Stop Trying to Make the Russian Reset Happen
This week we take a look at Joe Biden’s world tour which culminates in the long-dreaded “summit” with mass-murdering dictator Vladimir Putin. For our instant take on that, please join us on Patreon; we’ll be giving our analysis on Wednesday after the summit occurs!
Show Notes for This Episode Are Available Here
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm Sarah Kendzior, the author of the best selling books; The View From Flyover Country and Hiding in Plain Sight.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide, famine in Ukraine.
Sarah Kendzior:
And this is Gaslit Nation, a podcast covering corruption in the United States and rising autocracy around the world, and that autocracy is on display this week with Joe Biden on his world tour and his summit with Putin, which we believe we will be covering in a special episode later this week.
Sarah Kendzior:
Joe Biden has proclaimed to our allies that "America is back", but what does “America is back” even mean? Back from being an overt mafia state run by a sociopathic career criminal Kremlin asset? Sure. Removed from the conditions that allowed a sociopathic, career criminal, Kremlin asset to become president in the first place? Not so much.
Sarah Kendzior:
In case you haven't been paying attention to Trump crime cult accomplice, Merrick Garland, the mafia state is still in place and thriving, and we'll get more into that later. But first, some basic questions about America's position on the world stage. If I were one of our allies, I would not trust the US for shit. Would I be relieved that Trump was out? Of course, but would I believe that the US took the threat of Trump seriously, or that it takes the threat of autocracy seriously and the threat of transnational organized crime seriously? No, not based on the Biden administration's actions so far.
Sarah Kendzior:
The refusal to enforce accountability for Trump administration crimes is not just a domestic crisis, but a foreign relations crisis. It is a crisis of trust. Think about this from the perspective of a foreign country looking to work with the United States. What message does it send when a government won't investigate an attack on its own Capitol by seditionists who are now again announcing their plans for a sequel, unimpeded. What message does it send when the former president was a known mafia associate who pardoned the criminals who aided him, and those criminals who are deeply immersed in international affairs as well as US affairs are now roaming free?
Sarah Kendzior:
Who would trust that country? Jake Sullivan, one of Biden's key foreign policy advisors, was asked how Biden would heal the scars of the Trump era, and he had this to say, and I'm quoting him now: "I think our view going into this trip is that actions speak louder than words, and that showing that the United States is capable of turning the corner on the pandemic, showing that the United States is capable of making the dramatic investments that will pull us up and out of this economic recovery and help power global growth, showing the world that we are ultimately capable of making the investments in R&D and infrastructure, innovation and workforce, ultimately setting that foundation for this country will be the most effective way to show the rest of the world that the US has the power and purpose to be able to deliver as the world's leading democracy. So that's what he's going to try to demonstrate. And he, as I said at the outset, feels he goes into this from a position of strength because of the record he's built up over the course of the first four months.” So, that's the end of that quote. However, refusing to enforce accountability is not strength, it is dangerous denial that hurts not only Americans, but anyone who deals with the US.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yes, it's true that actions speak louder than words, and when it comes to elite criminal impunity and compromised institutions, there has been little action. Do not forget that from 2017 to 2021, Trump and his lackeys treated NATO like a protection racket. They threatened some foreign officials with violence and blackmailed others. They backed the enemies of our allies and the allies of our enemies. They threatened our own democratic stability in the United States in the most blatant of ways, and nearly everyone involved in these crimes has walked free, with the Biden administration showing not even an intent to stop them.
Sarah Kendzior:
Again, why should any foreign official trust a successor administration that won't enforce accountability? As we've said many times, the Trump administration was a transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government. A bunch of its lackeys are still in office, as we see most obviously in the DOJ. Others are roaming free with state secrets that can be used to hurt US allies. If I were a foreign leader, I'd ask Biden about that ongoing national security threat. Andrea, what are your thoughts?
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, I think what we're witnessing here with a summit with the most powerful person in the world—the President of the United States—and a mass murdering, xenophobic dictator who is the head of a sweeping criminal mafia state that is destabilizing not just its region, but the broader world, I think when you have a situation like that, you have to ask yourself, who actually won the Cold War?
Andrea Chalupa:
I think this is a time for us to reflect as Americans, as people who want to live in stable democracies, as historians. The KGB turned into the FSB and they worked in tangent over many years in weaponizing greed and corruption in the West. Now, Putin is arguably the richest man in the world, especially when you factor in not just his stolen wealth, but the court of Russian oligarchs that he closely controls and keeps an eye on.
Andrea Chalupa:
So this whole thing reeks of a bit of a hostage situation as though Biden, even if he didn't want to, had to meet with Putin. Obviously, he put some boundaries on that, like not holding a press conference. We had this bleeding under Putin in the US of the cyber warfare. It was sweeping. It wasn't just, of course, Colonial Pipeline. It was going back farther than that. There was Kremlin and Russian hacking of hospitals as the US was struggling with the worst of the pandemic. There's just utter criminal shamelessness of what Putin has been doing to the US, just emboldened by the weakness of our position in countering Putin. This is weakness that we're showing for many years under Obama, just an utter lack of imagination and understanding of how the Kremlin works.
Andrea Chalupa:
Think of the most ruthless individual possible. Think of someone that would take candy from a baby. Think of that ruthless person who will grab your Super Bowl ring from you and never give it back. That's Putin, and he keeps out playing the West to the point where now he has a summit on the world stage, and what that signals to Biden's European allies—that he needs to convince to come on his side on many issues in terms of countering not just Kremlin aggression, but Chinese aggression—what that signals to the Western Allies is Putin is saying loud and clear, "Look at me, you all have to play ball with me. France has to work with me. Germany has to work with me, Boris Johnson has to work with me. You all have to work with me because I can get a summit with the President of the United States.
Andrea Chalupa:
That hurts Biden's leverage when he needs to negotiate with his Western allies on anything else because it shows a tendency to fold. Let me tell you something else: the weird line that Jen Psaki and Biden and Biden's team keeps repeating when it comes to Putin is that they are determined to have a predictable relationship with Putin. They are determined to have a predictable relationship with Putin. They keep using that word “predictable”, not understanding that Putin's weapon is chaos. He thrives on chaos. He leverages chaos.
Andrea Chalupa:
Under Putin, Russian forces deliberately slaughtered civilians in Syria. They deliberately targeted hospitals along with Assad's forces. They did this, in part, not just to weaken the opposition and to prop up their puppet, Assad, so that Russia would have a proxy state on the Mediterranean which it could then use to further pressure the West and its geopolitical interests. They also did this to flood Europe with refugees. At the same time, they were financially propping up all these xenophobic, far-right political Kremlin clown cars across Europe that are running for office trying to break up the EU—the EU being a regulatory body that, in principle, tries to stand for accountability and human rights. In principle.
Andrea Chalupa:
When you see this summit with Biden and Putin on Wednesday, if you want an indication of how well Putin is playing this hand—this hand that has been in development since the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the KGB just changed its initials to the FSB and their dark arts continued and ramped up as they took advantage of globalization by outsourcing their corruption, exporting their corruption, and buying off officials, buying off the journalists, expanding their propaganda networks, expanding their shell companies, expanding their dark money across the West—if you want to see how well Putin is now harvesting those three decades of work, look at how long Putin makes Biden wait for that meeting. Because Putin is infamous for making world leaders wait for him. He does it to Angela Merkel, he does it to everybody. The big question on Wednesday is how long is Putin going to make Biden wait and how is Biden going to handle that?
Andrea Chalupa:
If Biden's team is as wishful thinking or as paid off, or a combination of those factors, if they're that far gone, you have to watch for signs of how naive or how paid off are they when it comes to dealing with the Kremlin? You can see signs of that based on how they deal with that power move of how Putin's going to make Biden wait for him. So I'm going to be looking out for that.
Andrea Chalupa:
The whole thing is a sham. Alexei Navalny is rotting in prison. Alexei Navalny had the courage to go back to Russia to show Russians, don't be afraid. His message directly to the Russian people was, do not be afraid. Now they're trying to kill him slowly in prison, like so many other political prisoners have died under Putin. There's been a ramp up of Soviet-style repression against the opposition. Alexei Navalny's party and supporters are now banned from running for office. You're left with just controlled opposition in Russia.
Andrea Chalupa:
The terror is heightened right now. This is not a man that is deserving of sharing the global stage with the President of the United States. This is not a man deserving of holding court on MSNBC in an interview with Keir Simmons. Keir Simmons is the same Barbie doll on-air reporter who got trolled publicly by Putin. In 2019, Keir Simmons was on stage with Putin and asked him, "Robert Mueller said you're attacking the 2020 election, are you?" What a dumb question, first of all, and Putin, of course, took that layup and sunk a basket and said, "Let me tell you a secret, you little mosquito, lean in close." Putin trolled him and said, "Yes, I am. But don't tell anyone. Shh"
Andrea Chalupa:
The whole audience laughed at Keir Simmons. Putin must have masturbated to that video for many nights to come. So who got the big interview with Putin this week? Keir Simmons, that same gimp on a leash. Putin trotted him out for his MSNBC interview. Let me just tell you something, what Keir Simmons and MSNBC did was morally criminal by giving Putin that platform.
Andrea Chalupa:
Putin has, arguably, one of the largest television machines in the world. All of Russian state TV is Putin TV. He's strangled all of the independence out of television in Russia. There used to be an SNL Saturday Night Live-style show that used to make fun of Putin, that's now gone. That was in the early days. He made sure to get rid of that and now it's all Putin TV all the time, and he's brainwashing Russians into Putinism, into seeing enemies within and enemies without. That's how he maintains his control.
Andrea Chalupa:
Not only that, he does these hour-long press conferences where he's thrown all these softball questions, where he can never bring himself to say the name of Alexei Navalny, as though it's like a curse and if he says it, his Botox will suddenly be undone.
Andrea Chalupa:
Putin has a global platform, he doesn't need MSNBC in addition to that. All MSNBC did was bend over and allow Putin to flank his power as a mass murdering autocrat. Well done, MSNBC. Well done, naive and/or corrupt Biden officials who gave your boss the stupidest advice of humiliating the United States by sharing a stage with mass murderer Putin.
Andrea Chalupa:
This is an embarrassing moment for the US, it's an embarrassing moment for the Western Alliance, and everyone who contributed to both the MSNBC interview and the Biden-Putin summit should be ashamed, and you should be forced to look at the photos of the Syrians who were bombed, of the Ukrainians who were bombed, of the Venezuelans who are starving right now by their dictator that's propped up by Putin, and so forth. All of those victims—the countless victims, the lives that Putin has destroyed—that's blood that's also in your hands now for legitimizing a mass murdering dictator. Well done.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, as to the motivation here, I mean, part of me, I don't care whether it's naivete or malice in some instances because the end result is the same, and the end result is deeply dangerous for the United States and for all of the countries you just mentioned, and for anybody in the Kremlin line of fire. As we've noted on the show many times, the Kremlin is intertwined with transnational organized crime from around the world with White supremacist movements from around the world, with corrupt plutocrats and oligarchs from around the world.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is truly an international crisis and the Biden administration has a tough challenge and instead is preemptively folding in certain respects. As we obviously know, it's a vast improvement than having an actual Kremlin asset supplicating himself publicly on a stage to Putin. And there have been some improvements in the directions that they went, where Biden is not doing a joint press conference. But the summit should not be happening at all, and I don't have great confidence just for all the reasons you listed and the manner that it’s being carried out.
Sarah Kendzior:
There was a thread yesterday that I thought was pretty interesting in terms of how things were worded from Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is basically an oligarch in exile, an extremely wealthy Russian businessman who got in a variety of entanglements with Putin, with the Kremlin over multiple decades, and now, I think, is living in Switzerland.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, he did an English language thread. It's worth reading the whole thing. We'll link to it in the show notes. The first two tweets from it I thought were interesting because of the phrasing used, where he says, "It is clear that the upcoming Biden Putin summit in Geneva is a meeting between the leader of the free world and a murderous gangster with a nuclear button. Western politicians will always claim ‘We don't negotiate with terrorists,’ But the reality is, of course, more nuanced and in many cases the devil is in the details. If a terrorist held millions hostage with a nuclear weapon, I'd be the last person to impede negotiations in this unfortunately similar scenario."
Sarah Kendzior:
I thought that was interesting. I don't think he's saying that Putin or the Kremlin are actually threatening nuclear war. I think this is a metaphorical statement, but I think that he may be implying that the extent of the cyber attacks that have been taking place steadily over a decade—and that obviously accelerated under Trump because Trump left the door open for those attacks to occur—may be effectively holding the West hostage, and I was wondering what you thought about that.
Andrea Chalupa:
I think without question, Russian criminality under Putin is certainly holding the West hostage. I think it's not just the cyber warfare, because the big advantage that Russia has under Putin that the West doesn't seem to grasp or know how to counter at all, is that Putin is willing to go there. It's the brazenness. It's sending his spies to go kill people on British soil, then running propaganda pieces that are so ridiculous and covering up their crime saying, “Yeah, our spies were just at this cathedral, just for tourism. Those dead bodies had nothing to do with us and our chemical agents.”
Sarah Kendzior:
And note, the tourist excuse is the exact same tourist excuse that they're now dragging out for the Capitol attacks.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right.
Sarah Kendzior:
These blatant acts of terrorism, they're like, “oh, we're just tourists.” And it's funny to them.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, exactly right. There's a lot of parallels clearly with the Kremlin and Republican authoritarianism because the active measures are the same, the psyops are the same. As a great symbol of that, you had Putin's favorite Congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who was in Congress for many years and he was sort of that lone weirdo in Congress that would always parrot Kremlin talking points and we couldn't wait to get rid of him. Then we voted him out in the blue wave in 2018. Suddenly, Dana Rohrabacher multiplies across Congress, and now you have Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and you've got Devin Nunez of California and so forth. It's like the game of Whack-a-Mole we keep talking about, the Kremlin Whack-a-Mole in the US Congress.
Andrea Chalupa:
Dana Rohrabacher, it turns out, was there. Putin's favorite congressman was there at the Capitol siege along with everyone else. You had one of these White supremacist terrorists who laid siege at the Capitol appearing proudly on Russian's propaganda TV, sharing his story. There's definitely a marriage there, certainly in values, certainly in tactics.
Andrea Chalupa:
In terms of the leverage the Kremlin has over us, they are ruthless. They are ruthless in a way that the West simply does not understand and this dates back to the times of Stalin. Putin has resurrected Stalin as a great hero, beloved by Russians, nevermind all the countless that he killed. And he's done this to show victory and might and also justifying ruthless tactics.
Andrea Chalupa:
I mean, you had the Soviet Union—our ally in World War II—they killed off the Polish intelligentsia in the Katyn Massacre. They waited on the sidelines, letting the Nazis destroy the Polish resistance in the Warsaw Uprising. They did all this in order to make Poland easier to occupy, which they occupied for several generations, leading to all of this state terror against Poles under Soviet occupation and so forth. That's just one example of how ruthless they were. Putin is carrying on that tradition and the West is just so unprepared and hasn't come up with any good solution to it and continues to force a normal relationship. It continues to reward them with blood money contracts.
Andrea Chalupa:
Look at Nord Stream 2, which Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, promised that he was going to stop during his confirmation hearing. Instead, the US is allowing that to move forward. What Nord Stream 2 is, we've talked about a lot on this show because it's horrifying. If you watch my film, Mr. Jones, there's this scene based on a true story, a true scene. It was covered in New Yorker Magazine at the time. In my film, Mr. Jones, showing this scene covered in New Yorker Magazine at the time, you see all these Russian officials and titans of American industry cheersing, toasting each other, in the Waldorf Astoria. This actually happened.
Andrea Chalupa:
They're doing this in the fall of 1933 when Stalin has just gotten away with mass murdering millions of people deliberately in a genocide famine, the vast majority from Ukraine. He did this to colonize Ukraine. He did this to steal Ukraine's agriculture and sell it abroad in order to raise the money to rapidly modernize his empire. What happened? No accountability. Instead, he gets rewarded with and symbolized in this big fancy banquet at the Waldorf Astoria between titans of US industry and Russian officials to show, let's make money. Genocides, mass murder, human rights, all those issues are so inconvenient to the almighty prophet.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, what we have here is history repeating. You have Blinken looking the other way, Biden looking the other way, allowing Nord Stream 2 to move forward, and it's that scene from my film, Mr. Jones. It's the exact same scene where you have all of these European corporations. It's not just Germany; it's France, it's other EU countries that are working with the Russian state to build a pipeline between Russia and Germany, which is going to bypass Ukraine, which is going to deprive Ukraine of much needed revenue right now. Because normally, Russia's gas pipeline passes through Ukraine and Ukraine gets to make money off of that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Russia is like, “Nope, we're going to cut you out of this deal, and not only that, we're going to economically destroy you by invading your country.” This pipeline is economic warfare against Ukraine, already added to the economic warfare against Ukraine of Putin's ongoing invasion. What this pipeline is doing is on top of that, it is further entrenching Germany's dependence on Russian gas. What is that all doing? That's basically putting Germany in a corner where it can't stand up to Russian aggression because it's dependent on Russian gas.
Andrea Chalupa:
Do you see how fucked up this situation is? Also, do you know who's in charge of this project?
Sarah Kendzior:
Do tell.
Andrea Chalupa:
Well, you have Putin's old friend from East Germany, where Putin was a KGB agent. You have a former Stasi agent from East Germany, who worked with Putin there, who's running this project, because it is a deliberate economic warfare project to divide the West and to contain the West and to avoid all accountability and to further weaken Ukraine so it could further increase its chances of colonizing Ukraine. Because as the saying goes, Russia—with Ukraine—is a superpower. Russia wants all the rich resources and the geopolitical position of Ukraine. That's the end goal here, do you understand?
Andrea Chalupa:
If Ukraine falls, you're going to have a massive nation the size of France right on the EU's borders under a Russian occupation. Russia is working towards that goal, chipping away at it, chipping away at it year after year. Biden and Blinken just allowed it to get closer and so did Germany and the rest of the EU by allowing Nord Stream 2 to move forward. This is a very dangerous time and I don't see anybody in the West showing any leadership, any spine, any strategy for containing the Kremlin's aggression. They all act as though they're waking up every morning with amnesia and trying to make friends with the biggest bully on the block.
Andrea Chalupa:
I don't even think we have any sort of structure in place to withstand Kremlin aggression either, because you have the Kremlin asset of the Republican Party slowing down the infrastructure bill, which would go a very long way in protecting us from Russia’s cyber warfare. All of this situation combined is... I just don't know. I don't know.
Sarah Kendzior:
Yeah, I don't know what they're doing. There's been some cheering about Biden doing basic things; treating our allies in the EU, in Europe, as our allies instead of our enemy, not doing the things that Trump did which involved threatening Canada and Australia and the EU countries. Of course, Biden did do some things that were pointedly meant to show that the US was going to protect former republics of the Soviet Union that are now independent states like Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, when he met with heads of state from those nations before his NATO meeting yesterday. I do think that was pointed. I obviously think that that was a good idea since the Trump administration completely screwed over those countries, lied to them multiple times, consistently threatened to abandon NATO, abandon them to Kremlin aggression, Kremlin conquest, yet again.
Sarah Kendzior:
But there are these major elephants in the room, so to speak: the elephant of the Republican Party working on behalf of a hostile foreign state, on behalf of Russia. Not just the examples you listed of former people like Rohrabacher, current people like Ron Johnson, Devin Nunez, but the entire apparatus is structured in this way. We add a Kremlin asset at the helm of our country and you might think that he's a fucking moron, and maybe there's some point to that, but he's surrounded by savvy operators and he's a career criminal. And he's good at being a career criminal, and he's actually pretty good at keeping secrets when those secrets are incredibly destructive to his own financial assets, when he feels that his impunity is actually threatened.
Sarah Kendzior:
He managed to keep Epstein a secret. He kept a lot of financial transactions a secret and has threatened people into secrecy, threatened people into silence. We'll get into that later, but I really wonder, beyond just the seeming inability of this administration to understand the terms of leverage when you deal with the Kremlin, that when you're saying we want a stable relationship and the other party is constantly privileging chaos over that, that you're going to be automatically on the losing end there. There are things like the cyber attack situation, the attacks on our critical infrastructure, that have had me worried since 2014 when Russia attacked the DoD, the State Department, the White House, the DNC, the RNC, private companies, then of course, it's accelerated throughout the Trump administration. It accelerated greatly in 2020 in the worst cyber attack on the United States by a foreign country in US history. That is still ongoing. We still don't fully know the damage.
Sarah Kendzior:
Then you see stuff come out, like this article, or many articles about this, where—I'm quoting one from UPI:"Vladimir Putin offers Joe Biden exchange of cyber criminals ahead of summit." This is yet another strange situation where Putin says, "If we agree on extradition of criminals, then Russia will naturally do that, but only if the other side,"—in this case, the United States—"agrees to the same and will also extradite corresponding criminals to the Russian Federation."
Sarah Kendzior:
If you've listened to our interview with Bill Browder, which we taped a few weeks ago, Putin has a very loose and expansive definition of what constitutes a criminal, which is basically anyone who may oppose him, anyone who may be a threat to his power. It's the same way of viewing the world as Trump because this is a fellow mafia state actor.
Sarah Kendzior:
So, the Biden administration initially blew this off. Psaki said, "Be a topic of direct discussion with President Putin and President Biden” and at that point, I had flashbacks to when Trump said that he and Putin were going to have a joint cyber security partnership (this is back in 2017), and that Rudy Giuliani was going to be the top cyber official and... Oh, God.
Sarah Kendzior:
But then, they did backtrack. The advisor I mentioned before, Jake Sullivan, clarified and said, “Biden is not saying he's going to be exchanging cyber criminals with Russia. There's no cyber criminals who have committed crimes in Russia that he's looking at and thinking, ‘I'm going to exchange them.’” I mean, it's just... all of this... I don't know. I'm biting my tongue because on one hand, it's like I desperately want the Biden administration to succeed here.
Sarah Kendzior:
We're not happy to be criticizing them on this. We're not happy about the lack of accountability. We're not happy that they don't really seem to have learned important lessons of the last four years, lessons that have to do with the very survival of the United States as a sovereign nation, and it's hard to tell at times how much they are keeping close to the chest when you're dealing with a regime like the Kremlin. I think we'll see more on Wednesday, tomorrow, in terms of how they behave and how much they are just being bullheaded about it, being extremely stubborn and refusing to actually realize, you know, we are not in a position of strength. No country could be in a position of strength when its institutions are hijacked from within, purged, gutted, its courts are packed, basic rights like the right to vote are deeply threatened.
Sarah Kendzior:
The Democrats are on the verge of losing the very small amount of power that they've managed to accumulate, you know, losing the House in 2022, not having free and fair elections. This is just blatantly not a position of strength. I think it's better to just admit that, to just admit, “Well, here are our flaws.” Because the thing is, everyone can see them. We can see them here in the United States and foreign actors can see them from abroad, and they can see that the Biden administration is not fixing them.
Sarah Kendzior:
This is the exact same problem that happened during the Obama administration, where all of our faults, all of our flaws were out in plain sight, in part, to a much greater degree because of social media. The remedy to that is you fix the fucking flaws. You do something, you pass new policies, you pass new laws, you call out bad actors, you try to do what's right, you try to do what's just, and then you are protected not just morally, not just legally, but you're protected pragmatically to a greater degree from foreign threats than if you just look the other way, or cover your eyes, or pretend it's not happening. We can see it's happening, they can see it's happening, and they know how to exploit those flaws to a massive, massive degree.
Sarah Kendzior:
So I just don't think that they can truly pull this off. It's like, yes, we're all relieved that Biden is there instead of Trump, but it's not enough. They need to go out the rot, and they need to be far more blatant—both in their messaging to the American public who is demanding accountability and to foreign actors abroad—that they're not going to stand for this level of corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
Speaking of rot, it's been reported that advising Biden for a summit with Putin, you have Michael McFaul, who was the engineer of the original Russian reset, and Fiona Hill, who called another Russian reset last year, and days later, Putin poisoned Navalny. So you have these institutionalists who are determined to make fetch happen. They're determined to work with Putin, no matter-
Sarah Kendzior:
Make reset happen!
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. It's like Michael McFaul wakes up every morning as though he's born for the first time and looks out at the world with baby eyes.
Sarah Kendzior:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. He has, like, amnesia. His Twitter account, half the time, I'm just like, is this a test? Is this some sort of Buddhist Cohen and we're supposed to just try to delineate some kind of meaning? Because it's like, dude, this is Russia 101 and you're supposed to be the diplomat master here, and you've got 500 randos in your mentions correcting you on basic things. But go on, go on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Every tweet from Michael McFaul reads in my head as “Golly, gee, gosh.” That's all Michael McFaul says, that's his internal monologue. Fiona Hill, I don't know her excuse. I think she's just become such an institutionalist, and she's trying to be "bipartisan" with Putin and the West, and it just doesn't work. What's the solution? You don't have a summit in the first place. What's the solution? You listen to Ukraine, because Ukraine as a country should not exist given everything Russia has done to it and yet they manage to survive because they know how to resist Kremlin aggression.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right now Ukraine is under an immense amount of pressure by the West, by the United States, to clean up its act, clean up its corruption and reform. But at the same time, maybe the United States should focus on that, too. The US wants Ukraine to de-oligarcharise, get rid of the oligarch class, contain the oligarchs? Well, I would love to see the West do that first. Show Ukraine how to do that, the United States, by reining in Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and Elon Musk and making them finally pay their fair share of taxes. You do that first and show Ukraine the way on how to do that. That's really US leadership.
Andrea Chalupa:
Let's take a lesson from Ukraine because Ukraine, as I keep going on and on and on, on this show, shows how to get it done. You had the popular uprising that defeated Putin's puppy, Yanukovych. That was a big arts festival. That was an uprising that encompassed all walks of life across Ukrainian society. It was done despite pressure from European Western officials to go home and disperse and all that. Once again, we turn to Ukraine for lessons.
Andrea Chalupa:
What do you have there? You have Zelensky with his balls of steel. When Zelensky hears about this Putin summit at the time when Putin has amassed 95,000 troops on Ukraine's border, what does Zelensky do? He needs to send a strong urgent message to the White House, so he goes to Axios. He does an interview with Axios. He speaks directly to the president of the United States through Axios saying, "What the hell is this? Why are you having a summit with Putin? Please meet with me first."
Andrea Chalupa:
What happens next? That interview with Axios, that leads to Zelensky getting an official invitation to the White House. So, that meeting should take place next month. Then, right when Biden's about to take the stage and do his big press conference at NATO, what does Zelensky do? He takes his balls of steel and he throws them on Twitter.
Sarah Kendzior:
[laughs] Ew.
Andrea Chalupa:
He announces that Ukraine is going to join NATO. Suddenly, you had Twitter awash with everyone celebrating, thinking that Biden and the West actually did something right for a change and is going to bring Ukraine into NATO. This was all a big bluff, certainly to fuck with Putin's head and to force Ukraine into the conversation. What happens? When Biden finally takes the stage for his big NATO press conference, Ukraine is the big topic of discussion. Well done, Zelensky. No one else is coming to your aid. You have to do what it takes to protect yourself. You have to be creative, and that is what he's doing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Biden, of course, had to say, "No, we're not having you in NATO, you've got to clean up your act first." But again, show Ukraine how to clean up their act, rein in your own oligarchs first and show Ukraine how to do that. As a result, Ukraine can join NATO, that path is there. But first the West wants Ukraine to jump through all these hoops to fight its own corruption. That's going to be tough. But again, the big headline of this week's episode is, if the West really wants Ukraine to get serious about corruption, the West needs to get serious about its own corruption, because it's the same fucking corruption. It's the Kremlin golden handcuffs, it's the Kremlin dark money, it's the offshore bank accounts. It's all of these loopholes. It's all the fancy accounting firms. It's all the legal warfare and the fancy law firms. Clean up your own damn corruption and stop putting all these unrealistic expectations and pressures on Ukraine.
Andrea Chalupa:
I'm someone that has spoken adamantly about corruption in Ukraine. I have told off Ukrainian officials to their face about the corruption in that country, and I'm telling you, West, you are failing. You're not living up to your own standards. As a result, you are being played and you're losing your sovereignty and you're putting the lives of countless people at risk, including dissidents.
Andrea Chalupa:
You just had a young man, a young, independent journalist, hijacked off a plane as it was traveling between two EU nations. Now, he is being forced, he's being paraded across Kremlin propaganda TV inside Belarus, praising the great dictator and being forced to confess to things he didn't commit. That's a violation of the Geneva Convention.
Andrea Chalupa:
So, because of the Western utter lack of strategy against this aggression, all of us could be Jamal Khashoggi. All of us can be Roman Protasevich, the independent journalist in Belarus who was kidnapped by Putin's puppet in Belarus, hijacked off that plane. All of us are those dissidents right now when you have such a shameful, embarrassing, self-defeating foreign policy as we're seeing coming out of Blinken right now, and Biden, and their team, and their Chamberlain advisors. It's just utter appeasement to Putin and his mafia state.
Andrea Chalupa:
So let's move on now to Blinken because we've got some things to say about him specifically. Welcome to the Anthony Blinken special. [laughs]
Sarah Kendzior:
Go for it.
Andrea Chalupa:
You know how Wall Street works, people put in their time on Wall Street, then they go to the SEC, which is supposed to be the regulatory body of Wall Street, and it just becomes a revolving door of corruption. You work in the SEC, then you get a fancy job in Wall Street. Nobody's really watching. Basically, the foxes are guarding the henhouse. That's how the SEC works. That's how Wall Street works. As a result, you have Wall Street being a gambling den and all the gambling pit bosses that allowed the big financial crash of 2008 to happen, they're all back at it again and we're vulnerable to another crash, right? That's because we have a weak SEC.
Andrea Chalupa:
You have the same thing going on with the DOJ. Why do you think Trump was allowed to come into power in the first place? Why do you think you've had all these slaps on the wrist, and why do you think corruption is flourishing right now in America? Because you had these DOJ lawyers that put in time at the DOJ and then they rake in all this money working at a handful of powerhouse law firms. It's a revolving door of corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
Key examples of this as you had... And the FBI works the same way, you had two FBI directors, William Sessions, and Louis Freeh go from being directors of the FBI to serving as lawyers to the Russian mafia. Again, revolving door of corruption.
Andrea Chalupa:
Antony Blinken has entered his own revolving door of corruption after serving in the Obama White House where he should have had a Come to Jesus moment where, from that time under Obama, he should have woken up to, “Wow, global corruption really made us vulnerable to Putin's attack in 2016, and how do we make sure that never happens again?”
Andrea Chalupa:
Instead, Blinken spent his years after Obama's White House and under Trump raking in a bunch of money, setting up his own lobbying firm, and serving a lot of massively powerful, giant corporate clients who are currently causing a lot of destruction on the planet. So, because he had so many lucrative contracts in his time before becoming Secretary of State, how are we to expect he's going to be serving what's best for the American public if it might jeopardize the interests of his former or potential clients?
Andrea Chalupa:
Some of these clients include Facebook. Yep, Blinken was serving Facebook. Facebook is, of course, the Fox News of social media. It's pushing out the Big Lie, hate speech, and flooding the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon would call it. Facebook has been defiant in white washing their role in furthering political extremism and dangerous disinformation. This, of course, has led to real world violence. One key example of this is Kyle Rittenhouse, the kid who organized over Facebook an effort to go out and confront Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin, which led to Kyle Rittenhouse killing two innocent people in cold blood and becoming a right-wing hero for it, because all these people are brainwashed over Facebook.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then you have Blackstone, another Blinken client. According to The Intercept, “a top financier of Trump and McConnell is a driving force behind Amazon deforestation. Steve Schwarzman is the CEO of the Blackstone Group, which partially owns a Brazilian firm that is helping transform the Amazon from jungle to farmland.” All right, Biden wants to make fighting climate change central to his foreign policy. He's talking about this during his Europe tour. He has the former Secretary of State, John Kerry, in a role solely dedicated to the US global effort for fighting climate change, yet his current Secretary of State worked for Blackstone Group, which is strangling the lungs of the planet by raking in money over deforestation in the Amazon.
Andrea Chalupa:
How does that work, Antony Blinken? Then you have Boeing. Boeing was another client. Boeing has, of course, a long history of corruption and utter lack of transparency. Boeing has had to pay millions in fines for overcharging the US government in their contracts. The most recent scandal, of course, was gambling with public safety in order to protect its profits, which led to two deadly plane crashes by its 737 Max jets. Boeing, a giant greedy corporation with a serious transparency issue. Blood money is more important than public safety, apparently, for Boeing.
Andrea Chalupa:
Then there's more. From The Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Blinken, through his share of Ridgeline Partners LLC, which is part of WestExec ventures,”—which is his lobbying firm where he's been serving all these big corporate clients I've been listing—”Mr. Blinken through his share of Ridgeline Partners LLC, which is part of WestExec Ventures indirectly holds stakes in a dozen technology companies, half of which involve data management. One tech firm included on Mr. Blinken's disclosure form, Elroy Air, develops drones. Two companies, Neural Magic and Zenith, operate in the artificial intelligence sector, while Raven[Ops] develops robotics.”
Andrea Chalupa:
“Arrangements have been made to divest the interest in Ridgeline according to the disclosure form.” This is from The Wall Street Journal. We'll link to it in the show notes for this episode, which you find as always on the Patreon page. Great. So, we have a Secretary of State who has in the past profited from artificial intelligence and robotics, which, as we're always saying on this show, the authoritarian playbook is classic. It's predictable. It's the same tools of repression and terror used generation after generation. There's nothing novel about the authoritarian playbook.
Andrea Chalupa:
Where it becomes harder to predict is how technology evolves and how technology can be used by the authoritarians to suppress people. That's why AI and robotics are terrifying, because that's the next Pandora's box. He just seems like the classic revolving door of corruption: going to government, going to corporations and back to government again, and none of us are safer for it.
Sarah Kendzior:
I absolutely agree and I have some information here to cover that has to do with Blinken's own background, his own family connections into various governments. I want to be clear here that I think anyone should be judged on their own decisions, their own actions, their own choices, and I think Andrea has laid out a very compelling case for why Antony Blinken should not be trusted, why he should not have been made Secretary of State due to conflicts of interest that he pursued on his own.
Sarah Kendzior:
But on top of that, there are conflicts of interest with Blinken that make him, in the Secretary of State role, a challenge for the Biden administration regardless. This is just something that should have been discussed earlier and considered.
Sarah Kendzior:
Antony Blinken's stepfather, the man who raised him, is Samuel Pisar. Samuel Pisar, throughout the latter half of the 20th century was a mainstream figure, a major figure in world affairs. He served in the JFK administration .He worked for the United Nations. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honor by Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, of course, went on to be indicted and convicted for corruption, but that's another story.
Sarah Kendzior:
The thing that is disturbing about Samuel Pisar is that he was also the lawyer and very close friend of Robert Maxwell, who we have discussed on this show many times. Robert Maxwell is a key figure in what we've been calling the transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government, or at least he was until he died mysteriously on a yacht, or off a yacht, in November of 1991.
Sarah Kendzior:
To give you the short version, Maxwell was a Mossad agent/UK publishing tycoon who was working on the side for the Russian mafia, specifically for Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian mafia who Robert Mueller had vowed to hunt down at all costs. He did not do that. Instead, he protected Trump and this is the branch of the Russian mafia that Trump and his cohort are essentially working for and linked to.
Sarah Kendzior:
When Andrea mentioned William Sessions, and in particular, Louis Freeh, leaving their positions as heads of the FBI and going on to work for the Russian mafia, again, it is Mogilevich who they want on and worked for. Robert Maxwell is also, as you may know, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was the partner of Jeffrey Epstein, the child rape trafficker who is embedded in multiple international espionage operations. It seems to be with a wide variety of countries, including the United States, Russia, Israel, and Saudi Arabia.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, these are the worst people in the world. These are the most dangerous people in the world. And Robert Maxwell's death in 1991 was very mysterious. There are claims that he was murdered, there were claims it was suicide, it was an accident, he fell off a yacht. I describe all this in my book, Hiding in Plain Sight. Quite frankly, all this should be covered more.
Sarah Kendzior:
Anyway, the last person to see Maxwell alive was Samuel Pisar, and I'm not at all suggesting that he murdered him. I'm just sort of stressing this to say the closeness of the relationship. You might think, okay, well, Robert Maxwell fooled a lot of people. A lot of people thought he was just this mega tycoon publishing asshole who made a ton of money and was kind of like a scandalmonger and was caught up in these shady circles with people like Adnan Khashoggi and Donald Trump and others in the Iran Contra era of the '90s.
Sarah Kendzior:
You might think, okay, if he tricked all these people, maybe he also tricked his very close friend, Samuel Pisar. I do not believe that that was the case. The reason I don't believe that was the case is because this Mossad agent, Robert Maxwell, was given this absolutely incredibly lavish state funeral in Israel after he died.
Sarah Kendzior:
I'm just going to read a little from the official announcement of that. It says, “President Chaim Herzog and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir headed a galaxy of dignitaries and politicians, both government and opposition who attended the funeral. Hertzog delivered the eulogy for the multimillionaire publisher, whose holdings in Israel, including Maariv are estimated at $300 million. This is a quote from Herzog, "Maxwell scaled the heights of human endeavor. Kings and princes waited on him, many admired him, many disliked him, but none were indifferent to him."
Sarah Kendzior:
Then here we go. "Maxwell's widow, Elizabeth, and their seven sons and daughters were at the graveside for the traditional Jewish burial service. Kaddish was recited by Maxwell's longtime attorney and personal friend, fellow Holocaust survivor, Samuel Pisar." So, I really doubt that the person reciting the Kaddish at the funeral is going to be ignorant of Maxwell's secret life, of his shady foreign connections, and probably of his illegal activity.
Sarah Kendzior:
My view on this was solidified when it was revealed in French newspapers that after serving as Maxwell's lawyer and very close confidant, close personal friend, Pisar went on to be the intermediary between Jeffrey Epstein and the French government. We're going to post articles about this in the show notes. I'm sorry, but that's too much of a coincidence. This is a vast operation but it seems clear that there's some continuity between what Robert Maxwell was doing and what Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell was doing.
Sarah Kendzior:
You see Samuel Pisar showing up again and again with his own incredibly long and vast network of international connections, which would be very useful for a criminal syndicate like this. You would think, well, he should know better. Particularly after hobnobbing with Robert Maxwell, perhaps he would be wary of continuing that with his criminal daughter's criminal partner, Jeffrey Epstein. But no, he seemed to solidify this operation.
Sarah Kendzior:
There is no indication that Antony Blinken himself is involved in any of this. I have looked and I have not found anything. He has not commented on it in any way, except to say his stepfather is an enormous inspiration to him, an influence on him. He didn't say it was because of all this shit. I think it's because of his role as a statesman and maybe because he... I think a lot of this just isn't known to the general public. I do think it's known to Antony Blinken.
Sarah Kendzior:
But regardless, regardless of what he thinks, the fact is, all of this makes Blinken very vulnerable to compromise because when your stepfather is linked to this many international criminal conspiracies, all of those evil operators, all of those mafiosos, and governments likely have... Not even likely, they have information on his own family, and it's likely that the continuing Epstein operation has information on him, too. That makes him more vulnerable and potentially in a position to be threatened himself.
Sarah Kendzior:
That, to me, makes him a very poor choice to lead the State Department. It makes the State Department itself vulnerable, and we've seen this. We saw this throughout so many administrations, how these nepotistic ties, these shady connections, how they are very easily exploited by bad actors. I always say, the solution here is you come clean about this. You speak openly about this. If you have nothing to do with it, then just say so. But either way, the combination of this personal disturbing history with what Andrea laid out about his financial entanglements, about his personal choice to integrate himself with all of these corrupt corporations and individuals, it adds up to a very unsafe situation for the American public.
Andrea Chalupa:
Without question, and it all comes down to corruption. You need a strong Secretary of State who's going to call the enemy by name and confront it, and that is corruption; corporate corruption, oligarch corruption. Whether those corporations and oligarchs are in the US, or Ukraine, or the UK, or France, or Germany or Russia, it's all the same enemy. It's a global enemy. It's a transnational crime syndicate. So, for the people on the left are like, “Enough with Russia, Russia is not our enemy, China's our enemy.”: it's the corruption that is running those autocratic states. And they're threatening our own weak and feeble democracy here at home.
Andrea Chalupa:
They're empowering the half of the United States that is fine with corruption, that justifies corruption as a "free market ideology", that justifies violence as a "White evangelical patriarchy ideology." At the end of the day, we need a Secretary of State like Elizabeth Warren. If I were the advanced AI writing this current simulation that we're all stuck in, I would hack the system. I'd go full Matrix and Neo and put Elizabeth Warren as the Secretary of State, just to hammer in the point. We are up against corruption and you cannot have an Antony Blinken as Secretary of State, who is going to leave his office one day soon and go profit from these abusive power structures that his lack of accountability, his poor advice for this summit—this Putin summit—are propping up.
Andrea Chalupa:
Our discussion continues and you can get access to that by signing up on our Patreon at the Truth Teller level or higher.
Sarah Kendzior:
We want to encourage you to donate to your local food bank, which is experiencing a spike in demand. We also encourage you to donate to GLAAD, an organization on the frontlines of fighting for the rights of LGBTQ people at a time when they, especially trans people, are under attack by repressive and harmful Republican legal warfare. Support their critical work at GLAAD G-L-A-A-D.org.
Andrea Chalupa:
We also encourage you to donate to the International Rescue Committee, a humanitarian relief organization helping refugees from Syria. Donate at rescue.org, and if you want to help critically endangered orangutans already under pressure from the palm oil industry, donate to The Orangutan Project at theorangutanproject.org. Gaslit Nation is produced by Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa. If you like what we do, leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us reach more listeners. And check out our Patreon, it keeps us going. And you can also subscribe to us on YouTube.
Sarah Kendzior:
Our production managers are Nicholas Torres and Karlyn Daigle. Our episodes are edited by Nicholas Torres and our Patreon exclusive content is edited by Karlyn Daigle.
Andrea Chalupa:
Original music in Gaslit Nation is produced by David Whitehead, Martin Vissenberg, Nik Farr, Demien Arriaga and Karlyn Daigle.
Sarah Kendzior:
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Andrea Chalupa:
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