Has Trump just trashed his own World Cup?

0:02This is a global production. Donald Trump placed a call to FIFA's president, Gianni Infantino. It is so ugly. It is so reprehensible. That that red card should be rescinded to allow Balogun to be part of the team tonight. It was absolutely pusillanimous on the part of Infantino to go, oh yes, Donald, let's look at it and we'll try and sort this out. What do you have here? you have Trump deciding that he has to respond as emperor. It's about politics. It's about crude muscle and Donald Trump just throwing his weight around. Where does this start and where does this end now? Can we overturn it or not overturn it?

0:45Or is that something that you'll seek to pursue? Because like you say, there's surely a chance. Where do you draw the line? Yeah, where to draw the line is the question that I ask. I have no answer to that. Where does this end now? Do we appeal if a yellow card is not a yellow card? Do we think it's not a red card or who thinks it? Where does this start and where does this end? It's my question. I don't have an answer. Can Harry maybe ask Donald Trump to? Maybe, yeah. That's a good starting point. That's the England manager, Thomas Tuchel, talking about red cards and match bans. He's not really talking about what happened overnight, that magnificent match where England beat Mexico, he's talking about another red card and he's talking about the involvement of one Donald Trump who magically made a match ban disappear.

1:39Has this World Cup just turned into a playground for Donald Trump? Welcome to the News Agents.

1:50The News Agents. It's Maitlis. It's John in Mexico City. And we are going to tell you about the dirty side of this World Cup in a moment because things have taken a turn for the worse by the intervention of one of our friends in the White House. That to come. But honestly, if you wanted to get a sense of just how powerful a national moment and a sporting moment can be, you were just in the right place at the right time last night. So I feel like actually we've been talking all night already. I know. Look, the Azteca Stadium is like nothing I've ever been to before. I mean, it's vast, it's huge, but the noise was utterly deafening.

2:35And when the Mexicans sang their national anthem with such gusto of people crying while they were singing it, it was really beautiful to behold. And likewise, when we sang, you know, God Save the King, every England fan was up there at the top of their voices and the noise inside the stadium was deafening. And it was all about what was best in football. This was a breathless encounter by two teams, quite evenly matched. It ends up 3-2 with ascending off two penalties and extra time that went on for 11 minutes that felt like 11 hours. And honestly, I felt I had aged about 11 years. And, you know, all of this in this hostile cauldron of a place, the Azteca, packed and the English was so outnumbered.

3:24And yet the game went on and it was like a siege at the end where, you know, from history, the siege of Mafeking or when, you know, your soldiers are running out of ammunition. There are only a few of them left, but you hold off the attackers. And that's what England did last night with Mexico City. And at the end of the game, it was a really fantastic atmosphere. And that was all that was best about the World Cup. All that you love about the World Cup was on show in the Azteca last night. And Mexico have never lost a World Cup game in that stadium. I mean, I know there was a lot of nervousness seeing how defensively we had to play.

4:07As you say, it was this sort of wall that came up. But it was like every single team member was their absolute best in that, what was it, 105 minutes in the end, wasn't it, last night? Yeah, it was. I thought it was absolutely amazing. I thought that every single player, I mean, you know, everyone talks about the superstars of Harry Kane and Jude Bellingham. And they were brilliant. Jude Bellingham was extraordinary. Every player really put their body and soul into it. And, you know, I kind of, and also Thomas Tuchel changed the system. Suddenly there were five defenders. He had the, you know, we talk about Keir Starmer, about the fact that he couldn't adjust his style.

4:47And that was the accusation about Gareth Southgate when he was England manager. And with Thomas Huckel, he just saw what needed to happen and, you know, changed the formation when we were down to 10 men and it was 3-2. And we were clinging on by our fingertips for dear life. There was one very amusing moment where when we were 2-0 up and we were feeling very relaxed, Mexico suddenly scored. And I was with a group of England fans and suddenly we are showered in beer, people with their beer cups. and so once Mexico got the penalty when it was you know we certainly thought Christ almighty we know what we've got to do now get our coats on put our cagoules on put our hoods up and we all huddled together and sure enough another shower of beer came all over us but we were okay so I probably don't smell I probably don't smell that great right now and probably this shirt does need to go in the washing machine.

5:40But interestingly when Thomas Tuchel was giving the press conference afterwards, one of the questions was about our player that was Kwanzaa that was sent off with a red card. And the reason he was asked about it was not just the sort of comings and goings of all the sort of, you know, the disciplinary action in a game, but the fact that overnight, one of the most egregious interceptions in any World Cup took place. And that is from what we understand from reporting via the New York Times that Donald Trump placed a call to FIFA's president Gianni Infantino after the game between America and Bosnia on Thursday night in which an American player Balagan was given a red card which means technically he would not have been able to play in a fixture with Belgium tonight.

6:37Now, miraculously, after four nights of thinking about it, FIFA suddenly decided that that red card should be rescinded, suspended, magicked away, I think is the technical phrase, to allow Balogun to be part of the team tonight. And this has left an extraordinarily nasty stench over a World Cup that up to this point was going fantastically well. It is so ugly. It is so reprehensible. The idea that an elected politician tells the head of a football authority which players can and cannot play on the field. It was absolutely out of order for Donald Trump to have made the call to Infantino. And it was absolutely pusillanimous on the part of Infantino to go, oh, yes, Donald, let's look at it and we'll try and sort this out.

7:33Honestly, in the stadium last night, as I said, it was the very best of what football can offer on the pitch. And they flashed up a picture of Infantino and suddenly Mexican and England fans are booing in unison because no one can defend something like that. It's just a gross interference. It's absolutely improper. What on earth is he doing trying to kind of influence this? And it's been the law in football for decades now that if you are sent off, it's a mandatory, you know, you're banned from the next game or the next three games or whatever it happens to be. And so for Donald Trump to do this means that this isn't about sport anymore.

8:16And maybe we're naive in thinking it's the beautiful game. It's about politics. It's about crude muscle. And Donald Trump just throwing his weight around an Infantino who we know, we know is not the greatest, is he? Well, just to put this in context, on Thursday night, when there was all the hoo-ha about the red card, FIFA sources said after the match there was no recourse for an appeal. They actually cited Article 66.4 of its disciplinary code. And the irony is, I think, that we had just stopped talking about corruption in this World Cup. We just stopped talking about the exorbitant prices or the racial bans or the uneasy smell of America being on the make and trying to get the FIFA Peace Prize last December to sort of tie in that wonderful relationship.

9:05We just started to concentrate on the actual game, on the actual football, on the actual magnificence of the players. And then this comes. And if you talk to the White House or if you ask them for the official statement, they will say, oh no, Trump just wanted to understand the rules better, in inverted commas. He just wanted to know what had caused Balogun to be suspended. It's all about understanding the rules. And it just so happens that there were others in his administration who also needed to understand the rules better, because after Trump's first involvement, as reported by The New York Times, reports have suggested there were multiple calls, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

9:44Oh, is that a man who deals with money by any chance? And Andrew Giuliani, the executive director of the White House World Cup task force, who recruited lawyers to also assist with US Soccer's appeal against the decision. So Infantino gets the call from the president and then finds what? An entire task force on his back as well, saying, we're just trying to understand it. And sure enough, on Sunday evening, they suddenly found another part of the disciplinary code, which is Article 27, which allowed them to, well, they haven't exactly destroyed the red card. They've just kind of left it hanging for about a year over this poor guy's head.

10:29And actually, what's astonishing about this is from the sounds of it, none of the players, none of the US players even knew what was going on. They didn't know about the call. They didn't know the decision was up. They thought they'd kind of come round to imagining that they weren't playing with their teammate, this sort of key USA striker. And suddenly he's back in and they're having to justify it, presumably, to every other team and all the other players that they meet now. Look, everyone in the world of football tonight is going to want Belgium to give the US a mighty kicking, you know, to 4-0, 5-0, 6-0.

11:06And I do feel sorry for the players because I think it's put them in an invidious position where they're suddenly the bad guys in the world of sport. And I would love to know what Mauricio Pochettino thinks about this, the US team manager who, you know, formerly managed, you know, Paris Saint-Germain managed my team Tottenham and is a brilliant guy. and he's been put in a difficult position. Look, there were question marks about whether this was a soft, inverted commas, red card that had been delivered to Balogun. Well, let the football authorities, let the referees decide, oh no, maybe we've gone too far and rescind it.

11:45That's happened before. But no, it's Donald Trump's intervention that has made the difference. And this belief that Donald Trump has, that he has total impunity, total unfettered power, that we now have as America celebrates its 250th birthday, and it's manifesting itself in the most unlikeliest of places, that we're now talking about this footballer that Donald Trump, I guarantee you, had never heard of until last week, using it as the latest place where he can flex his muscles and he can make other people bow to his will. And I just think that's going to turn everyone against the United States as a result, the football team, as a result of all of this.

12:28Yeah, I mean, without getting too west wing about it, this week, you know, the whole 250th anniversary is all about a celebration of throwing off the shackles of tyranny. It's about independence from tyrants, independence from kings, independence from sort of arbitrators of other people's lives. And suddenly, what do you have here? you have Trump deciding that he has to respond as emperor, that he has to respond as king. He is not just content with being the US president. He has to be the king of FIFA too. And I mean, the ultimate irony, honestly, is to go back to Sepp Blatter's tweet that came out this morning, a man who has not been, shall we say, known for his squeaky clean approach at the top of FIFA's governing body.

13:19But even Sepp Blatter has tweeted, red cards are not overturned by political phone calls. They are overturned by rules. I'm going to read this with a straight face. They are overturned by rules, evidence and independent bodies. If a US president intervenes with the FIFA president and a player is suddenly cleared before a World Cup knockout match, the question is unavoidable. Quo Vardis, FIFA. I mean, is Sepp Blatter saying there are limits to which even I would not have gone? That is from somebody who we thought had a pretty tarnished reputation, and he is now calling out his successor. Well, look, even the head of European football, UEFA, have issued a statement.

14:02In similarly condemnatory terms, it was unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable. This has happened apparently before. in 1962 Brazil had a player sent off and there was a very strong sense then that there had been political interference to try and get that kind of then in 1962 it wasn't a mandatory suspension after a red card so it was very murky but this is in plain daylight everyone is reporting it I mean you listed all the people that got involved I've also seen reporting that the Department of Justice got involved. I mean, the DOJ ringing up Infantino and ringing up FIFA's lawyers and saying, you better do this.

14:49You better do this. And I just think it's terrible. I mean, a real stench. Yeah. Do you remember the story that they told of the Argentina World Cup final in 1978, when apparently, and it's very hard to find actual documentary evidence of this, but apparently Kissinger and Argentina's president Vidal sort of popped into the Peruvian changing room just before the match began and said, Peru, you guys won't make it through. You know, you're out anyway, to all intents and purposes. Please, could you fix the match to allow Argentina to win? Now, Peru has denied that. The players have denied that conversation.

15:25But this was the sort of the theory that hung over that whole victory for Argentina as they hosted the World Cup. And I mean, what is amazing is you're absolutely right. That was behind closed doors, right? We never actually got to hear that from the horse's mouth. Now we are basically just enumerating the people who have been involved in helping overturn this decision, including Trump, who then actually tweeted out, truth socialed out this morning. Oh, thank you for making the right decision. He's not even pretending that this isn't about him. look you've seen that MAGA video that was put out where you see the referee brandishing the red card to Balogun and then Balogun brandishing this a card of his own with Donald Trump on it like you know your Donald Trump out trumps your red card so screw you yeah literally and there you have it I think this is you know the world cup we have talked about all the things as you say Emily that could have possibly gone wrong with this world cup and Infantino you know behaving like the emperor that he thinks he is and Donald Trump, you know, putting a lot of people off.

16:34And the World Cup was going really, really well. And there were big crowds. And you've just got this. I think it really tarnishes it. It's interesting, isn't it? I mean, what happens if a Belgian player gets sent off tonight? Does the King of Belgium have to call Infantino? And if there is a sort of disagreement, I mean, I was listening to this Norwegian hosts, football pundits, say, look, we started with the rules in football, then we brought on the referee, then we brought in VAR, and now we're at president's. And where does this end? The Supreme Court? It's like the rules have just been ripped up in plain sight of this whole tournament.

17:20And I don't see how America can progress now. I mean, genuinely, what happens if they do beat Belgium? What happens if they are in the final? What happens if they win the tournament? And all anyone's actually thinking is, well, that was an outcome that wasn't even on the cards until the president intervened. But Donald Trump would think that was worth it. You win at any cost. There are no rules. It's a dirty fight. You don't play by the Queensbury rules. You punch below the belt always. And I think that that is what you're seeing in all of this. I mean, what's to stop Donald Trump ringing up? You know, if Belgium do win tonight, Donald Trump, I mean, this, you know, it sounds preposterous, but the whole conversation we're having, Emily, is utterly preposterous.

18:05What's to stop him saying, well, it was an unfair match because the Belgians did this or the Belgians did that. I demand that the match should be replayed. And what's Infantini going to do then? I mean, I'm sure he'd say no, but the fact that we can even have this conversation. Yeah. Yeah. It's just the madness that has descended. I suppose the other thing we've got to consider now that England, through to the quarterfinals and playing Norway, what happens to Lewis's relationship with his Norwegian wife? Where does Lewis Goodall stand in all of this? It's big stuff. I thought you were going to say something else.

18:38I thought you were going to say, if we need to have a red card rescinded, is it Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham who makes the phone call to Infantino? I don't think they carry much clout. Well, we will be back in a moment talking about Nigel Farage and his money woes. Interesting to just compare the difference between a written constitution that America has that appears to get torn up whenever the will takes them and Britain's unwritten constitution where we go through everything with a fine tooth comb and a parliamentary standards committee until we think we've come to an answer.

19:30Well, if over the weekend you have been following all the latest revelations on Nigel Farage, the money he's been receiving from, amongst others, a convicted criminal, then the man behind some of this extraordinary reporting is Gabriel Pogrant. He's with us here. and it was the inside investigations team at the Sunday Times which broke yesterday's story on the back we should say of the Guardian's excellent reporting on the Christopher Harbourn£5 million loan. Gabriel I know you're also fronting a podcast and it's called Posh George, the criminal behind Farage. So should we just get a little window into Posh George first of all?

20:11Absolutely I mean, he's quite a difficult figure to pin down, which is by design rather than through accident. A US judge once described him as deceptive for sussily changing his name. It's spelt with two T's and two L's. He legally changed it to have one T, one L. This Cottrell. Cottrell. He flies on private jets under an alias George Coe. So quite who George Cottrell is, is its own riddle. But to the extent we've been able to unravel some of his story, He comes from an aristocratic family. His mother was the daughter of the third Baron Manton, and she dated the future King Charles in the 70s.

20:50The match was broken off, actually, because she posed nude for Penthouse magazine. So lots of colour in her life, lots of colour in his early life, because he grew up on Mustique, the Caribbean island. He was born in Gloucestershire, raised in a cottage in rural Worcestershire, and was expelled from boarding school at Malvern College for his involvement in gambling. And at that point, the young George goes into Mayfair in the sort of grey zone of London finance, where Russian and Arab and English money commingle. commingle and he becomes very conversant in the ways of offshore finance and how to move money around the world and this leads him i think the tender age of about 20 to participate in a conspiracy where money laundering services were being advertised on the dark web and somebody said somebody got in touch to say i'm a drug dealer or we're a drug dealing syndicate can you please help us launder hundreds of thousands of dollars a year um and the person on the other end of the dark web says uh yes sure and let's meet a las vegas hotel to discuss next steps and the person who arrives is this blonde chubby aristocrat posh george who gives them detailed information about how they can launder the proceeds of of drug dealing um and i'll just momentarily press pause there to say that after this happens he goes to he returns to London becomes very involved in Farage's inner circle he's a volunteer at UKIP.

22:29Okay so just just take us to that because this extraordinarily sort of colourful young character has not at this point met Nigel Farage what is the moment where he where they meet where their lives become sort of entangled? So he's got an uncle by marriage lord hesketh who's the um former f1 um racing owner and a uh ukip peer he was a defectee an early defector to ukip and we think through that that he may have met farage but essentially he this is how long ago then we're talking this is around 2014 and he becomes the essential farage whisperer so when nigel wants a fag or he wants a pint or he needs a moment to just be on his own or somebody needs to pull the chair from under the table when he's getting sat down for an interview.

23:18Like, Posture becomes that guy. So we would all have seen him. I mean, sort of like the Gary to Selena's Veep. Exactly. He's just everywhere. And he has this kind of uncanny ability to read and preempt Farage, which gives him this status as Nigel's man. He becomes deputy treasurer of UKIP in his 20s. and the reason I said I was going to pause was because he's with Farage on the day of the referendum in 2016 they go get drunk and have lunch at a restaurant in Mayfair awaiting the result and then fast forward a few months he's in America for the Republican National Convention in Cleveland Ohio with Farage and on their way back they're getting a connecting flight through Chicago and suddenly a phalanx of federal agents turns up to arrest posgeorge because posgeorge is his nickname by the way not my um not my um appellation but he um at that point learns that the drug dealers who had been corresponding with him who he'd met were actually undercover u.s agents okay so farage is with the man who he's trusted for the best part of sort of three years at that point when he's arrested he's convicted of wire fraud amongst other things but their relationship continues and what is the money question that we're talking about now so you're right so when he leaves prison um he says he's going to get involved with charity work and return to education he doesn't do that he moves to montenegro and becomes involved in uh crypto gambling and in a crypto gambling platform which we revealed on the weekend is implicated in potential criminality so that's what he does.

25:04Farage has gone out there to visit him. But the thrust of our story on Sunday is that in a year preceding Farage's election, Cottrell bankrolled his operation from everything from drivers and security to personal staff to the man responsible for Farage's social media output. This was before Farage won in Clacton, pretty much two years ago this week. So in the whole 12 months before that, he was being bankrolled by the convicted criminal. That's quite right. And in addition, he also has since and prior to the election availed him of a townhouse he rents near Buckingham Palace. So let me break this down, Gabriel, and I feel stupid asking this, but which part of this is illegal or unparliamentary?

25:53What is rule breaking here about this arrangement? So that's a great question and one we've examined from top to bottom, as you would expect us to. So I guess the ultimate objective of the code of conduct for MPs is to uphold democracy by maintaining the highest level of transparency. and then you get the small print on what that involves and one of the bits of small print is that in the 12 months before one's election as an mp um you have to declare any interest any any registrable any uh financial or non-financial benefit and what it says is that there is an exemption this is one which farage is relying on so it's important there's an exemption for purely personal gifts so that means um a box of chocolates from husband to wife or a grandma's this to jumper for you i mean they say then what about an aunt leaving you money in a will things like that that's a perfect example and then it says that if it is it gives friends and family relatives as the example if it's not that and a reasonable person would consider that your receipt of the gift relates in any way to your political activity it says disclose it and it says if you have any doubt and it says you should think about the motive of the giver or the use to which the gift is to be put if there's any doubt declare it declaring is not an admission of wrongdoing it is uh the opposite it's a way of being transparent what we do if you do it then you're in no doubt that you're in compliance with the rules so he didn't declare any of it that's right there's one gift he declared from cultural which was i think about 9 250 pounds worth of support for farage to alongside his staff and security attended a conference in a Conservative conference in Belgium in April 24.

27:38That's the only disclosure he ever made about this about this period. So if he didn't disclose it, how big a penalty is that potentially? I mean, is it just a perception of a lack of transparency? Or has he done something more wrong than that? It's a great question. I suppose one matter which is worth reflecting on is who George is, because the real concern in relation to undeclared interest is there any intersection on the Venn diagram between the circle that we might call Cottrell's life and times and interests and then Farage's circle as a politician capable of potentially in future giving effect to policy but also championing certain things.

28:22So George Cottrell is intimately involved in this platform called Tether.bet. It uses the cryptocurrency Tether which is part owned by Christopher Harbourn, the man behind the five million pound undisclosed donation. And he's involved in crypto, and he's presently seeking a pardon from US President Donald Trump. Farage is, of course, close to Trump, and he has championed crypto. His party hasn't published legislation on a number of things, but it has this very detailed, technicolor piece of proposed law about making Britain the crypto capital of the world. And Farage has lobbied the Bank of England in relation to crypto.

28:59So there's no imputation for me that George has asked Farage to do anything or that Farage has done anything for George but the question in relation to the rules is might a reasonable person consider that there's anything political within this gift and might one pose questions about what's going on over here so I think that's worth that's that's sort of worth setting out and you asked about how serious this could be the actual answer is this isn't a penal code there's no common law or legislation it's parliament's own system for policing itself so the real question is lib dems and lab yesterday referred this matter to the standards commissioner daniel greenberg if daniel greenberg investigates he can propose sanctions which can then be endorsed rather stamped or not because he's also he's already investigating farage over the five million pound harbourn donation have you had any word that he will widen his investigation now i've got no word at all about that other than to say that it is in his hands as it were now and it i don't know if they would broaden it to include it or do something in parallel um but it does seem it falls into very similar territory in some ways the territory is actually important it's similar but it's also different in a subtle but significant way which is that whereas the five million pound gift was just cash this was support for activity which in some instances does what i was gonna say does seemed to it was squarely political so um you know the output output on social media this guy who farage uh was cultural funded a guy who became farage's tiktok manager there's lots of clips we found which we understand were produced by this chap which um you know we're promoting farage's positions on expressly political matters immigration european human rights law wokery but also at times promoting reform itself of which farage was at the time honorary president.

30:50So you're reporting today, which shows that George Cottrell had these reform cards, business cards, suggest that he can't use that claim of it being a gift from a family member or a gift from somebody very close. Well, I think it's an awkward one, I got given it by somebody who was at a semi-public event with Post George and he passed them his card and it's got the reform logo and his name and then Farage's email underneath it. And I think we understand he's dished that out in the past in relation to fundraising for reform. So it's... And yet, Jenrick yesterday, who is their, what sort of, Treasury spokesman, shadow something, whatever, was doing the rounds.

31:31And he said there is pretty much nothing to see here. Farage himself called it an establishment stitch up. They said there's no, no rule has really been broken. Yeah, no rule has been broken. It's an establishment stitch up by a pro-Labour paper is essentially their position in relation to this. but in on the on on who pos george is he says he's just a friend and he's got no role in reform um and i've i've heard that one before from uh the forerunner to reform i remember learning that pos george was raising money for the brexit party and i asked them what he was up to years ago and they said well he's got no role so they often said he's got no role and that helps it happens to help it might only happen to help it i'm not saying it's deliberate but it certainly is convenient for the purpose of saying this wasn't a political gift or it had nothing to do with politics, if he's just a friend.

32:15But then we've got this piece of evidence from last year which shows that he's presenting himself as being connected to reform, which feels like a material piece of information. Faraj has said he's considering legal action against you and your team. Yes, he has. I must say I'm none of the wiser as to what that means. I can only say in terms of the core points of the story that Robert Jenrick, to whom you referred yesterday, essentially went on the airwaves and confirmed every facet of the story. So I'm not sure what the legal action would mean. Maybe he's saying that we've accused him of breaking the rules when he didn't.

32:53I mean, that's not a matter that either of us can adjudicate on just yet. So I'm not sure what that means at the moment. There's a rule that the pollsters tend to use, which is that scandals, in sort of commas, has cut through when the stories are very simple to tell. Do you see or do you think this is having a political impact? Is that your sense it's having an actual impact on Farage's standing now? Or do you think people are in danger of getting lost in the weeds of the cryptos and the Bank of England and the Montenegro? Is it one of those things where it's almost become too complicated for people to know how to respond to it?