347. Question Time: Biden’s Pardon is Unforgivable

0:00Thanks for listening to the Restus Politics, sign up to the Restus Politics Plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestuspolitics .com. That's therestuspolitics .com. At Blinds .com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100 % satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

0:32Because at Blinds .com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit Blinds .com now for up to 40 % off site -wide, plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.

0:50Welcome to the Restus Politics Question Time with me, Anastakambo, and with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Rory, we mentioned in the main podcast that Shultz was in Ukraine and Olivia Holman, hot off the press. Olaf Shultz has pledged $680 million to Ukraine. Will this be enough to help them win before Trump comes to power in January? So, firstly, no, absolutely not enough to help. Ukraine win. I mean, the Germany has been very generous, given maybe 15 billion euros, but to put it in context, the US has given north of 120 billion over the last couple of years. And Ukraine is losing ground fast. Russia has made a lot of advances even over the last three days.

1:33It seems as though Russia still has a huge superiority in the number of men it's able to deploy. Zelensky has been reluctant to conscript 18 to 30 euros at the rate at which we'd expect him. We'll hear a bit more about that and another one of our leading entities coming up. But it raises the bigger question of whether if Trump decides to stop the 50 billion dollars a year from the US, whether Europe would want to step up and find that money itself and finding that money would mean some pretty difficult choices about stopping funding of health education and infrastructure programs in Europe in order to give money to Ukraine, which it's not currently giving.

2:16And secondly, are they going to try for unanimities? So, what happens when Victor Orban from Hungary tries to veto them from doing this stuff? Are they going to form smaller coalitions? And thirdly, what do they do about the fact that there's still some kit that we don't produce in Europe? It'll be many years before we can. We don't have any real equivalents of the US Patriot missiles, for example. So, we'd still have to buy from the US. And this is all about stopping Putin continuing advances. This is not about Zelensky winning, is it worth? Anyway, over to you. Look, there's some of the money involved already are enormous.

2:50I wonder whether Sholes will get criticized in Germany. I mean, it's always difficult when you're in an election campaign, you start doing these massive spending things because he's not always been, if you remember, we were very excited at the start of the Ukraine, the crisis, when Sholes made that speech talking about this being a site and vendor to complete sort of epochal change in German attitudes and so forth. And yet, he's often given the sense of having to be sort of pushed into things, very, very caution and so forth. So, this is definitely a signal of real support and intent, whether it's partly with Trump in mind, I just don't know.

3:29You know, last week, Rory, we discussed whether Trump might be a little bit less obvious on Ukraine than the cartoon. And then Anthony is Karamucci and I talked about that on when I was manfully standing in for Katty Kay. And I had a couple of calls from people in the American system who thought, and maybe one of them said, maybe this is wishful thinking, but it is kind of the developing theme here that he won't just be ready to give over Ukraine. And the point that Anthony made that Trump hates this label of being Putin's little lackey. Anyway, we'll see. Let's think with America for a while.

4:06What about this one? Poppy, which is worse? Hunter Biden or Charles Kushner? So Hunter Biden has been pardoned by his dad. Joe, Charles Kushner is the father -in -law of Ivanka. He's an ex -convict dad of Jared, who made a lot of money out of being the advisor to Trump first time round, very close to the Saudis. So which of these things is worse? So they're both bad, Rory, which is worse. So I'm going to really annoy you and most the audience by saying Hunter Biden's worse. Oh, I think it's totally shocking that Joe Biden has pardoned his son. It's unforgivable and it feels to me corrupt. Charles Kushner at least served time in jail.

4:56I think it's ridiculous that Donald Trump is making his daughter's father -in -law the ambassador to France. But I hold Trump to very, very low bars. What Biden's done is just shocking. And to remind listeners, there is no equivalent to Britain. There is a royal pardon, but we use it very, very occasionally to pardon dead people. So Alan Turing was pardoned for being convicted very unfairly for homosexual acts after the Second World War, the great computer genius. The idea of using your position as president to pardon your own son from a criminal offense, I mean, hell does that say about the rule of law?

5:35Yeah. I mean, my criticism and my anger over it is more to do with the politics. It won't surprise you to know. Where Joe Biden has a point is when he says that none of this stuff where they've gone after Hunter Biden would have happened, had his name not been Biden. I think we can kind of accept that. It's been, it has been weaponized, it has been politicized, but that happens in politics. Yes, well, yes, exactly. And can I just point out that that's exactly what Trump's support is saying. They say none of these cases would have been brought if it wasn't going against Donald Trump. Both of them are saying the entire US legal system is prone to political bias and they don't trust the rule of law.

6:14Yeah, I think Joe Biden is making a different point about Hunter Biden. He's making the point that had it not been for the Republicans going after Hunter Biden, like it was the only thing in town, it would not have become the case that it did. Whereas what Democrats will say about Republicans rightly is Donald Trump, you have broken a lot of laws yourself. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, just to push this to Fubba, obviously Trump's point is that the case for which he got his 32 felony convictions, I'm perfectly prepared to believe would not have been a priority for prosecutors that kind of case if it had not been Donald Trump.

6:52And he's probably right that the incredible flurry of cases that have been mounted against Trump reflected a concerted Democrat campaign to try to make him ineligible for office or at least discredit him. And exactly the same is true about Hunter Biden. In both cases, these are people using the law to go after their political opponents. The proper response from the Democrats and Biden is to say, I believe in the rule of law, I believe in just process and don't go around pardoning your son. Mike Gray here when I was at school, we were read this story about this Russian general, Tauquatis, I think it's called Manius Tauquatis, who's Oh, I saw you.

7:30I saw your tweet about Arthur. I thought, my life is too short to look it up. He'll tell me later. Yeah. So his son had, he'd issued an order to his army that nobody was to engage with the enemy. They weren't too advanced. And his son was challenged by an atrussian to single combat. He went out to fight the atrussian and single combat defeated the atrussian took his arms, the whole army cheered. He came back to his dad with a big grin on his face and said, look what I've done. I've just won this great victory. And his father ordered him to be executed at once. Oh, and you admire that. Yes. And the Romans admired it great.

8:09It was the story the Romans were told again. And again, and of course, the point of the story is that not only you not supposed to do what Biden does, you're actually supposed to prosecute the law with greater rigor against your own children. Yeah. Anyway, Donald Trump is also, he's put another father in law into another senior job today, Tiffany's father in law. So there's a sort of big father in law that he's going, there's an I think the whole pardon thing is utterly ridiculous. There's much more to the American constitution. I mean, it's got some pretty ropey bits in it. It really has. I just think the whole pardon thing is awful.

8:39I get why you wouldn't want to if you got that power. Because Bill Clinton did the same with his brother. He pardoned his brother over. It's shocking. Just in case I sound like I suddenly weirdly flipped from being Colonel Harris's biggest champion to Trump's, the Charles Kushner case for which he was sent to jail was absolutely beyond imagining awful. So Charles Kushner in court, apologized to his sister, get this, apologized to his sister for soliciting a prostitute, sending the prostitute to her husband, seducing her husband, videotaping the encounter between her husband and the prostitute, and then posting his sister the videotape.

9:20Yeah. Nice because because because his brother in law was planning to testify against the beneficial prosecution. Yeah. No, they're lovely people, Roy. They're lovely people. I think the equivalent you made with the Joe Biden family is absolutely so well -made. Brackets are being very ironic. Now listen, Roy, there's a question here, which I think we should discuss. It's got a link. Philip, with two former conservative ministers on the question time panel last week, is the pretends a BBC neutrality finally dead? Well, let me answer that one because one of the ministers was re -smogged and the other one was you.

9:52So I don't think that's it. I really don't think there's a kind of neutrality issue there. But there's another one. Should question time be doing longer deep dives with the specialised panels for bigger issues like immigration, climate, unemployment, 10 minutes per question, never seems to do them justice. Also, is Roy's finger okay? I noticed your finger. Was that pen? Yeah. It's a really embarrassing. It was a red pen and everyone thought that sort of scarred my knuckle in some fight with Jacob. Yeah. But how, what are we doing? We're drawing on your finger. I was I was trying to take notes with my red pen before question time, which largely involved drawing all over the only space that you can find in the Times newspaper, which is the cartoon section.

10:34There's a thought that I realised that you could see on television that I'd drawn Red Marker all over Benjamin Netanyahu's face. I saw that. Who was the cartoon of the moment. So I thought I was going to get in trouble for that too. Roy have you ever heard of this stuff? It's called paper. It's so that's amazing. I was getting it. You roll it on it. Get some of that stuff. That's brilliant. Listen, I think I know what your answer would be to deeper dives and aggression because you said to me when you watched me that that was the most boring question time you'd ever seen in your life. We were trying to do these really so serious I did quite say that.

11:08I did find it quite dull. Jacob Riesmog has decided to be even more curtier -some -polite than ever because he's got this TV reality TV show coming up. I saw that Mariela Froststrup and Annan Menon were good on immigration. I liked what they had to say on immigration, but they were slightly echoing each other. I saw you couldn't quite decide whether you were on the podcast talking like you are now or you were on a cut -through TV program and you couldn't quite get the balance right. I know. For example, I try to say something I often say on the podcast which is we need to be very humane and honest about the immense benefits that immigration bring us and we also have to demonstrate that we can control the numbers of people coming into Britain.

12:03And I am told. And I realized that by you don't get any applause for that and when it was put out there I noticed that on Twitter nobody knew how to respond because the left were really alienated by my talking about controlling immigration and the right were completely enraged that I said we needed to be humane and accept the contribution that immigrants make. So that's another problem. I think it's a something huge vacuum if you try to do on men top. Yeah, but I also think you had a very flat audience. It was a smaller than usual audience and it seemed very flat. Well, now good news for the listeners because it's not going to be flat this week is it because we're going to have Alice the Campbell and Nala then our friend Nigel Farage on the same panel.

12:51Yeah. So what's your advice for that one, Rory? Well, you see I'm afraid at last time I thought the answer was to be kind of courteous, sort of do what Jacob Reece Mugler's kind of avoid by being very polite. Yeah, but you don't think you're up for a fight, aren't you? You're really you're going to try to share what a more entertaining question time looks like. It kind of depends what comes up, but I don't think I'll let him get away with a lot of his nonsense. By the way, they've told me that they've I don't know whether it's just as a result of yours, but they've told me they've decided to go back to a panel of four this week.

13:24Well, I do think five was two minutes. They're so ready. Why they put five on or what they think? If you get a stopwatch, I mean, how many minutes in total do you get on the whole thing? It's not many. No, no, no, no, you barely, barely speak at all. So you do all that research on the train on the back of the times car tunes with your right hands, right? Yeah, and you get four subjects, you get about two and a half minutes on each, then she. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's why podcasts in the long format feature. Well, we're all going to be really looking forward to watching you. Right. Here's a self -serving question for me.

13:54Percy, when Rory talked about visiting Afghanistan this summer, sounded like the charities working there are still able to help women and families, despite the international community leaving when the Taliban returned, what can we do to help this work? So answer on that. Terkwas Mountain, which is the charity that my wife Shashana runs, is still running in Afghanistan. It's supporting 4 ,000 female weavers. It's keeping education, health, going in very difficult situation under the Taliban. And this week is an amazing thing called the big gift where hundreds of British charities who raise funds will have their funds matched.

14:32Terkwas Mountain is an example of that. So would encourage people to look up Terkwas Mountain the work that it's doing. Thank you, Percy, for that searing question, which allowed Rory to do, even by his status of blatant plug. Well, we talk about plugging, Rory. Yes. What did I say to you before you went on question time? I have to plug the podcast and I completely failed. And what did you get? You get a question that was basically about Kim Leadbyter, who happens to be the guest that we just had on the podcast. The leading interview on the podcast. And I completely failed to say as you would have heard if you'd listened to the rest of the podcast.

15:06Yeah, well, you can even more subtly just say we had this really good interview with Kim this week, where she said X. Yeah. Anyway, never mind. I was terrible. No, I did walk off thinking I'm just going to one question time to think I actually watched the program. I watched it to see how Rory gone. I watched it to see whether the audience reacted when they announced that Nigel Farage and I were going to be on, which they did. And I watched it to see whether Rory would actually make any notes that didn't make his hands look like he'd been in a fight. Okay, question to you. What do you think about the chance of Georgians?

15:46So that's the country in the Caucasus to break away for Ivan Shfilis autocratic wishes to remember. Ivan Shfilis is the is the Oleg Ark, who basically controls Georgian politics, very pro Putin against the war in Ukraine. And Elena says, I'm a Russian living here in Tbilisi since March 2022. So hello to our Georgian listener. Young people here really want the Euro integration, but still there are a lot of older people in the country who do not. Alastair. Well, I think what I was going on in Georgia is is really interesting and actually quite inspiring. You've got three nights on the truck now, thousands of people out on the streets.

16:25The latest provocation is the government saying that they're basically stalling on the discussions and negotiations to get into the European Union. But it's becoming, you know, we talked about proxy activity. There's a proxy element to this as well. The Russians are very much driving the Georgian dream and the Georgian dream government in the setting, the direction that it's setting. And in addition to Elena, we've got some really amazing emails this week from people in Georgia talking about why this matters so much to them. I think they really do have the sense of their country being at an absolute inflection point.

17:03It can go, it can go, the Russian route or it can go, the European route. And it's clear, certainly the people that listen to us, maybe this is obvious, it's clear the direction they want to go in. Yeah, quick reminder to everybody. So Georgia obviously form a part of the Soviet Union. And whereas Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, which were part of the Soviet Union, joined the EU, joined NATO and in the cases of places like Lithuania, kind of their economies have been completely transformed, they've become liberal democracies. Georgia looked like it might have been on that journey, had one of these color revolutions.

17:35There was a huge amount of optimism around the Democratic Georgian government. Got candidate status, so on its route to joining the European Union and on its route to joining NATO. And of course, that is real anathema to Putin. I mean, that's what really frightened him about Ukraine. The idea that NATO could be getting closer, the idea that EU membership could be coming to Ukraine. And so he's really set out to make sure that that future is locked off. How could Europe get Georgia back on track again? Well, the most powerful thing it's got, which no other body in the whole world's got, which makes the European Union completely unique, is it can offer membership.

18:14And offering membership means that you can offer people free movement of people, access a single market, enormous amount of money and pre -accession post -accession funds. America doesn't begin to have power like that. It can't offer those kind of carrots to a country to transform. But of course, Europe's lost its nerve. So one question I had to you is whether maybe there's a middle ground of whether they could think about offering things like single market membership, which is what they offered to the Scandinavian countries before they joined for you as part of that carrots to places that Georgia or Serbia to begin moving in a better direction.

18:48So just in reading Angela Merkel's book, how keen she still is on growing the European Union, giving continued to give countries in the East hope that they can come in. I think the politics in Europe make it very, very difficult at the moment. So I think you will have to start looking at different kind of options. And I guess this sort of idea of a multi -speed Europe is part of what Macron taught about when he first came in. You're looking at Macron, by the way. You know, I saw this wonderful interview with the president of Georgia on one of the French channels. And I thought, my God, she speaks a credible French.

19:25So I look her up. She's French. So instead of being rich, she'd get her eye, because she also speaks through her English. This is president Zorabishvili, Salomey, Zorabishvili, born in Paris, parents, Georgian political refugees, became a French diplomat, rose to the level of ambassador, was sent to be ambassador in Georgia. And then with the French government's permission, became a Georgian citizen, then joined their diplomatic service. And she's now the president, and she's refusing to go, because she says the election that they had recently was not legitimate. They cannot choose who the president is, because they're not legitimate.

20:09So she's basically staying put while these protests go on. It's seen that we can get on the better. So if our Georgian listeners have access to the president of Georgia, it couldn't be more relevant or more timely. That's a great idea. Yeah, she was great. Okay, Alice, quick break.

20:28This isn't ad from BetterHelp. At the moment, we're getting advice from everywhere. You just have to go on TikTok. Could be Alice's cold plunges. Could be my attempts to meditate or the digital detox that I'm doing in Colombia. But of course, one of the things that we know is that it can be incredibly valuable to talk to another human being, somebody who's actually been trained as a therapist, to work through these ideas, calmly objectively and professionally. And as the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a very diverse variety of expertise.

21:04They've got over 5 ,000 therapists in the UK. They've helped more than five million people globally. And you can join a session literally at the click of a button, change therapists anytime. So obviously not about fixing you, but it's about hearing yourself clearly, maybe for the first time. So talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10 % of their first month at BetterHelp .com slash rest politics. That's better H -E -L -P .com slash rest politics.

21:37So this special segment of today's show is brought to you by Google. Now if you're a keen listener, you'll know that Google has been sponsoring the podcast and has been giving me some training and some of their AI tools. Also better understand how Google are making AI work for everyone across the UK. In other words, they're giving me the same training. They're giving a lot of people in Britain. They're also looking at policy and they released a number of policy recommendations that they're trying to get the government to adopt. And they've got a question in Frazerory. Google wants to know which of the recommendations that they put forward in their AI opportunity paper, which we've read, which do we think are the most critical at making AI work for everyone across the UK?

22:21Well, I think it's a lot of interesting stuff here. So one of the things they point to is all the productivity gains that you could bring in health. And the very obvious one that we often talk about is that AI is very good at looking at extra scans, better generally than a human radiographer. But it's not an either -all. We talk a lot about the idea of super -agency. In other words, what AI is really doing at the moment is not necessarily replacing humans but supplementing, sitting alongside them like an incredibly bright assistant. So in the case of health, AI can pick up stuff that human eyes miss because it's able to go through a far larger data set and isn't constrained in the way that we often are psychologically by what we're looking for.

23:06So that would be one really strong example. And one that's really relevant to we're streaming who's always talking about this shift from analog to digital, which you know I'm always a bit doubtful of. But I mean, I think what Google's doing is quite interesting. I mean, I think they've recognized that the technology on its own doesn't work. You've got to think about it in terms of how it works with government and how it works with citizens. So what they're trying to do is think thoughtfully about how AI can actually help the government in the government's priorities, whether it's health or the environment.

23:37And then think about how to make it feel relevant and useful to citizens. And then connect it to what can the UK do to have a bit more of a stake in this industry, develop its own AI industries. And how we can also think about involving citizens in the management of the risk that could go along with AI as well as its benefits. So congratulations, I guess, that they're trying to think about the bigger political dimensions because often technologists just throw out a tool and then a assume that people are going to love it as much as they do. I also think the fact that they're addressing it in that political context, making the point that actually the countries which lead in this are going to become to spend a bit of the long term.

24:19And you know, to be fair to Rishi Sunak, I thought he was what he did having that kind of AI summit was a very, very good idea. The current Labour government is going to have to get on top of this both in terms of its relation to government and government public services, but also what sort of economy we're going to build for the future. I tell you what I like about the Google paper, you keep saying that nobody in the world knows what these Labour 5 missions are. So I was very, very pleased and encouraged to see that they've partly related their entire strategy to the Labour's 5 missions on the economy, on health, on crime, on the environment, on on education.