to wrap my head around this.

1:08:38Mark Warner:So you've got two Russian spies, one in Moscow, one in Paris. They're talking about these. They keep mentioning this guy, Tommy. And we don't know from listening whether Tommy is collaborating with the Russians or someone the Russians are going after to see if they can hack into Tommy and actually be a victim. Right. And the idea, this is the part that I don't think people fully understand. if we want to look at who else Tommy has called, because we've got Tommy's name, we've got his number, we can only look at the numbers but not the content. If you want to look at the, and say on an email, Tommy sent something to Mark, if you want to look at the content, you have to get a warrant.

1:09:31Mark Warner:But the idea that you could get a warrant because there is the circumstance that this could be an active live terrorist event and you don't know whether Tommy's about to go do a bomb. The idea that you could get a warrant when you only know the name when 20 % of the time, 15 % to 20 % of the time, Tommy is the victim, not the bad guy. It is – at the end of the day, I've come down to this is such an important security tool. President Obama supported President Biden, Trump. It is 70 % of what we was in the presidential daily brief. But I understand that people have feel the other way. And we have added additional requirements that if it's a politician, if it's a religious figure, if it's a media person, you have more hoops.

1:10:17Mark Warner:If it's somebody where information might be about their constitutional rights because you're out protesting ICE, you can't use it there. It will never be, for friends like Ron Wyden, who is a hardcore civil libertarian, I will never satisfy him. I do think there will be, at the end of the day, somewhere around 15, 20 Democrats that will still say, absent the problem, because here's my problem, this goes away, God forbid something happens. And Donald Trump then says, we wouldn't have had this incident if we had this tool. And the irony, just one last point on this is I don't think Donald Trump actually even supports the provision that much because it took until like six weeks, seven weeks before the bill expired that he even came out and formally said he supports it.

1:11:08Jon Favreau:Right. Well, wouldn't the actual like kind of existing authorities not expire for almost another year if there wasn't a reauthorization?

1:11:14Mark Warner:That is, again, where the rubber hits the road. There is the ability that this authority is certified once a year and it would be maintained until March. When this came up under Biden, what we heard from the telcos, and this is mostly telcos and the Googles and the hyperscalers, they said to Biden's security team, if this expires, we are no longer going to participate because we don't have indemnification. This expired on Friday night. So we're now into an area where, you know, who is right? Will they continue to participate or not? One of the telcos today told me, thank goodness, that they will participate.

1:12:02Mark Warner:The others, we don't have an answer. And what is insane to me is I'm the freaking vice chair or was former chair of the intelligence, I should know whether they are participating or not. Right, right. And in a normal world, the Justice Department, if we still had real lawyers, would have tried to get an injunction to try to force them to continue to participate until it was litigated out so we don't end up with this gap. My understanding, they've not even filed suit yet. So, there will be this gap, hopefully not too long, but we will find out whether the concern I had that they won't participate without indemnification is true or not.

1:12:43Jon Favreau:Okay. Just as long as I'm treating you like my deep state therapist, I mean, is it wrong to focus on the DNI when Kash Patel is just as unqualified and has more authorities to conduct, do things that are abusive against Americans via the FBI?

1:12:59Mark Warner:Well, I have gone through a long litany of Kash Patel abuses and mistakes, and he should not be there. The DNI does get keys to all 18 agencies. Frankly, the DNI, to go nerdy again, that whole role needs to be slimmed down, probably re-examined. It came out after 9-11, well-intentioned, but grew too much. But no, Kash Patel scares the hell out of me. And what also scares the hell out of me is we have seen intelligence professionals in other agencies. The NSA, which is our spying organization in terms of listening in, they fired the guy who, Tim Hawk, who was there, who was a career professional because Laura Loomer went after him.

1:13:41Mark Warner:Or the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency told the truth about the first bombing of Iran a year ago where he said, yeah, we whacked him pretty good, but we didn't obliterate their nuclear program. obviously the truth or we wouldn't be back in on this. So you've got plenty of, I got plenty of reasons to keep you up at night in terms of concerns.

1:13:59Jon Favreau:Have you ever seen Kash Patel chug a beer? The guy doesn't spill a drop. Let me tell you, man.

1:14:03Mark Warner:Just on video, although I will, I won't even, I'm hesitant to say this, but there's some colorful videos online about Mr. Pulte as well.

1:14:12Jon Favreau:Oh, I've seen one of those. The gentleman before him seems to be having a good time. Senator, thank you so much for doing the show. So maybe when we learn what's actually in this deal, we could talk again. That'd be nice. Love to. Thank you, Tommy. Appreciate it.

1:14:25Mark Warner:Godspeed. Take care.

1:14:32That's our show for today. Thanks to Senator Warner for coming on. We'll be back in the feed on Friday with a special episode. The three of us and Dan will be recording in Chicago at the opening of the Obama Presidential Center. Fun. Nice. Talk to everybody soon. Pods of America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Faris Safari with Reed Cherlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Kirill Pellaviv, David Tolles, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.