2/12/25: Elon Confronted On DOGE Rampage, Trump Blows Up Gaza Ceasefire, Trump Demands Ukraine Minerals
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Good morning and welcome to CounterPoints. Some difficulty traveling around Washington today has Emily and I broadcasting from home today. Emily, how is it in your neck of the city? Well, D.C. doesn't handle snow very well, so it's about as you would expect. But it was a really beautiful, like sticky snow. So that's the benefit.

Indeed, there's a little bit of potential rain coming. Otherwise, looking forward to some possible sledding after this. Good luck with that because it's going to freeze up quickly. Yeah, I know. It's going to get ugly. But anyway, so we're going to start, of course, with Trump and Elon Musk holding a press conference with his boy from the Oval Office.

We're going to move from there into the looming collapse of the ceasefire with Netanyahu and Trump threatening to end that and bring all hell back to Gaza in an effort to ethically cleanse the strip and redevelop it into condos and produce a Riviera of the Middle East. We're also speaking of...

this rather blunt real politic. We'll also talk about Donald Trump saying that he has told the Ukrainians that he wants to be paid back for the U.S. investment in their war effort to the tune of $500 billion in rare earth minerals and that they can reach a deal with Russia or not reach a deal with Russia. It's kind of, he doesn't really care. Meanwhile, Zelensky himself has kind of floated some

some land-for-land peace proposal that could be a step forward. Tulsi Gabbard was supposed to be confirmed last night in the United States Senate, but because of the inclement weather here, they decided to postpone that until this morning. But she probably, by the time you're watching this, she may have gotten through and will be the director of national intelligence, barring some serious surprise. And then Emily...

So you were able to bring in a couple of guests today, both of whom I think are going to be interesting. One of them you're doing a newsletter with. Am I right about that? Yeah, we have two guests today. The second guest is Saurabh Amari. He's my colleague at UnHerd. We did launch a newsletter called, a new newsletter called Area 47 a couple weeks ago. So you can go to UnHerd and look for Area 47, subscribe. It's a free subscription. And we can put that in the notes here too. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So good, like, scoopy little details from inside Trump world. So we're working on that. But Saurabh is joining us today to talk about a really, really interesting story he wrote from the perspective of somebody on the right about

the era of Elon Musk and Mago World embracing Elon Musk and the various pitfalls that people don't seem to want to acknowledge. So we are happy to have him here so he can talk to us about that. The first guest that will be on the show is Lindsay Burke.

who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on scaling down the Department of Education dramatically, which just as we're coming here to discuss in this morning's show is some of the biggest news in D.C., those plans are proceeding apace. So it's a very timely conversation we will get to have with Lindsay about

A lot of her ideas are going to likely be implemented in the next few, I mean, with Elon, you could say the next few hours, honestly, but certainly the next few days. Yeah, and they started last night. They were, you know, sounds like they were rifling through, you know, contracts at the sixth floor of the Department of Education and

canceled, I think 89 of them worth nearly a billion dollars. That's on top of another roughly a hundred million dollars in like DEI contracts they've canceled. And they're signaling that the plan is to, you know, fully destroy the department of education. And so I'm looking forward to hearing from the author of the, this, this project 2025, which

You know, the Trump campaign consistently told us had nothing to do with what he intended to do, which although which you consistently warn people, no, this is what they're going to do.

Yeah, I mean, there's, yeah, we'll talk about it with Lindsay, but how can you, when someone puts, you know, years of time into building out a blueprint for, you know, reform or destruction. Can't let that work go to waste, right? Yeah, right. So we will make sure to talk to Lindsay about all of that and big show. So we might as well dive in right here with our A Block, which is all about the Oval Office project.

conversation that Donald Trump and Elon Musk had with reporters late yesterday. We have this clip here. I'm going to share my screen so that you can watch. This is Trump. Actually, I forgot one of the participants in this was Little X. And you'll see if you're watching this, you're going to see Little X on Elon Musk's shoulders. He is a very cute kid. I don't think Grimes was particularly happy that he was there, though. So we'll see.

Roll this clip and you can see Donald Trump talking about all kinds of different things. And some of the things that we found, which is shocking, billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. And I think it's very important. And that's one of the reasons I got elected. I say we're going to do that. Nobody had any idea it was that bad, that sick and that corrupt. And it seems hard to believe that judges want to try and stop us from looking for corruption, especially when we found

hundreds of millions of dollars worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption, and it seems hard to believe that a judge could say, we don't want you to do that. So maybe we have to look at the judges because that's very serious. I think it's a very serious violation.

So that's Donald Trump going in on the federal judge. Obviously, there's a decent amount of debate right now on the right about whether Donald Trump should challenge or just disobey orders from the judiciary. And Trump yesterday said,

something that you just heard it there. But some people interpreted him saying, Ryan, I don't know if you caught this. At one point, he said, basically, like, we'll follow the judge, but we'll appeal in this broader discussion that like the context that he just gave could be interpreted a little bit differently than that, too. Maybe they want to impeach the judge, which is a thing I believe you can do through the Senate. So sort of an interesting moment there with Trump.

Yeah, impeaching a judge over issuing a stay would be just an incredible break from 200 plus years of how we've been doing. To me, the level of dishonesty that's flowing from Trump in those comments is rather startling. He's not doing an audit. He's not just – no judge would stop an executive, a treasury department, anybody –

from going through your spending, categorizing it, and trying to figure out whether there's waste, fraud, or abuse. No judge would ever stop that. What happened here is that they were sued because they were accused of giving this guy, what's his name, Elez, one of Elon Musk's doge officials, read and write access to the Treasury Department's most sensitive data.

They initially denied that they had done so. The judge issued a stay, like, okay, stop. You can't be giving this guy all of this information right now. You need to come forward with a more reasonable plan that is within statutory guidelines, because there are laws around the safe access and holding of federal records. We now know from the federal governments, from Elon Musk and Trump's own filings, that

that they did actually give this guy right access, read and write access. So they're now saying that they're doing an examination to figure out whether or not he actually did anything with that. But he also had it on his own personal, on his own laptop that he was using. So this hacker kid

who had the ability to change the code inside the Treasury Department on his laptop, they're saying they don't think he did anything with that. I guess, but they already said that he didn't have that access. So now they've changed that story. So for a judge to come in and say, look, this is on hold until what's Trump's famous phrase, until we figure out what's going on. What the hell is going on? Until we figure out what the hell is going on.

is not saying that you cannot audit federal spending, that you cannot hunt for fraud. And the other layer of dishonesty here is this kind of all shucks, like I can't believe what we found. I'm glad that 90% of the stuff that they're shutting down on USAID is being shut down when it comes to

you know trying to intervene in foreign uh countries and basically being uh a vehicle for kind of the us intelligence and u.s military like okay you won't go after the go after that if you want to go after that but like this this like pretense that they're stunned by what they're finding like they i i find i find that part difficult to believe like we all this was all publicly known stuff

Right. Yes, that's absolutely true. Now, Elon obviously got a lot of questions, as people can imagine. Some questions are ones that it's been he actually this is interesting. He actually really has not talked to the press a lot as he's been like taking on the government, wildly taking on the government. And he finally actually did some Q&A.

And I think it was actually pretty important to get some of these questions in front of him. So let's...

Take a look at one of these moments with Elon. I'm going to share the screen again just so that we can see how he responded to some of these very important questions. This may seem like, well, are we in a democracy? Well, if you don't have a feedback loop, okay, we'd have to... Sorry. Sorry.

I tell you, gravitas can be difficult sometimes. So if there's not a good feedback loop from the people to the government, and if you have rule of the bureaucrat, if the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? Right. I want to say, actually, something interesting here is that

He is trying to become the bureaucracy. Like it's kind of interesting to hear that from him because he's also like he's a special government employee and bureaucracy is bureaucracy. It's not it doesn't change just because it's a conservative bureaucracy. Yeah. So he's a bureaucrat. Like that is that that is what he is. Yeah.

And what he is saying is he is the proper bureaucrat, that he is the one that, because he's there with Trump and people elected Trump, that he should be able to carry out the mission that people elected Trump to carry out. I have an enormous amount of sympathy for that general idea that people should be able to vote for candidates, and those candidates should be able to enact policy. Obviously, there have to be...

The problem here is that that's not the system we have. I kind of wish we did have that system, but we don't. What he's describing really is a parliamentary system where you would elect the kind of the MAGA party and they would have a majority in parliament and that they would appoint Trump to be prime minister. And then they would be able to carry out their agenda until there was a new election called. What we have is a system where we elect members of Congress

and we separately elect a president, and the members of Congress enact laws that the president either signs or vetoes, and if the president signs those laws, they're in place even after that president leaves office. The laws don't go away when the president leaves office, and the congressional spending bills that have been enacted do not go away. That's why on March 14th, we will have a government shutdown,

if Congress does not agree to a new spending package and keep that going. What Musk is sort of suggesting here is that that shouldn't be the way it works, that the people elected Donald Trump and Donald Trump will decide how the government operates fully, which programs get funded, which programs don't get funded, and that March 14th, whatever, whatever Congress does or doesn't do, you know,

the government stays open. That is a system. And I think that there's real virtue in a system like that, that would actually, I think, be more democratic. At the same time, though, is Congress democratic? Like, is it part of a democracy or a democratic republic to have these two chambers where, you know, every two years in the House,

candidates present ideas that they're going to enact when they're in Congress, and then you fight them out, and then 700,000 people or so go and vote for that person to be their representative in Washington, and that chamber passes laws, and then the Senate passes its laws. That's the system we have. And he doesn't like it, because it's harder to just go in and just straight up do stuff. Because if you want to get rid of the Department of Education, for instance, you have to

pass a law that repeals the Department of Education. And he doesn't want to do that. As you know, that's what foiled Reagan because Reagan had Democrats in controlling Congress at the time. Well, this is the central argument among people like Russ Vogt. And he actually, Russ wrote a long essay about this in The American Mind in September of 2022. And

During the Tea Party years, you'll probably remember, Ryan, one of the big sources of opposition... And this is Trump's OMB director, so right man right at the center of this revolution. Right. Go ahead. So that...

during the tea party years, uh, one of the biggest sources of opposition to Barack Obama was that he was becoming an Imperial president, that he was really expanding the powers of the executive. Russ disagrees with that, uh, common conservative critique and says, actually the reason that we have this jumbled checks and balance, um,

off like what, why is that off kilter? Well, it's because the executive has let a lot of his power over these agencies atrophy over the course of years so that we've built up layers and layers and layers of bureaucracy. And this is something that Elon Musk like definitely is, uh, buying into. It's something that Donald Trump himself is definitely buying into. And where did you get that? It was my wife's mug. Amazing. Although she didn't even end up voting for her in the end, but anyway, go ahead.

You just added her. I've got a great Wisconsin mug actually right now. It's yeah. Uh, but anyway, uh, that's the, uh, the theory is that actually the executive needs to be much more muscular, um, and flex over these executive agencies so that what you don't have is career bureaucrats or people who've come through the revolving door, which is a real problem. Actually, even for the left, you and I have talked about how that happens at the EPA where you have, um,

As one of many examples, you have people who came from energy companies and Exxon ending up in these jobs and making decisions that they weren't elected to make that are helpful to their former employers. So all of that, there is a real argument. But it is, from the conservative perspective, sort of interesting because there is this split over whether the executive is too powerful or not powerful enough.

And clearly that's the position that Musk and everyone in the Trump administration is on the same page with now. It's just really different from where it was 10 years ago.

So we have more. And this time, actually, Elon Musk was answering. I thought this was these were some of the most useful questions. He's answering questions here about potential conflicts of interest, which is actually great to have him get on the record answering these questions. So here we go with Elon on that. If you have received billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon and

And the president's directing you to look into the Department of Defense. Is that a conflict of interest? Yes, we definitely need to do and are going to do at the president's request. Does that present a conflict of interest for you? No, because you'd have to look at the individual contract and say, first of all, I'm not the one filing the contract. It's people at SpaceX or someone who will be putting for the contract. And I'd like to say, if you see any contract where it was awarded to SpaceX and it wasn't by far the best value for money for the taxpayer, let me know. Because every one of them was.

That may well be true. Let's take it. But it doesn't really eliminate the question of conflicts of interest, sort of a non sequitur there. Let's listen to his other answer on this topic. The White House says that you will identify and excuse yourself from any conflicts of interest that you may have. Does that mean that you are in effect policing yourself? What are the checks and balances that are in place to ensure that there is accountability and transparency? No.

Well, we actually are trying to be as transparent as possible. In fact, our actions, we post our actions to the Doge handle on X and to the Doge website. So all of our actions are maximally transparent. In fact, I don't think there's been, I don't know of a case where an organization has been more transparent than the Doge organization. Right. So, yeah, it says there won't be a conflict of interest because SpaceX is the best. Right.

And also that he's not the one putting in the requests. It's his employees who are doing so. If this is what people want, I guess this is what people can have. Well, but it's also not in compliance with the special government, not to sound like a loser. The special government employee jurisdiction, like the way that that position is designed, obviously we know he submitted this confidential conflict of interest report, but you're actually not supposed to have it.

any relationship or any work that overlaps with your private portfolios. And this is overseen by the Attorney General of the Department of Justice, so that's on Pam Bondi. And I doubt that there will be any attempt to rein Musk in, at least publicly, on that question. But he's totally out of compliance with definitely the spirit of that law. And that law is just sort of

I mean, it's just not designed for something like this. So the application of it is, I don't know, Ryan, it's just so the whole thing. There's never been anybody in the history of the country. I mean this sincerely, like even J.P. Morgan. Nobody has ever had this level of power. Right now. And certainly like, right. Imagine J.P. Morgan going into the White House, but remaining the head of his bank.

and going in and canceling contracts with his competitors. I mean, he was kind of the treasurer while he was... He was sort of the treasury secretary. He was like a Fed chair before there was a Fed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you also... In Musk's case, it's also tons of defense contracts. Just the amount of contracts that his various businesses have with the government is unbelievable. So it's not even just...

like one, it's not even just one issue area. It's like across the board. Right. And so while Musk's team is in there just unilaterally canceling contracts, American Prospect reported yesterday that, or maybe it was The Lever, one of those outlets reported that a brand new SpaceX contract was just paid out just this last week. So I think from the perspective of people who are having all of their contracts cut,

to watch the guy who's doing the cutting continue to get contracts is a huge, like, wait a minute moment. And then if the answer is, well, look, it's a great contract. And the taxpayer is going to be very happy that they're funding. This was for research and development for SpaceX. It's a private company that has made him one of the richest, helped to make him one of the richest people on the planet. And the taxpayer is funding their research and development costs. Mm-hmm.

And that's a good, and okay, that's a great deal for the country. You could imagine a reverse Elon Musk doing a wow tweet, be like, wow, this private company that has made this man the richest person in the world is having its research and development funded by the taxpayer. Unbelievable fraud. And we found it and you wouldn't have known about it without Doge and we are canceling that contract right now.

Like, oh, sorry, this is actually your contract. He's like, this is the best value for the taxpayer that you're ever going to get. And if you don't think so, you tell me and I'll deal with it. I mean, if Zuckerberg had been doing this under a Biden administration. Imagine we're paying for Meta's research and development. Yeah. He'd be like, wow, we're paying for Meta's research and development. Yeah.

Well, we have one more Elon clip to watch and then we have some reaction, not reaction, but we have some of Speaker Mike Johnson as well. So let's play this final Elon clip and we will see what he had to say when asked. Your detractors, Mr. Musk, including a lot of Democrats.

I have detractors? You do, sir. I don't believe it. Say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non-transparent way. What's your response to that criticism? Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public. The public voted, you know, we have a majority of the public vote voting for President Trump. We won the House, we won the Senate.

The people voted for major government reform. There should be no doubt about that. That was on the campaign. The president spoke about that at every rally. The people voted for major government reform, and that's what people are going to get. They're going to get what they voted for.

And a lot of times, you know, people that don't get what they voted for, but in this presidency, they are going to get what they voted for. And that's what democracy is all about. So let's also now listen to Speaker Mike Johnson asked about J.D. Vance's recent comments saying that, you know, it's OK not to comply with a judge's order. And here's how Mike Johnson responded.

Well,

Well, of course, the branches have to respect our constitutional order, but there's a lot of game yet to be played. Those will be appealed. We've got to go through the whole process, and we'll get to the final analysis. In the interim, I will say I agree wholeheartedly with Vice President J.D. Vance, my friend, because he's right. What they're doing in the executive branch, I've been asked so many times, aren't you uncomfortable with this? No, I'm not, because when Congress, for example, appropriates dollars for the executive branch to use, we build in –

not only in the spirit of the law but in the letter of law, a broad amount of discretion for how that is used. There is a presupposition in America that the commander-in-chief is going to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars, that the commander-in-chief, the president of the United States, is going to command those within his branch of government to do the right thing by the people, to be accountable, to not fund drag shows in Middle Eastern countries or South America, to not waste our

our taxpayer dollars and that's what has been uncovered and that's why we and the people are applauding what's happening right now in the new administration because they've taken that seriously.

All right. And let's go ahead and take a look over here. So the Trump administration, as Kyle Cheney says, is asking an appeals court for an emergency order to permit it to reinstate limits on federal spending that it says were improperly blocked by a federal judge in Rhode Island, which they called, quote, intolerable judicial overreach.

And Ryan, we may actually disagree on this. I thought that just as an update, this this circuit court has already rejected this this appeal. It was a three judge panel, two Biden appointees and an Obama appointee. So they kind of ran headlong into some partisan opponents. But the three judges said, no, like give the district court district court.

Time to work this out and the stay remains in place. But go ahead. Well, no, I was just gonna say this was what was happening yesterday afternoon. The kind of the broader context for what Musk and Trump were talking about. And I think there's a pretty good argument that what the judge did was judicial overreach, which kind of kicked off this entire debate between

Vance world. Um, and people were curious how Mike Johnson would approach it, given that he is, he does have a constitutional law background. Um, and conservatives all came down or I guess I should say like Trump allies all came down on the side of not complying with the order. Uh, but then ultimately went through the appeals process. So I guess, I mean, I don't know if I should say balls in their court, but if they want to just be out of compliance with it, the ball is in their court. It just, it looks like they probably won't do that.

Right. I mean, J.D. Vance comparing it to a general on the battlefield seemed to me like a pretty huge stretch. Like Congress passes laws that prescribe what the federal government is able to do with some records and who's able to access them and what precautions have to be taken. And

you know, the judge argued that those laws appeared to be broken here and that the executive needed to show cause that it was going to comply with the law. So

That felt to me pretty standard and not kind of wildly outside. It did – like I understand the point where, well, if you're even barring the treasury secretary from going down and like looking at these data, then that sounds crazy. But the judge did say that if – that with preclearance –

there could be access granted to any government officials that were in addition needed. The reason the preclearance was required here is because the judge, I think, felt like the Doge people were being dishonest, that they said that these kids did not have read and write access. That turned out to be false. It could be an innocent mistake, which is what they're trying to say it is, or it could be a lie that they told.

But either way, what they said was false. And so there does and would then create the breaking of a law. And so for a judge to come in and say, you got to pause because you're breaking the law, to me, doesn't seem like they're the ones creating a constitutional crisis. Although there is this, I guess the other part of it is that the Doge guys are now government employees, which makes it more complicated. And I

Part of it is like, okay, so Elon is just throwing his personal contractors at... I think that's how some people are seeing it. But I don't want to say carefully, but they did go through the process of getting them actually employed. So for example, I think Elles was actually an employee of the Treasury. Now he's at the State Department, right? Big balls. He's at the State Department now. So they are going through some of the official processes, which kind of complicates things.

the question a little bit. Obviously, if they're out of compliance with the law, they're out of compliance with the law. But yeah, and I mean, we talked about this last week. Musk calls this a revolution. So it's like a very legal revolution. I don't know. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, by the way, the other point that J.D. Vance made in this tweet is that a judge would never tell a prosecutor how to prosecute a case. J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School. And there's this joke about Yale Law School that they don't teach you the law there because it's all about becoming basically a corporate CEO or something or a politician or a member of the deep state. The idea that

I didn't go to law school, but the idea that a judge doesn't tell a prosecutor how to prosecute a case is absurd. Judges are constantly throwing cases out, constantly telling a prosecutor that they don't have enough evidence to go forward with X, constantly telling them discharge actually doesn't fly. It's gone. So his examples there, when he gets out of the, like, you can't tell a general how to wage a battle, after that, everything is

suggests that he did not actually go to law school, which is strange because we know that he, for a fact, went to a very good one and is a very smart character. Yeah, I'll just put this element up on the screen. It was confirmed that Elez now is at the State Department. So we also are keeping an eye on what I think, Ryan, might be one of the biggest trends that will develop over the next, I don't know, like a week or so, probably, probably

probably over the course of the next year, just depends on how all this happens. But CNN wrote a piece yesterday inside the GOP's careful pushback to Musk's Doge effort or doggy effort, as you refer to it. And one of the interesting parts of this is, so here's

Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. He's saying instead of getting rid of everything, let's look at it selectively. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And he says he supports shutting down the CFPB, for example, but that Trump can't ultimately usurp Congress. And obviously Congress established the CFPB, which creates quite a dynamic for constitutional conservatives

But there were years spent kind of developing a plan for this muscular executive takeover. And Ryan, the thing I find very interesting is

In the House of Representatives particularly, we saw some of this from Katie Britt in Alabama. The broad government reform doge mission is very popular with red state voters, of course. And so are you going to end up looking like, I don't know, I mean, do you end up looking sort of silly, foolish, selfish if you're Don Bacon? And maybe for Bacon in Nebraska, this is USAID sending a bunch of American-grown farm workers

products to different parts of the world, you have to answer that question. Yeah. A major thing that USAID does is, as Samantha Power said just a couple of days ago, the former director of it, is it tries to open markets for American corporations. Because it's getting so much pressure, you're finally having people talk a little bit more honestly about what it does.

And, you know, moving on from USAID, oh, you know, we're just, you know, we're just helping, you know, feed and, you know, give food and medicine to the needy. It's like, no, okay, now we actually have to justify what we're doing. Let's be more honest about what we're doing. And one of the things they do, yeah, is they work on behalf of American corporations. And agribusiness would be at the very top of that.

The last Trump administration saw a trade war lead to a collapse in soybean prices for the Midwest, which have never recovered. And so one of USAID's jobs is to go in and find places where the U.S. agribusiness can sell soybeans.

It's product. And so I'm sure bacon, that's part of what bacon is talking about there. Yeah. And otherwise, in the other place, he says, look, all right, you don't like this spending. Let's redirect it. But let's do it the constitutional way. Feels feel quaint. Like, let's like pass a law and do it. He's like his argument is that there's still a law. And yes, I feel silly.

Like in the face of a revolution, talking about process. Right. Because this is what's going on. It's a revolution. And here's these hall monitors talking about the law. We happen to have had this constitution in place for like 250 years. So it's kind of a big deal. And I've been told my whole life that it's a big deal. And apparently it's not. Yeah.

Well, but this is the thing with the Don Bacons of the world is it's going to become a challenge to stay consistent on wanting this, quote, revolution. And then when the revolution hits your district, you say, well, we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Give us carve outs that

makes sense. And I say carve-outs in a pejorative sense because I think in that case, it's easy to support revolution when it doesn't affect your district or your constituents, but it's really going to test the commitment to the quote-unquote revolution when it does actually come home. So one more point before we take off here for this block. It looks like...

Big balls. He launched, as this reporter says, a privacy-focused image-sharing site in 2021 that allowed users to create custom URLs, the URLs that redirected to Corsatine's site. That's Edward Big Balls Corsatine. Referenced the sale of child sexual abuse material, racial slurs, and rape. Ryan, I...

I didn't quite know what to make about this story, to be honest, because I don't necessarily oppose creating different tools like this. And we're reading into possible motives here in a way that I'm as crazy as the whole big balls thing is. I don't want to jump to conclusions. But what did you make of this? So what makes this interesting?

to me so shocking is that it is specifically focused on encrypting images. It specifically has been used to have abused, used by people who've abused that in the way that you would expect, you know, a site like that to be abused. And it goes, I do a lot of work that requires, you know, encrypting our communications so that, you know, sources are able to communicate with journalists and

and not be discovered by authoritarian regimes who would then torture and kill them. And so encryption and privacy are very valuable things. If you have a document that you were trying to encrypt and keep secret from these authoritarian regimes, you have multiple options. You can put it on an encrypted thumb drive. You can put it on a laptop that is disconnected from the internet.

And that, or you can put it in, you can put that in a safe. Like there are pretty solid things you can do to protect your documents and keep them encrypted and safe from those kinds of prying eyes. But notice the characteristic that you still have when you're doing that. You are in possession of those documents slash images at that point.

I don't mind that because I'm not doing anything illegal. A journalist is allowed to be in possession of classified or secret documents. That is well within the law. You are not allowed to be in possession of other certain images, which we're not even going to talk about here. Therefore, the...

regime that I just laid out of protecting the documents would not actually be sufficient if your motivation was to protect you from the legal implications of possessing those kinds of images. What you would need is some encrypted way to hold them somewhere else on a different server that you would still have access to, but that could then not be connected back to you. And that is precisely what Mr. Balls has

designed here and if he did it accidentally and just happened to be the perfect vehicle for this type of exploitative imagery to be possessed but not possessed by perverts who should be in prison then somebody should have told him hey you know what looks like what you're designing is going to is specifically to be used for these types of people and it's and it's a crime and you should be in prison for it um

Or he designed it this way on purpose. Like those are the only, those are the only two options. Well, and what's crazy is, so he's 19 now, I believe. And if this was 2021, you can do the math. This kid was in his like smack in the middle of his teenage years creating, which I'm sure defenders will say, this is a brilliant young mind. And, you know, that's the type of person you want to bring into the government. But obviously that's, it's insane that you,

you even have that level of power on our current internet when you're that age potentially. So lots of news to talk about in the Middle East. So let's move on to that.

So we learned more about how Donald Trump plans to approach a potential peace in the Middle East, Ryan, as yesterday went along. This is just a very busy space, but in the Oval Office press conference that we discussed earlier in the show, he was obviously, unsurprisingly, asked some questions about this. Let's hear how he responded.

This is after, by the way, he met with King Abdullah of Jordan. You can see this is the usual setup in front of the fireplace at the White House. So he got a question on that. Let's take a listen. I think we're making some very good progress. Mr. President, you said before that the U.S. would buy Gaza. And today you just said we're not going to buy Gaza. We're not going to have to buy. We're going to have Gaza. We don't have to buy. There's nothing to buy.

We will have Gaza. What does that mean? No reason to buy. There is nothing to buy. It's Gaza. It's a war-torn area. We're going to take it. We're going to hold it. We're going to cherish it. We're going to...

get it going eventually where a lot of jobs are going to be created for the people in the Middle East. It's going to be for the people in the Middle East, but I think it could be a diamond. It could be an absolute tremendous asset for the Middle East. And you're going to have peace. It's going to bring peace in the Middle East. Okay. And so here's another response just quickly. It's similar, but he was asked a similar question and gave a similar response to what we've heard. Still worth listening to though, for sure. Well,

The only thing I can say is this is going to bring stability and peace to the Middle East. And ultimately, when it's developed, which will be in quite a while from now, we want to let things calm down. But when it's developed, it's going to bring tremendous numbers of jobs to the Middle East, including the people of your country.

Ryan, a lot to work with there. Again, similar to what Donald Trump has been saying for the last week plus, but when he's confronted on some really obvious questions about this, that's what he has to say. What did you make of it? Every time, and Trump also was asked multiple times in here whether or not Palestinians would be able to return to Gaza once this was redeveloped, which is the main reason

objection that Palestinians would have to the plan. I think if there is a guaranteed right of return and there's going to be reconstruction, there are negotiations around how that can be accomplished that could easily reach agreement on all sides. Every time Trump has been asked whether Palestinians would be able to return, he has said no, and he has used this strange formulation that they won't want to come back, which is just...

confusing at best to anybody. And just, it's not that confusing because it just makes completely clear to everybody involved that this is an explicit plan to get everybody out, to ethnically cleanse the entire region. And therefore, the obvious, Trump is not a moron, the obvious response from Palestinians is

is going to be, okay, well then we're not leaving. And you have blown up the ceasefire deal because the ceasefire deal says that more than a week ago, negotiations around phase two are supposed to have already started.

and negotiates around phase two mean that israel will leave the philadelphia quarter which is down there by rafa and egypt and will fully withdraw from gaza all of the hostages will be exchanged and reconstruction will begin that's that's what phase two is supposed to mean

If, and that is a redevelopment that is for the people who live there. Egypt has come out and put out a statement saying that they support the general idea of reconstructing Gaza and that they're willing to work with the United States to do this. But of course, the Palestinians have to be able to stay.

The idea that that is where we're having some level of argument is just nuts. Because there is no, you know, you're getting no Arab buy-in, you're getting no Palestinian buy-in without that. And the U.S. and Israel, absent a nuclear weapon, don't really have the capacity to

To clear out all of these people or the will, you know, like you said, like a nuclear weapon or tunnel warfare. Right. Good luck.

Boots on the ground, tunnel warfare. Ryan, this was, Dropsite pulled this video of King Abdullah of Jordan, a comment that he made along these lines, which was also rather interesting. Let's take a listen to what he said in this presser with Trump. President, I truly believe that with all the challenges that we have in the Middle East, that I finally see somebody that can take us across the finish line to bring stability, peace and prosperity to

to all of us in the region. And it is, I think, our collective responsibility in the Middle East to continue to work with you, to support you. Meanwhile, we also have this video of Netanyahu talking about a lot of what Ryan was just mentioning, the collapse of the ceasefire deal. Let's take a listen to what he said.

So this is Netanyahu speaking in Hebrew to the Israeli public after the Security Council briefing and basically saying that because of what Donald Trump has offered to Israel, they are upping their demands and they're willing to go back to war starting on Saturday if all of the Israeli demands are not met. And Jeremy Scahill over at Dropsite reported some of Netanyahu's comments, including

Inside the security briefing, which I think are really tell you exactly how this unfolded, Netanyahu said to his to his counsel here, he said, quote, you wanted a day after plan. You got one. It just it just doesn't match the Oslo narrative. We won't repeat that mistake. So he's talking about Donald Trump has now.

forever ended Oslo and has given them a day after plan that they did not have before. So he said, quote, I've come back with a vision without Hamas and without the Palestinian authority. We know what complete victory is and we will not give up on it. So what Netanyahu is saying here is very clear.

Trump has opened the possibility of complete victory, as he calls it, by which he means the complete eradication of the Palestinian population in Gaza. And therefore, whatever ceasefire agreement they reached beforehand is pointless to pursue when this revolutionary potential is in front of them. So they are declaring their intention to go forward with this starting on Saturday.

So that brings us to this next post from your colleague at Dropsite, Jeremy Scahill. I'm going to put this up on the screen. He says, nine paragraphs into today's New York Times story on the situation with the Gaza ceasefire, readers are informed that Israeli officials and international mediators, quote, said that Hamas's claims were accurate. This is an incredible moment because what Hamas has said

is that Israel, after a couple of days of letting in some food and medicine, choked off aid again. And also that Israel is more than a week overdue in sending negotiators as required to Doha to negotiate phase two of the agreement. And when they finally did send negotiators, Netanyahu specifically forbid them from discussing phase two and instead are just talking about some...

loose ends around phase one. That is Hamas's claim. According to the mediators and Israeli officials, Hamas's claim is accurate. It's kind of a remarkable line from the New York Times and not remarkable for them to bury it. You famously should read the New York Times from the bottom up, and that's the way to get the most accurate to the least accurate information. But so that's clearly what's going on, and Hamas has put...

put out a statement last night saying, we continue to be willing to abide by the ceasefire as long as the occupation is willing to abide by the ceasefire, which they pointed out is guaranteed by the United States.

So it is Hamas who is standing up for the rules, the process, fairness, the international rules-based order. It's quite an ironic situation if you're somebody that thinks that Hamas is a barbaric, lawless terrorist organization when it is Israel and the United States that cut a deal and is now

very explicitly abrogating the deal in favor of complete eradication of a population. I mean, Hamas can still be a barbaric terrorist organization and when its interests are to comply, to look compliant, to come to the negotiations and say, we have all of our T's crossed and I's dotted. We're all barbaric. It's just what we do. And Hamas here is trying to abide by the rules and trying to abide by their...

agreement. So... Ryan, you guys at Dropsite had a PDF that we were going to go through as slides. This document was published at Dropsite by my colleagues Jeremy Scahill and Sharif Del Quddus. This is a Hamas document that they circulated among the negotiators and those who were supposed to be guaranteeing that the ceasefire agreement is actually carried out. And so, you know,

They argue here, and I'll go through this. So you can actually just find it at DropSiteNews.com. They continued flying drones. Israel continued flying drones. They continued, you know, military vehicles remained in places where they had agreed to remove military vehicles. They demolished homes where they had agreed that they would stop demolishing homes. They killed civilians.

after saying that there would be a ceasefire. The release of prisoners was delayed, a delay in sending a list of prisoners. And then, you know, some of the things we've seen, number nine here, families of the deported prisoners were prohibited from joining them and from leaving the West Bank. And this is the point they made about humanitarian aid, that humanitarian aid was not getting in. You can see how precise and detailed their complaints are. The

their fourth complaint, the denial of essential supplies. You can see that there, as well as finally the fact that they have refused, this is the key one, political violations. They've refused to abide by the terms that say it's time now to start negotiating a phase two. And instead they have been publicly saying that they will not in fact move on to phase two. So just

you know, as flagrant a series of violations as you could have to an agreement. And one that, as the New York Times reports, the mediators and Israeli officials agree is accurate. So that's all like everything. You don't have to trust Hamas. But if you trust anybody else involved in this, everyone agrees that that document that we just showed you is accurate.

I'm really interested to see how Steve Witkoff, assuming his role is ongoing in all of this, I'm actually pretty curious to see how he deals with some of these questions because I think one of the strange things is

And honestly, I would say so far, like good things about Witkoff rolling in as a businessman has been, he looks at some of the leverage on both sides and just like, what the heck is going on? Like this is completely, we've been, you know, obviously the United States has just been approaching this in a way that makes very little sense. So Ryan, in this case, it may be very interesting to see how Witkoff handles these questions.

Yeah, we'll see if he could pull some rabbit out of a hat here. But I think Netanyahu smells blood in the water here. Trump has opened up to him a possibility that is too tantalizing.

Not to at least, you know, take a shot at. Let's now take a look at this clip of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro talking to Stephen A. Smith, who was shouting us out a bit yesterday. Crystal and Sagar was shouting breaking points out a bit yesterday on X. But here's his question and answer with Josh Shapiro on his podcast. But the first order of business is his position that essentially the U.S. wants to take over Gaza. Yeah.

What was your reaction when you heard that and when you saw him standing next to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel? Why saying so? I thought it was an unserious proposal. I thought it was a proposal that if he actually carried it out the way he said he was, violates international law. I thought it was deeply disrespectful to the Palestinian people. I think it doesn't take into account Jordan and Egypt and how they're going to feel about it.

And I thought it was wrong. Look, I want these hostilities to end. I want all these hostages home. I'm someone who believes that there should be a two-state solution. I want the Palestinians to have a state that they can call their own. I want them to live peacefully side by side with Israel. I think what Donald Trump did was make that harder.

And again, I thought it was really unserious and unhelpful at this time. You still got about 100-ish hostages that aren't home. Why would you do anything to upset that process now? So, Ryan, what did you make of Shapiro's answer to that question? I couldn't agree more. Trump is condemning Trump.

these hostages to death with this plan. Shapiro has actually been probably more critical of Israel than your standard Bog Democrat. If you take the median Dem and their position on Israel in general, and also Israel post-October 7th,

you will find that Shapiro has been more willing to criticize Israel than the average Democrat. And so I wasn't surprised at all. And what he's saying there is very, very much in line with kind of a liberal Zionist two-state solution kind of Democrat, which is, I think, what he proudly is.

Which is interesting because he's also seen as one of the few Democrats who's been, to your point, yeah, like a liberal Zionist, very outspoken in support of Israel. Some of that I think is just that he's Jewish and so people kind of just assume that.

That there's a little more like allegiance there or something, which, you know, there's a little bit of bigotry there in that kind of assumption. Well, he was pretty tough after October 7th and like on protests. Oh, yeah. And he went to war against. He was doing a lot of signaling. Yeah. He went to war against protesters on campuses. Yeah.

People have to understand where the median Democrat is to understand that to be slightly a tick to the left of that doesn't actually mean you're not a very passionate Zionist supporter of Israel. It's just it's all on a kind of meaningless spectrum from the Palestinians perspective. Yeah.

You know, as somebody who's really seen right now is the future or the potential future, maybe a potential future leader of the Democratic Party. And you can hear him doing his like Obama impression slash Southern drawl for everyone in like what, like Southwestern PA? I don't even know. He, I guess, is handling the question in a way that makes sense, given that he wants to position himself as a leader of the Democratic Party going forward.

Yeah, 2028. I was told we weren't going to have any more elections. We'll see if we do. All right, let's move on to news now in Eastern Europe.

Well, there's a lot going on when it comes to Donald Trump's plans for how to end the war in Ukraine. It's almost as though he started his administration working on Israel and is now turning his attention to winding down the war in Ukraine. And he had some interesting comments yesterday at the White House about

the minerals, the mineral situation in Ukraine. Ryan, this was an interesting line from Trump. I want to have our money secured because we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars

And, you know, they may make a deal, they may not make a deal, they may be Russian someday or they may not be Russian someday, but we're going to have all this money in there. And I say I want it back. And I told them that I want the equivalent, like $500 billion worth of rare earth. And they've essentially agreed to do that. So at least we don't feel stupid. Otherwise, we're stupid.

I said to them, we have to get something. We can't continue to pay this money. What did you make of that, Ryan? Well, it's interesting also in the context of Zelensky saying that the claims that we've sent $177 billion worth of aid, military aid, are false and that he's short $100 billion.

what exactly to make of that. You know, all of this is kind of pencil whipped together by us saying, well, these missiles are worth this and we're going to send that and we're going to count that towards the figure. But, you know, more broadly speaking, this is the kind of

bald Trumpian kind of truth telling around what imperialism and what it is and what it means to be a client state of the United States. Transactional, yeah. Yes. When he said, my troops are in Syria to take the oil. Like he said, if we were going to go in and invade Iraq, we should get the oil. It also kind of

misunderstands the American empire that be just, it assumes that because the American empire doesn't say out loud that the reason everything it does is for the purpose of corporate profits and, and resource extraction, that therefore that's not what it's about, which is,

idiotic and naive in the extreme uh of course like that's what we're doing um why like we didn't bring democracy to iraq just coinc and it just coincidentally happened to be sitting on a whole bunch of of oil you know we didn't we didn't we're not it's just it's just so obvious to anybody who is paying like the most amount of attention so it's almost i guess uh

heartening to have it it is spoken out loud okay now you understand this is why we are this

This is a reason we are supporting Ukraine. It's more about geostrategic, I think, military confrontation with Russia less than it is resource extraction, but it is also that. Well, it's kind of interesting because we're in this weird reckoning where because Trump is taking this wrecking ball to the pretense, you also then hear people like Sam Powers coming out and responding by saying, well...

okay, you know, she's not as direct as Trump, of course, but from Chris Murphy to her, you have people being like, yeah, it's, this is all about empire and or resource extraction. And they say it in these terms that are still not, you know, Trumpian transactionality, but they are being more honest about it because Trump is threatening the programs. Yeah. And the, I, it,

from Ukraine's perspective, it must be so galling and offensive because Ukraine has lost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of its people to this war. Ukraine did that on behalf of... They were invaded, but they did it at the urging of the United States. There was a

There were peace talks underway in March of 2022 that the United States basically directed them to scuttle and continue the war. So the idea that Ukraine would do what we asked them to do, and Ukraine owes us all of their rare earths because we sent our surplus weapons.

to Ukraine, for Ukraine to fire them at Russia so we could test our weapons out and then replenish our stock has got to be deeply offensive. What do you mean, we owe you? Ukraine is the one that has suffered deeply as a result of this. The idea that they owe us. I mean, they had a lot of agency in willingly extracting their own resources too. There's so much. I mean, obviously people know the corruption in Ukraine. Well, yes, they had some agency.

But when the US came in in the post-Soviet era and created an oligarchy, we are the ones that built that oligarchy. So what did an individual Ukrainian have at his or her disposal to do anything about those oligarchs?

So let's, even as we've been talking, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was weighing in on this conflict. He's on his first trip abroad, and he said basically that a return to Ukraine's pre-war borders is, quote, unrealistic, as the New York Times has it here, realist.

really interesting, not surprising, but quite an interesting comment there from Pete Hegseth on his first trip abroad. He's at a NATO meeting in Brussels. Ryan, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is it. Once you have the Secretary of Defense

telling the Ukrainians that it is an unrealistic objective, an illusionary goal, and it's not going to happen, that you're going to give up territory, then they have to give up territory. Because that means that that is the U.S. negotiating starting point. So obviously, zero chance Russia comes back with a proposal that restores all of Ukrainian sovereignty. So this is a huge...

for Hegseth to say this out loud. And it comes as, let me see if you have this handy or should I pull it up? The Scott Besson? Yes. Yes, I can share that right now. And it's also interesting just as I'm pulling it up to think about, there were some actual questions about Pete Hegseth and whether he was really like new right MAGA or old right MAGA because he does come with a lot of

He's said so many different things over the years. It's just an interesting kind of question. And people didn't know if he was just still kind of a neocon with America First style. But this is a pretty strong indication of where his foreign policy is headed.

Yes. And from all the sources that I've spoken to who, who are close to Hegseth, they have been, they have been very clear and explicit to me that this is a America first guy. Like this is, he is that, that's who he is. Whatever his politics may have been in the past. Like there are a lot, been a lot of Republicans who have, um, uh,

of, you know, have evolved into this America first thing. And some of, some of the conversions have been real. Some of them haven't. Right. In some ways it doesn't matter because whether he meant what he just said or whether he didn't mean it doesn't matter. He said it. And here, let me add this, this Hill article. Basically, this, this, these comments from Hegseth. This one, Ryan. Oh, there it is. Yeah. Come after Zelensky.

has, you know, opened the door toward these negotiations in the sense of, you know, there's some Russian territory in the Kursk region that Ukrainians control. He is saying that they will swap some of that land for some of the territory that Russia controls. And key in this, in his comments, is that he said they're not prioritizing which territory,

would be swapped. All of it is a high priority, which means that they're not talking about demanding all of it, that this is an implicit concession that Ukraine is going to have to turn over some territory. Now, at the same time, Russia is demanding not just the territory that they currently control,

but additional territory that they claim they ought to have some legal right to. And we can say also, we'll find out, oh, sorry, Ren, I didn't mean to interrupt. I was going to say, well, we'll also sort of find out what Scott Besson's approach to all of this is too, because Donald Trump posted on True Social yesterday that he's like dispatching Besson to Ukraine to end the war. So similar kind of dynamic at play with Pete Hegseth and Scott Besson. It's kind of a litmus test, I would say.

Yeah, and the cost to Ukraine of following the U.S. direction in continuing to wage this war is going to be absolutely enormous. It looks like...

There will be a much worse deal on the table than may have been achievable. Whether it was achievable or not, we don't know. But the Ukrainians were basically blocked from going for it. And it is a very, very blunt signal to other countries around the world of what the price is

for following the directions of the United States. There was that famous Kissinger quote where he says, it's dangerous to be an adversary of the United States, but to be a friend is deadly. And that was the case for Ukraine. Just today, you've had multiple kind of European leaders

bucking the Trump administration and saying that what they need to do in the future is pivot towards China, a much more reliable partner and one that they see on the upswing. So the idea that we're even losing Europe at this critical moment looks like it's going to be the US against the world.

And let's actually watch this clip of Pete Hegseth because we actually have the video. So I'll roll it now. Like you, a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine. But we must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine's pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective. The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement.

Instead, any security guarantee must be backed by capable European and non-European troops. Right. The benefit, I think, of watching that clip is you see that's scripted. It's not a slip of the tongue. It's not an offhanded comment. That was a really intentional statement from the new defense secretary as, by the way, what you can see on your screen now is a picture of

of a dead Ukrainian soldier's search history, which includes, if you're listening to this, Ukraine-Russia negotiations, Zelensky negotiations. It goes on Putin talks. Trump, when will the war end, is absolutely gut-wrenching to see that. It's just a poignant set of search results because it shows how desperate this

soldier was for an end to this awful war. And it didn't come in time for him and for

hundreds and hundreds of thousands of others. I mean, it's insane that we have so little talk about the volume of casualties and deaths. It is completely insane on both sides of this war. And you can understand why. I think, Ryan, another interesting thing is Zelensky is now speaking the way that he's speaking. There's a certain amount of pressure that he has to be responsive to at this point as well. And in a way,

Hagzath and the Trump administration coming down so strongly in their position on NATO and territory is, I'm sure, welcome news to a lot of Ukrainians.