Trump's War Against Thomas Massie and Rand Paul; Exposing Corrupt Foreign Influence and DC Rot: With Kenneth P. Vogel
Trump escalates his attacks against Thomas Massie and Rand Paul as they continue to uphold their principles instead of following the White House's lead. Plus: journalist and author Ken Vogel discusses his new book "Devils' Advocates The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden, and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interests." --------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
Welcome to another episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Donald Trump has been vocally supporting and fundraising for the Republican senator of Lindsa of Trump South Carolina, Lindsay Graham.
Despite the fact that Graham is what MAGA long claimed to most abhor, namely an extreme warmonger and corporatist.
Meanwhile, Trump has also decided to wage war, what looks to be a relentless war on two Republican members of Congress, in particular, both from Kentucky, Congressman Thomas Massey and Senator Rand Paul, despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact that those two are among the most stalwart anti-war, anti-interventionist, anti-censorship, and anti-spending conservatives in all of Washington.
We'll examine what all of this means.
Then, New York Times investigative reporter Ken Vogel has spent years first at the at Political and then the New York Times, aggressively divulging all sorts of corruption and influence pedaling by virtually every faction in Washington.
He probably did more than any single reporter in the country to investigate and bring to light Hunter Biden's corrupt dealings in Ukraine.
And he's also done the same for many of Trump's closest confidants, in particular Rudy Giuliani.
He has a new book out that is full of new reporting and insights on all of this corruption entitled Devil's Advocate, The Hidden Story of Rudy Giuliani, Hunter Biden and the Washington Insiders on the Payrolls of Corrupt Foreign Interest, and help you with here uh with us here tonight to talk about that new reporting in his book.
Before we get to all that, a couple of quick programming notes.
First of all, Friday night, this Friday night, so three nights from now, I will be in San Antonio, Texas, along with Megan Kelly and Emily Jacinski for an event that we are doing.
It's actually the first stop on Megan Kelly's Nationwide Tour.
The first stop is in San Antonio.
I will be there for that.
That's the only one I'll be there for.
And it is at the Majestic Theater, 7 30 at night.
I'm actually not sure now if there are tickets left.
I believe there may be a couple.
I don't I don't know.
But if you're in the San Antonio area and would like to come, we would love to have you.
You can look online and see about ticket availability.
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When Donald Trump was preparing to do something that seemed very anathema to what a lot of people understood the America First agenda to be, namely joining Israel and bombing Iran.
A lot of people started saying, wait, what happened to America first?
And a lot of Trump's closest supporters, even the Trump White House stood up saying America first doesn't actually mean anything other than what Donald Trump says it means at any given moment, which I think came as a surprise to a lot of people because they didn't know they were joining a cult of personality.
They thought they were supporting a set of ideological beliefs laid out carefully by Donald Trump over the course of many years, laid out and defended.
And of course, Donald Trump is the leader of that movement.
He really kind of, I wouldn't say created it.
I think he had ancestors who paved the way in terms of the political acceptance for these ideas and even the ideas themselves.
But Trump did what he's really good at doing, which is branded it, defended it, gave it a lot of charisma, a lot of pizzazz, and was able to do what nobody else was able to do, which was convince Americans to support it against not just the Democratic establishment, the Republican one as well.
And so, of course, Donald Trump plays a major role in the America First Movement.
There's no denying that.
But this isn't a hierarchical religion where everybody who's a follower of the religion is duty bound by the pronouncements of the leader.
In fact, the idea of politics in a free country in a democracy is that the people who vote are supposed to demand from their leaders adherence to the things they promised that they would do, not just say, oh, whatever you do automatically becomes the agenda.
And as I said, this America First Agenda had very clear attributes to it.
One of which was obviously opposition to endless wars, to starting wars, to regime change wars in other countries to try and liberate the people of those countries.
That's liberal interventionism, that's neoconservatism, both of which Trump and his movement vehemently condemned.
And it had people who were representative of that ideology, probably among all the members of Congress, no one more so than Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and he was hated by MAGA, hated, held up as the epitome of what MAGA wanted to reject.
He was the pure Republican establishment figure, aligning with John McCain, who hated Trump and Jill Eberman, just hardcore neoconservative warmongers.
And then you had people who I think clearly did pave the way.
If I had to select somebody who was a prominent political figure in the last, say 50 years, who I believe was one of the forefounds, the founders of this America First Movement, I would say it was Pat Buchanan.
And then secondarily, I would say Ron Paul.
And I say Ron Paul because Ron Paul ran in 2008, 2012, made immense headway inside the Republican Party, running for president for the GOP nomination, going to rural Iowa and deep into red territory in South Carolina, and condemning neoconservatives and endless war and the Iraq war and George Bush and Dick Cheney and that whole foreign policy.
And he was running against John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, all people who were embodiments of that.
And Ron Paul convinced a lot of people that they were not only opposed to the Democratic Party establishment, but also the Republican Party establishment, including, but not by any means limited to, this posture of constant war, constant regime change.
Papi Cannon was exactly the same.
Papi Cannon ran against the incumbent George H. W. Bush in 1992, based on a platform of social conservatism, but also based on a vehement opposition to the warmongering and neoconservatism and globalism of George H. W. Bush, who had been the CI director, and Ronald Reagan's vice president.
And when Papu Cannon ran, nobody thought he had any chance against the Republican presidential incumbent who was Ronald Reagan's vice president, but he got such a large vote that the RNC had to give him a prime time speaking slot because there was so much of his message that was resonating with the Republican base.
He was also vehemently anti-immigrant, by which I mean illegal immigration, wanting to reduce legal immigration before the American right or the Republican Party had really come to that idea.
He paved the way for that, which obviously became a major plank of Donald Trump.
So you have Papu Khan, and you could trace it back as well, obviously, further you go back.
You could trace it to some philosophers and writers, people say Sam Francis, but he was a big influence on Papu Kane.
I'm talking about kind of the prominent political leaders.
I would put Papi Ken into ran Paul to Ron Paul and then to Donald Trump in 2016.
Ron Paul ran in 2008-2012 and proved there was a big Republican receptivity to this message.
And yet, there's something very odd going on, which is Lindsey Graham is not in any way any longer an enemy of MAGA.
He may be to some adherence to Donald Trump, but Donald Trump loves Lindsey Graham.
Lindsey Graham's up for re-election in 2026.
He has a primary challenger who's running more from a populist America first perspective.
And Trump has endorsed Lindsey Graham, and he's not only endorsing Lindsey Graham vocally, he's doing so vocally, and he's actually fundraising for him.
And the same is true for all of these neocons in the Republican Party, all these warmongers, all of these corporatists, people who don't care at all about the working class, who want to just serve their big donors, their big corporate base, who want constant wars.
There's dozens of them.
Trump's not campaigning against any of them.
He doesn't denounce any of them.
He is, though, denouncing two different Republicans.
One, he's on a complete jihad against, which is Thomas Massey.
He's vowing to remove Thomas Massey from the Congress.
And he has three extremely pro-Israel billionaires, including Mary Madelson, who are basically single-handedly funding the anti-Massey pact to remove Massey from Congress.
They are motivated by the fact that Thomas Massey is probably, certainly in the Republican Party, maybe next to now with Marjorie Telegrine, but for a long time was the only vocal voice against the influence of Israel in American politics, how much we do for Israel, how much money we give to Israel.
And APAC, before Trump did, announced they wanted Thomas Massey gone, and by a huge coincidence, Donald Trump decided of all the Republicans in Congress and the Senate that he wanted to remove, the one he wants to most remove is the person that just so happens to be APAC's primary target as well.
I'm not saying that's the only reason Trump wants Tom Massey gone, but it's certainly one of the reasons, and it's one of the reasons why he's able to get so much money poured into anti to PAX to remove Thomas Massey from Congress.
Thomas Massey is supposed to be what, in a lot of ways, MAGA was supposed to be.
Anti-war, anti-interventionist, very anti-censorship, pro-free speech.
And we'll get to Thomas Massey in a second, but now Trump is also starting to intensify his targeting of Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, who I would say, certainly among Republican senators, is the most anti-war, the most anti-interventionist, the most pro-free speech, has denounced a lot of Trump censorship the way he did with Biden and Obama.
And I think it speaks volumes about the two Republican senators, the two Republican members of Congress that Trump is targeting for destruction and removal versus the people that Trump is defending and fundraising for and doing everything to keep in power, people like Lindsay Graham.
So this tension has been brewing for a while.
There was a Rose Garden lunch back in, this was just a few days.
Was this just a few days ago?
I thought this would happen a little earlier.
Actually, it was it was today.
There was something else where there was an event at the White House, I believe it was the Easter egg roll or something, where Rand Paul made it a point to say that he had gone every year because he was invited every year, and this year he didn't get invited by the Trump White House.
And then today, earlier today, from Politico, Rand Paul says he was not invited to the Rose Garden lunch, where he didn't show up.
And Rand Paul then clarified himself on X saying, I actually wasn't invited to the White House lunch today, but that's okay.
I had previously scheduled a Liberty Caucus lunch with Thomas Massey.
So he's very pointedly supporting Thomas Massey in that tweet, aligning himself with Massey, because he knows that Trump is coming for him.
This was at the White House earlier today.
Trump actually spoke at the Rose Garden with a bunch of GOP senators, and that was why it was notable that Rand Paul was not invited.
That's why he wasn't there.
And Trump made a little poking aside at Rand Paul, that's what he said.
You know, everybody showed up.
I said I figured you'd have like, I'd say 40 would have been a good number, right?
If everybody were just missing one person, you'll never guess who that is.
Let me give you.
He automatically votes no and everything.
He thinks it's good politics.
It's really not good politics.
He's an automatic no.
So that was the issue is Trump made it a point to say every single Republican senator, got their marching orders, went down to the White House as ordered, like they do pretty much about everything.
And the only one who wasn't there was Rand Paul of the entire Republican caucus, but then Rand Paul said I wasn't even invited.
That's why I didn't go.
Now, all of this was preceded a few days ago by a very vocal public direct attack by President Trump on Rand Paul.
He went to true social and he posted this quote whatever happened to Senator Rand Paul.
I'm endlessly mystified by Trump's use of scare quotes.
Even if you're trying to criticize Rand Paul, he actually is a senator.
I don't know what those scare quotes are for, but that's just an aside.
He was never great, but he went really bad.
He like broke bad.
I got him elected twice in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Such an odd claim because Rand Paul was elected to the Senate in Kentucky before Trump ever appeared on the scene.
Not sure how Trump thinks he got Rand Paul elected twice.
But in event, I got him elected twice, but he just never votes positively for the Republican Party.
He's a nasty little guy, much like scare quotes, Congressman Thomas Massey, aka Rand Paul Jr., also of Kentucky, which I won three times in massive landslides, is what he says about Massey.
He's a sick wacko, a sick wacko who refuses to vote for our great Republican Party MAGA or America First.
It's really weird.
Tom Massey has been saying things like, Why are we giving so much foreign aid to these other countries like Ukraine and Israel instead of keeping it in our own communities to take care of the American people?
Which I thought, I mean, and I paid pretty close attention to the Trump movement from the beginning.
I thought that was a pretty pure representation of America First.
I've heard people in America First say that, including Donald Trump, over and over and over.
And this, by the way, has become Marjorie Taylor Green's critique of the Trump movement.
And it's only a matter of time before he targets her.
Even though she had been one of his most loyal advocates, which is she keeps saying, wait a minute, why are we bombing the Houthis?
People in my district don't even know what Houthis are, let alone consider them a threat to their lives.
Why are we spending all this money and just killing people to bomb the Houthis?
And then she said the same thing about why we're bombing Iran.
And she's very much questioned the billions and billions and billions and massive amounts of attention and soft power and diplomatic force that goes to protecting Israel.
And she's doing so on America First Grounds, what she got inspired by to enter politics.
And that's the same for Thomas Bassing and for Rand Paul.
And those are the people that Trump is deciding to target.
Not the people who remember, he ran against Rand Paul in 2016.
He also ran against Marco Rubio and uh Ted Cruz and was vicious toward them.
And those were the those were the candidates of the Republican establishment.
First Jeb Bush, and then when he proved to be a complete flop, they turned to Marco Rubio, and then when he dropped out to Ted Cruz.
The Republican Party establishment never rallied behind Rand Paul.
Just like they hated his father Ron Paul.
Because they're outside the Republican establishment.
It's just very interesting and I think revealing in a lot of ways that Trump is so single-mindedly devoted to destroying them.
Now, it is true that both Rand Paul and Thomas Massey are the kinds of members of Congress who believe in principle that they're not going to just vote the way the White House tells them.
And I've seen Trump supporters, including probably some who watched the show, saying, well, why don't why do Ron Paul and Rand Paul and Thomas Massey refuse to vote with Trump?
We elected Trump.
Yes, you elected Trump.
You also elected every member of the Senate and Congress, including Rand Paul and Thomas Massey, and both of them have won repeatedly in Kentucky, based on standing on these principles, regardless of the whether The Republican or the Democratic Party supports them.
Donald Trump ran on the same grounds in 2016.
So in June, when Trump wanted this so-called big beautiful bill passed, Rand Paul did what his father had done forever, what Rand Paul has always done, which is say there's way too much spending in here.
A big Rand Paul policy, and it's bizarre that this has placed him on the outs in the Republican Party of the conservative movement, is that we're too far into debt.
We have massive deficit spending, we spend on everything.
And Rand Paul thought that the Big Beautiful bill, which it does, massively increases the debt and the deficit.
And so he said, I'm gonna vote no.
Here from the Hill, June 3rd, 2025, Trump slammed Senator Paul for voting no on everything, lacking constructive ideas.
Now, last night we showed you that Rand Paul went on to meet the press this weekend and objected to Trump's policy of blowing boats up in Venezuela and then claiming afterward they were filled with narco-terrorists.
Because Rand Paul also objected to the Obama war on terror policy where they would just go blow people up by drone and afterwards say, oh, don't worry, those were all militants, even though we have no idea who the people we push blew up were.
Same with these boats.
We have no idea who these people on these boats are.
And they're like, no, don't worry, these are narco-terrorists, very dangerous people coming to the United States, even though they're thousands of miles away.
And J.D. Vance, who loves X, I mean, J.D. Vance is very smart.
He is very smart.
But sometimes it, I mean, he's the vice president of the United States, but he does seem to really enjoy trolling on Twitter.
He opened a Blue Sky account to troll the liberals there.
It just seems a little bit beneath the office.
I get that Trump succeeded, but Trump is a very singular politician.
In any event, a Democratic partisan named Brianstein, Krasenstein, went on to axe.
I'm only noting Brighton Krasenstein's post because J.D. Vance replied to it.
And Brian Krasenstein said in early September about the initial strike on a Venezuelan vote, quote, killing the citizens of another country who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.
I think he said that in response to J.D. Vance posting the video.
And in response, J.D. Vance replied, I don't give a shit what you call it.
Now, all right, that was J.D. Vance's reply.
Again, I think he's trying to, he sees what worked for Trump.
He's trying to replicate that.
This is not ever how J.D. Vance comported himself, but he does now.
He wants to be the heir to the Mogger movement.
I understand that.
But Rand Paul responded to J.D. Vance.
That obviously offends Rand Paul.
Rand Paul has been defending the right-of-due process, the need to comply with basic norms when we go around the world killing people.
The fact that we should produce evidence for it before we just blow people up.
And he said, quote, JD, quote, I don't give a shit.
Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is, quote, the highest and best use of the military.
Did he ever read to kill a mockingbird?
Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation?
What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.
And the U.S. Coast Guard and other parts of the U.S. military that project force do interdict votes that they suspect carrying drugs, and they enter the boat and they try and see whether or not there's drugs on there.
And if there are drugs on there, they arrest the people and bring them to a prison and put them on trial and have the evidence, the testimony of what they found in the boat, who was on the boat, and then those people get convicted and go to prison.
Why do we suddenly change that and just start blowing boats up randomly without having any idea who's on them?
Also, Rand Paul has made clear that he opposes tariffs.
And we covered tariffs and the fact that it was a view of the left for a long time that tariffs are needed to undermine the excesses of free trade.
But for conservatives, especially more libertarian economic conservatives like Rand Paul, tariffs and protectionism are horrible.
They believe in the ability of countries to just trade freely.
And so he's been a vocal opponent of Trump's tariff policy, and he joined with various Democrats like Ron Wyden and Chuck Schumer and Tim Kane to introduce bipartisan legislation to reveal to repeal the tariffs and restore congressional Authority over trade, which really had as its main goal the idea that the president can't just set tariff policies.
That's something that has to be done by Congress.
It's a balance of power argument.
That again, Rand Paul was constantly pushing as a way to limit the power of people like Barack Obama and Joe Biden when they were president as well.
His crime is that he's now extending that consistent critique in the same way to Donald Trump.
Thomas Massey has been a target of Trump for even longer than Rand Paul has.
The first time he ever attacked him, at least in this presidency was back in March.
So barely, not even two months after Trump got inaugurated, he went on to true social and he said this, using those scare quotes again, Congressman.
As though he's not really a congressman, he's something else.
Congressman Thomas Massey voted to delay the debt ceiling bill from the Biden administration to the Trump administration without getting anything for this horrendously stupid move.
When Republicans could have gotten everything they wanted, he additionally voted to delay the current budget disaster from the Biden administration, the Trump administration.
I was running for office at the time, doing my thing.
When I heard about this, it was quite simply hard to believe, a catastrophic mistake.
Now, on virtually on every other issue, he's a very simple no.
He can't even approve a continued resolution when he approved that many times during his career as a congressman.
Tom Massey is a grandstander in all caps.
And the great people of Kentucky are going to be watching a very interesting primary in the not too distant future, clearly threatening Thomas Massey with a primary challenge.
And again, continual resolutions are the ones that just say, you know what, just keep the government going until we figure things out, just keep spending where it is.
This is something Republicans hated when Democrats controlled the Congress.
They thought continuing resolutions were awful because they just kept government spending at the level they were at.
So of course, someone like Tom Massey who's a hawk on deficit spending and the debt, and Rand Paul are going to oppose anything that keeps Washington spending at its current trajectory.
The idea that that gets you kicked out of the conservative movement is bizarre.
But what Thomas Massey really does is oppose Trump's foreign policy, especially when it comes to Israel, something that has become very sacred to Donald Trump.
In June, Thomas Massey went on Tucker Carlson's program.
He's been on our program many times as well, talking about these similar things, and he said something that was quite remarkable for a member of Congress to report and admit regarding Israel, and it had a lot of repercussions.
And here's what he said.
Everybody but me has an APAC person.
It's like your babysitter, your APAC babysitter, who is always talking to you for APAC.
They're probably a constituent in your district, but they are firmly embedded in APAC.
And every member has something like this?
That's how it works on the Republican side.
And when they come to DC, you go have lunch with them.
And they've got your cell number and you have conversations with them.
That's absolutely crazy.
I've had four members of Congress say, I'll talk to my APAC person.
And it's clearly what we call them my APAC guy.
I'll talk to my APEC guy and see if I can get him to dial those ads back.
Why have I never heard this before?
Why would they want to tell their constituents that they've basically got a buddy system with somebody who's representing a foreign country?
It doesn't benefit the congressman for people to know that, so they're not going to tell you that.
So I guess you can argue, oh no, it's just a massive coincidence that the Republican Donald Trump and his extremely fanatically pro-Israel billionaire donors have decided to target for destruction and remove from Congress just so happens to be the person who has been saying things like this about Israel for quite a while now.
Just a few days before Donald Trump bombed Iran with Israel and for Israel, Massey went on to act, so this was June 16th and said this quote This is not our war.
But even if it were, Congress must decide such matters.
According to our Constitution, I'm introducing a bipartisan war powers resolution tomorrow to prohibit our involvement.
I invite all members of Congress to co-sponsor this resolution.
I mean, the idea that we shouldn't go bomb Iran for Israel seems like pretty America first to me, as I've always understood it.
And as I've heard Donald Trump defend it.
And for the crime of insisting on adherence to what we're supposed to be the principles of this movement, he's now being targeted by Trump basically for supporting America first.
And he said Trump is siding with people like Lindsay Graham, who are, at least as I've always understood it and heard it, the very antithesis of America First.
I think it says a lot about the Trump administration, who they regard as their enemies.
A few days after bombing Iran, ignoring what Massey said, Trump went to true social and again escalated his attack on Massey.
He said, quote, Congressman Thomas Massey, no uh scare quotes this time.
Congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky is not MAGA, even though he likes to say he is.
Actually, MAGA doesn't even want him, doesn't know him, and doesn't respect him.
He is a negative force who almost always votes no.
No matter how good something may be, he's a simple-minded grandstander who thinks it's good politics for Iran to have the highest level nuclear weapon while at the same time yelling death to America at every chance they get.
Iran has killed and maimed thousands of Americans and even took over the American embassy in Tehran under the Carter administration.
We had a spectacular military success yesterday, taking the bomb right out of their hands, and they would use it if they could.
But as usual, and despite all the praise and accolades received, this lightweight congressman is against what was so brilliantly achieved last night in Iran.
Massey is weak and effective and votes no on virtually everything put before him.
He's Rand Paul Jr.
No matter how good something may be, MAGA should drop this pathetic loser, Tom Massey, like the plague.
The good news is that we have a wonderful American patriot running against him in the Republican Party, and I'll be out in Kentucky campaigning really hard.
MAGA is not about lazy grandstanding nonproductive politicians, of which Thomas Massey is definitely one.
Okay, that was for opposing the bombing of Iran for Israel in the response Trump wrote about how Iran took hostages, chant death to America, goes getting the bomb, would be used the bomb.
These are all talking points right out of the Netanyahu government.
And the other thing I just want to say quickly is it was really bizarre for me to watch this.
I noticed this, that Thomas Massey used to be pretty popular among conservatives.
I said that the other day in a bunch of the most the blindest Trump supporters who just change their views like people change their underwear one day to the next based on what they need to believe to support Trump and cheer Trump and defend Trump were saying, oh, that's so stupid.
Thomas Massey supported Ron DeSantis.
It's true.
He did support Ron DeSantis.
I don't think he likes Trump personally.
And the thing is, so many of the people with the greatest power in MAGA also supported Ron DeSantis and not Donald Trump.
So it's hardly an excuse.
I say Thomas Massey is popular among America first because he, on foreign policy, is one of the most vocal America first advocates.
It's that he's fallen out of favor with Trump and his followers, his blindest followers, because Trump deviated from that America first policy while Thomas Massey stayed there.
June 26th, this was right around the time Trump announced that.
The Daily Collar says exclusive AIPAC is seeking to out out to out, seeking out challengers to unseat Representative Thomas Massey.
So as usual, APAC and Trump completely aligned.
Politico, five days later reported on the creation and funding of a new anti-Massey pack.
And here are the people funding it.
GOP megadonor Paul Singer and Paul Singer hated Trump.
Paul Singer is the financier of the Washington Beacon.
The Washington Beacon is a very neoconservative outlet.
They were the first to basically hire Christopher Steele for the steel dossier.
They wanted to destroy Trump.
Paul Singer hates Trump, hated Trump.
And yet Paul Singer is funding the anti-Massey PAC, not because he's angry that he voted against a big beautiful bill, but because he's critical of Israel.
This is the real power behind it.
GOP mega donor Paul Singer was the latest donor to a super PAC seeking to Alice Representative Thomas Massey last month, according to a filing submitted to the FEC on Thursday.
The group, MAGA Kentucky, raised $2 million between its launch in late June and the end of the month.
1 million from Singer, 250,000 from hedge fund manager John Paulson, who's also a hardcore pro-Israel billionaire.
$750,000 from Preserve America PAC, a super PAC tied to Miriam Adelson.
Can you believe that Mary Middleseam?
Who Donald Trump just said, he asked her, Do you love Israel more or America war?
And she wouldn't answer.
Has the audacity to name her PAC Preserve America, as if that's actually her agenda?
Anyone confused about why Miriam Madelson wants to remove Tom Massey from Congress, given that she's a one-issue person in that issue is Israel?
That's what is going on here.
Thomas Massey is also a major force behind resolutions that would compel the release of the Epstein files, something Trump has made very clear.
He is alarmed by to the point that he called these documents a hoax, knowing that one day they might get released and he wants to convince people ahead of time that somehow Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went in there and fiddled with the documents and put his name in or the name of other people he likes in there.
I mean, who believes that?
Does anyone really believe that?
That Biden and and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fabricated parts of their Epstein files but never released it.
So Thomas Massey is demanding their release of the Epstein files.
That's another reason that Trump hates him.
And then last night, Ron Paul went on to his podcast, the Liberty Report, and he talked for about 30 minutes about the fact that Trump is now threatening and trying to remove from Congress Congressman Massey and also his son, the Senator from Kentucky Rand Paul.
And here's part of what Ron Paul said.
There's two coup groups of even Republicans, you know, on foreign policy.
You know, uh, there's uh there's one group that says it's uh, you know, we should be non-interventionists and and not start war and end wars.
That was a pretty clear statement.
And now now they're saying, well, the people who vote that way, they're bad people.
So if if the pronouncements in the uh campaign was that we're gonna start less war and end bad wars, and then you always vote that way and vote against the spending for it, well, why should that person, like uh no, everybody, it's not hard to guess who I'm talking about.
You know, Thomas, Thomas Massey is getting ripped off to the platform than uh some others.
So uh he's but now the uh president is uh is not just you know being polite and picking a candidate and saying we're the good guys and go on.
Uh but he is now really hot under the collar about Thomas Massey, and he's out raising money.
So what does he need?
He needs support.
So he needs a good strong senator.
You know, if we're gonna take on popular uh members of Congress who are voting against war, we need a real supporter of the uh non-interventionist foreign policy, of which was talked about in the campaign.
And guess what?
He came up with a name.
He's very well known.
He's capable of winning uh winning elections and uh and and and raising funds.
His name is Lindsay Graham, and that's gonna be the solution to try to get rid of uh Thomas Massey.
So I I think that's a sad story, and uh I think that uh he comes up with the issue of throwing around terms.
Who are the re rhinos?
Well, I'd like to think that the term doesn't make a lot of sense because I divide them up into people who who believe in non-intervention and non-violence and a real peaceful approach uh to political things, and uh just follow the Constitution, too.
It is so ironic that Trump uses this term rhino as his primary term of malign people, which is Republican name only, kind of a Republican who's not really loyal to the party.
When Trump's whole political career, 2016 was launched based on running in against and condemning the Republican Party, Bush Cheney, foreign policy, Reagan economics, the entire Republican establishment.
Donald Trump would donate money to Democratic candidates.
He would vote for Democratic candidates.
He's not like he's some lifelong blue buttons Republican.
That's what makes it so bizarre is that he has transformed the idea of what it means to be a member of the Republican Party in Congress to not one who supports the principles that Trump himself defined his movement, but one that just supports Trump no matter what he does, including when he sides with and takes orders from the Miriam Middleseens of the world.
And he really is out there raising funds for Lindsey Graham here from the Hill yesterday, Trump to attend a Lindsey Graham fundraiser in the first midterm campaign appearance, his very first appearance that Trump's doing to raise money for the midterms, and he decides to go and raise money for Lindsay Graham, not to defeat a Democrat, but to defeat a Republican primary challenger.
And of course, Lindsay Graham has been going around constantly demanding that Trump continue to fund the war in Ukraine.
He of course supports regime change in Venezuela, he supports the bombing of Iran.
So he is aligned with Trump.
But I think if you're a Trump supporter, if you're a believer in MAGA, you should ask yourself why is it that Donald Trump's main enemies in the Republican Party are the people who are most against intervention and regime change wars and censorship?
Denouncing Trump's various censorship policies, and yet Trump's most beloved members of Congress are people like Marco Rubio who he elevated to someone of almost unlimited power when it comes to foreign policy, who's a lifelong neocon who ran against Trump, accusing Trump of being a Russian agent when it comes to foreign policy.
And people like Lindsay Graham, who, if you asked even a year ago, MAGA, self-identified MAGA supporters, who is the Republican member of the Senate who's most anathema to your agenda, they would say, oh, Lindsay Graham, clearly.
And now Trump is out there raising funds for Lindsay Graham while to exp while trying to expel working in tandem with AIPAC, Tom Massey from the Congress, and Rand Paul from the Senate.
I could spend a telethon of a show for the next seven days without stopping, trying to show you what the Trump administration is.
I probably couldn't do a better job of conveying it more clearly, more powerfully, more precisely than Trump's actions with regard to these politicians.
Thank you.
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Ken Vogel is an investigative journalist who, as well as any reporter in the country, covers the confluence of money politics and influence.
He does that now for the Washington Bureau of the New York Times.
He previously reported from Politico as their founding chief investigative reporter, where in both places, I think he did more than any other reporter to bring to light the corruption that the country now knows about involving Hunter Biden and Joe Biden's role in Ukraine and Barisma.
But he's also uncovered many other uh important corruption stories as well, both in his reporting, but also as the author of several books, including his most recent, just out, Devil's Advocate how Washington lobbyists get rich, enabling dictators, oligarchs, and arms dealers.
His reporting has been all over the place, as you would expect.
We talked about it many times on the show, and we're delighted to welcome him on our show as well.
Can I believe this is your debut appearance on System Update?
We usually have a cake and some uh d'oeuvres when that's the case.
We neglected to do so tonight, so I apologize, but it's great to see you.
Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.
I'll cash in my chits for the cake and hors d'oeuvres later, but uh it's it's great to be with you.
I'm a fan of the show, and I appreciate you having me.
Thank you.
I appreciate that.
All right, let's talk about the book.
Um I picked it up, you know, I am obviously very uh familiar with the reporting that you do, the perspective from which you do it, the investigative techniques and targets you have.
We've covered your work many times on our show before.
And I wasn't sure whether this book was going to be just a rehash of the reporting that you've done, or if it was going to be not just new reporting, but also kind of an important addition to how we understand corruption.
So let me ask you, in your own words.
There's definitely new reporting here.
Uh in fact, I would say, like if you could describe that way, like the main character of the book or one of the main characters of the book with Grudy Giuliani and Hunter Biden is someone probably people don't know, and they will know after reading your book.
We're going to talk about him in a second.
But what did you see as the kind of purpose of the book beyond the daily reporting that you do?
Yeah, I mean, as you alluded to, there were a number of scandals in in US politics that had been emerging, not from domestic money and politics, the subject of your last uh segment, which is sort of where my sweet spot had been for many years, but from foreign money in politics.
So I'm talking about the Russia investigation, but you know, uh, the Mueller investigation, I'm talking about Hunter Biden's work, uh, you know, with Barisman and other places.
I'm talking about the Clinton Foundation.
Uh, and so, you know, I started to look at this phenomenon and try to figure out what was going on here.
And the more that I looked at these seemingly disparate stories, the more I saw a common thread, which was that in a lot of parts of the world, uh, the developing world, the former Soviet world, parts of the Middle East and Africa, uh, there's this there's this sort of mindset that the way that you get what you want from government,
either something positive, government assets or government funding or something uh, you know, that's something where you're seeking the omish, you're trying to stay out of the government's crosshairs, is to throw money at the people in power, if not the people directly in power, their family or their associates.
And I think there was this conceit, uh, certainly that I had, and I think that a lot of people in the United States have, that we're different from that.
We have all these rules and laws embedded in the Constitution.
There's the emoluments clause, there's these conflict of interest laws, ethics laws, we have lobbying disclosure, campaign finance disclosure that prevent that type of thing from happening.
And what I found as I sort of pieced together some of these scandals and did deeper reporting was that, oh no, we're we we very much have that a system that allows for that type of mindset to play out, you know, in a real way.
Certainly there's the perception among these foreign interests that they are getting something when they throw money at a Hunter Biden or Ruby Giuliani or the Trump kids and their various crypto and real estate ventures.
But it's more than that.
It actually does affect the the exercise of US foreign policy, US international trade policy, economic policy around the world in a way that makes us not so different from a lot of these other countries that I think we have a tendency to sort of like look down our noses at.
You know, the title of your book illustrates this point, but anyone who's familiar with your work uh uh uh already knows this, which is you know, you the the book title has both Hunter Biden and Rudy Giuliani, illustrating the fact that you are pretty much you just I think ignore who the beneficiary is or who the party prejudiced by your disclosures are in terms of Republican Democrat left versus right, and you really just try and do journalism as it's intended to do.
And I want to ask about that a little bit in just a second.
But um, I want to focus for a minute on the Trump movement on the Trump presidency for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it's the predominant faction now.
When Donald Trump ran in 2016, he ran on this idea that DC is a swamp, not a democratic or a left-wing swamp, but a bipartisan swamp that essentially it's just shaped by and governs for the people who are the money of interest at the expense of everybody else.
That was central to his appeal to his argument about what he wanted to change.
And on top of that, you have this very aggressive nationalism that defines Trump's political identity and his political movement, to the point that, you know, a lot of times now, even if a person who naturalized in the United States, you know, criticizes Donald Trump, there's this reaction like, you're a foreigner.
Who are you to come and tell us how our politics should be?
There's very much a lot of hostility.
Anytime, you know, foreign, overtly foreign voices trying to shape our politics, unless it's President Bukele of El Salvador, in which case we should copy him, but he's kind of like accepting that proves the rule.
And so you have this nationalism combined with this, you know, in vain against the swamp, both of which would seem like they'd be extremely hostile to influence of foreign money, of non-American uh oligarchs,
non-American uh money, and yet, you know, every week there's a new story about the Trump family being in bed with various foreign interests about the Trump administration, you know, doing deals that that let foreigners shape us, accepting a plane from Cotter, um, you know, a multi-hundred billion dollar plane as the new presidential plane.
Is it do you find these two things kind of at odds or irreconcilable?
And and if if so, what do you think explains how Pervasive it continues to be.
Yeah, that's an interesting frame.
And I do think there's an element of tension or conflict there.
But I think it can be explained by the fact that like Trump was, in fact, an outsider.
I mean, it's it's easy to forget now where he is, as you put it, like dominating our politics, not just in the US, but globally.
But when he came into office in Washington, like there are a lot of, I mean, the majority of the sort of traditional power centers, the permanent professional political class in Washington had really turned up its nose at him and wanted nothing to do with him, even when he came into power.
And so it created this vacuum where there were new people who maybe had been trying to establish themselves as gatekeepers and part of the swamp who had been unable to do so, but were able to uh sort of get a foot in the door by virtue of their connection, sometimes quite peripheral to Trump.
Uh, and then there was also this preference that he had and continues to have to this day for people from the business world who he regarded strangely as like not part of the swamp, even though, as we know, and as you lay out as a like a underlying theme of your show, you know, there's not a whole lot of difference between the power centers in Wall Street and Washington, uh, you know, now increasingly Silicon Valley, you could put into that category as well.
And so Trump had relied on these people who he knew from his New York real estate days, you know, and and who we knew from his family from the beginning uh to sort of exercise to exercise not just like uh policy help shape policy, but exercise like foreign policy, US um, US political might around the world.
So I'm thinking of folks like Jared Kusher, of course, you know, had come out of uh New York real estate where he had done business with the Qataris.
They basically threw him a lifeline on one of his uh sort of landmark troubled properties, 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
I'm thinking now about Steve Whitkoff.
And and look, I mean, you know, Witkoff and Kushra actually deserve some credit here.
Uh, you know, Kusher from the first administration negotiating the Abraham Accords and uh Kushner and Whitkoff this time for negotiating the Gaza Israel ceasefire.
And, you know, yet still, like there is, I think, rightfully attention on this confluence of their business interests with what they're doing.
So Witkoff and uh and Kushner were asked about this actually on 60 Minutes the other night uh about the way that their work and Middle East diplomacy was implicating their private business interests.
And Kushner said, look, this is a strength.
We don't see this as a weakness.
It's experience.
Some people call it a conflict of interest.
We call it experience.
Exactly.
And that I mean, that's very much the Trump worldview.
And here you actually see a situation where maybe it did redound to the benefit of the United States.
But certainly I don't, I think it's a lot harder to argue that Trump accepting a plane from uh from Cutter or you know, the bailout in Argentina or whatever, that these other things are in the interest of the US or the world.
They very much do to your question, seem sort of contrary to both the drain the swamp ethos and the America First uh sort of mantra that that really are the you know underlying um sort of tenants of his at least initial entry into politics.
Absolutely.
Uh let me ask you along those lines about Rudy Giuliani, who uh is a major focal point of the book, I think with very good reason.
You know, it's to me, Giuliani is such an interesting figure in this regard because he was elected to the mayorality in New York as a Republican, a very democratic city elected him, largely on the strength of his reputation as this kind of you know, hallmark and paragon of probity.
He was a prosecutor, stood up to mafia and wall street fraudsters, you know, somebody who just really couldn't stand corruption, would put people in jail no matter how powerful they were.
That was the branding that that led him to become New York mayor.
And of course, he turned into a hero after 9-11, like probably the person who benefited most from 9-11 politically was really Giuliani, because of how he handled it, because of his presence as New York mayor.
And he had this, you know, sterling reputation that he began to monetize very, very aggressively, became a very wealthy person as a result of that.
Even so, I think it took people a while to realize it because of the buildup of this branding.
That in so many ways, and I think it's part of the reason why you put his name in the title of the book.
He kind of at some point became morphed into kind of the face of the DC of DC swamp corruption, Of having dealings with foreign influence uh rings or foreign leaders or foreign groups to peddle influence in Washington.
What do you think happened that propelled him on that trajectory?
And why do you find him such an important representation of what you're writing about?
Well, two things I think propelled him on the trajectory.
Number one is like he had uh he had financial problems.
He was, you know, despite the fact that he was collecting these huge paydays from overseas, he had a very expensive lifestyle.
He uh got embroiled in a very expensive and bitter divorce proceedings with his second wife.
Uh and and he was he was sort of out of money.
And at the same time, his his uh sort of relevance, his, you know, his fame was diminishing the further and further we got from 9-11.
So he's becoming sort of a marginal figure.
And what happened that sort of helped reverse at least temporarily both those trajectories was Donald Trump, with whom he had this long relationship going back to their time together uh in this sort of like 1980s uh tabloid go-go uh New York uh milieu.
And he was a very early supporter of Trump.
He stuck with him even when, as I was alluding to in the, you know, and uh earlier, uh, a lot of people turned their backs on him as he became like increasingly controversial headed into the election, and he thought that he was gonna become Secretary of State.
I mean, he openly campaigned for it.
And he said that similar to what Kushner and Whitkoff said, he said that his experience working for sometimes these unsavory foreign regimes was actually a strength because he knew how the world worked and he was familiar with geopolitics.
Well, he didn't get it, partly because some of the more legacy people around Trump, including uh Chris Christie, who was involved in the first transition, thought that his his foreign work would actually be a liability and would prevent him from getting confirmed by the Senate.
So what did he do?
He sort of refashioned his role as like a shadow secretary of state, where he continued to reap these uh even larger paydays because everyone knew he everyone around the world knew he had the ear of the president of the United States.
Uh, and at the same time, he was whispering in Trump's ear about these tricky foreign policy issues that did implicate his clients or his business partners around the world.
And that allowed him for a time to be both relevant and to renew his earning power.
Of course, it ended disastrously even before uh January 6th, and the way that that caused legal uh legal liability for him, it backfired in the form of the first impeachment of Trump when he was whispering in Trump's ear about Ukraine, where he was doing business and trying to do business and getting Trump to exert pressure on Zelensky to try to unearth dirt about Hunter Biden and the Bidens uh in a way that again backfired spectacularly.
So Rudy, I thought it was an interesting character because of his role in sort of pioneering this type of shadow foreign policy during the first Trump administration.
And even now he's still doing a little bit of it, even as he is diminished, uh, but um, but but still uh, you know, an influential character, at least during the first Trump administration that I thought was worth putting some spotlight on.
Yeah, you know, for me, it's just such a uh kind of a lesson about the endless capacity of human beings to fall prey to greed.
I mean, the fact that he was so widely admired and could have built a very good life, you know, of admiration and success based on that, but instead became so addicted to, you know, more and more wealth and consumption as his primary source of self-esteem, to the point where he fell prey to you know all the worst elements in Washington.
Um and it kind of is a uh a lesson about Washington as well, to the point where he's now basically fighting off a bankruptcy court and begging to keep a few of his World Series rings that and maybe like a car.
It's such a sad story, but kind of a testament to the swamp that that Trump was talking about, but himself seems to have fallen prey to.
Um let me ask you about Hunter Biden, uh, whose name is also in the title.
And, you know, as I said in in the intro, I think you did probably more than any other reporter to bring to light Hunter Biden's very shady dealings with Barisma and Ukraine and just the whole, you know, kind of uh uh smoke around around Hunter Biden.
I think a lot of that came from from your reporting.
I know you got a lot of criticism for that, especially among liberals, and their argument was basically look, in the scheme of corruption and the scheme of what Trump world is doing and the scheme of how K Street works, these are very small potatoes.
Like you're talking about $50,000 a month contract.
It doesn't seem like the Ukrainians or barisma got much out of it.
You know, they were probably paying up for influence, but you know, by by devoting so much time and energy to it, and you're still doing it by by featuring it in your book, centralizing in your book, you're giving this kind of enormous weight to a story that at the end of the day is kind of trivial.
That's not my view.
It's just a view that I hear express quite a bit for people who are angry about the reporting you did exposing the Biden family.
What is your response to that?
Why do you see why did you consider that a story that merited so much journalistic attention?
Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, uh, it is true that he was not successful in some of the foreign influence campaigns that he endeavored.
Some of them, by the way, he was, and I would push back a little bit on Barisma.
I think Barisma at one point did kind of get what they wanted from bringing on him and the people around him.
It wasn't just him.
I mean, he helped recruit a uh PR firm and a lobbying firm that then recruited a lawyer who were successful in negotiating settlements to some of the investigations that were hanging over Barisma and the oligarch owners.
So I think I know that people around Barisma do believe they got their money's worth.
But it but it's more than that, Glenn.
Uh, you know, he was trying.
I mean, it he it wasn't for like lack of effort that the amounts that he was collecting were smaller.
And by the way, they weren't that small.
I mean, he he made more than 10 million dollars from foreign interest.
So uh, you know, it's it's one thing for liberals to say, well, that's less than the than what the Trumps made, but it's certainly a significant amount of money.
And also I should say, like, you know, some of the instances that we looked at, uh, first of all, there's a pattern that I think was disturbing that I think really gets at the heart of uh what I what I write about here, which is that he was going around the world looking for clients or business partners who were in the crosshairs of the US government,
and not just in the crosshairs of the US government, but particularly in the crosshairs of anti-corruption initiatives that were being pushed by the US government and by his father specifically, when his father was vice president.
So, you know, hearkening back to that mindset that I was talking about in some of these places, and some of the certainly in the in the post-communist world, like that is something that the that like these business partners or clients would hire him because they apply the sort of way that politics works, the pay-to-play sort of political techniques that they use in their own countries, and they think, well, look, Joe Biden and the US government is coming after us for corruption.
We can just hire his son, and and and that will like help us alleviate this problem.
And so, you know, whether it did or not, uh, again, in the case of Baris might think that it sort of did help, but um, there are other cases where it might not have, it certainly was undermining the exercise of like a an important principle, you know, certainly in the minds of his father of U.S. foreign policy.
And then on the amounts, I should just say that like there's another example of this in Romania that I write about a good bit in the book, and that was the subject of an excerpt from the book in the New York Times, where Hunter Biden was trying to help this uh Romanian oligarch get out of trouble, a corrupt land deal that he was being prosecuted for.
And one of the things that Hunter Biden tried to do is bring in his Chinese business partners uh and get them to invest 300 to 500 million dollars in this land, and that Hunter Biden would be a partner in the resulting joint venture.
So you want to sort of scoff at like, oh, it's $50,000 a month or it's only 10 million dollars overall.
500 million dollars is is not, you know, five if like if you swap the name like Hunter Biden for Donald J. Trump, you know, Donald Trump Jr. and and uh put forth that fact pattern with trying to recruit the Chinese, no less to invest 500 million dollars in a uh project in Romania that by the way also abutted the the land on which the U.S. embassy in Bucharest sat, I think liberal heads would explode everywhere.
Especially if there were documents floating around about Chinese business deals that suggested that perhaps Donald Trump himself might be a participant in the profit sharing of of some of these deals that Hunter Biden was pursuing, um, as was the case with these these uh laptop documents.
Um, let me ask you, uh most of the reviews that I've seen about your book uh have been very, very positive, especially in praise of the kind of new reporting that you've done.
It's very forensic, it's very detailed, it's very document-driven, which is I think the best kind of reporting.
One of the critiques I've seen, I don't remember where, I think it might have actually been in the New York Times review of your book, uh, which they you know assigned not to a staff reporter or to a book reviewer on the New York Times staff, but to an outside, I think he's a professor.
Uh Essentially said that one of the critiques of the book was that you are very adept at highlighting, and this goes to what you were just saying about Hunter Biden, uh, and I think even to Rudy Giuliani to some extent as well, which is that you're definitely adept at highlighting attempts to influence government policy,
namely paying people on the periphery, paying family members of important politicians or even presidents, trying to worm your way into these circles with money in order to then have them influence policy on your behalf or for you to even do it yourself.
But that it's very difficult to demonstrate most of the time.
You're able to sometimes, but most of the time you're it's difficult to demonstrate that this actually worked, that kind of the machinery of US foreign policy is so multifaceted, so complex, so multi-layered, diffuse among so many different groups, that a lot of the time, you know, you just have a bunch of grifters uh kind of walking around these power circles,
they've wormed their way into there and they exaggerate wildly their ability to influence things, including the main character character of your book, um, who oftentimes love to boast of what he was able to do, but you know, it's very questionable whether or not he did.
How much of that is valid?
Namely that there's a lot of just grifting and con artistry going on, but it's not really affecting foreign policy versus your ability to actually connect policy to this these payments.
Yeah, I think there's there's two sort of critiques there, both of which like have some validity.
One is like there are grifters who are exaggerating their influence and and reaping sometimes huge paydays by so doing, by suggesting that they're doing more than they actually are or than they actually can do.
And that's that's certainly a thing.
And and it's particularly a thing in lobbying, and even more so in foreign lobbying, because it is so difficult to sort of figure out who is actually, you know, what is the the definitive cause of a given action?
And so, you know, that's that's the second point of like proving that uh cause and effect, which is always very difficult.
That's always the case with um, you know, with this type of reporting.
And, you know, even times when people are like, oh, you got it, like uh, you know, a story that I wrote about a woman who was seeking a pardon for her son from Trump, gave a million dollars to the Trump super PAC, went to a fundraiser, you know, whispered in Trump's ear about her son's plight, got the pardon, like it's also possible that there were other mitigating factors that played into that, and that it wasn't just the the you know, the million-dollar donation.
So, like when it comes to foreign lobbying, you know, is it can we definitively say that Trump reversed his position on Nippon Steel buying US steel because Nippon Steel and the, you know, the Japanese government hired one of his top fundraisers to lobby him.
No, we can't say that.
Did he reverse his position on TikTok, the TikTok ban uh because one of the top investors in TikTok was one of his uh one of his biggest donors, and also because Kellyanne Conway and other people around uh around him had been hired by TikTok to sort of um effectuate this result, or that these tariff exemptions came because uh the countries or uh foreign companies that uh were going to be affected by these tariffs, hire people around Trump to uh to lobby for them.
No, we can't definitively say it, but I don't think that we should ignore uh the possibility that these played a role in.
I think it is a worthy journalistic endeavor to try to show, even if it's a nuanced answer, to try to figure out the degree to which this type of influence peddling does affect decision making.
Yeah, I mean, I think the TikTok example is so good, just for people who don't aren't familiar with it, and you write about it a lot in your book, which is you know, Trump was the original sponsor of the drive to ban TikTok in 2020 in his first administration, claiming it was too dangerous to allow China to influence uh America's youth, contaminate the precious minds of Americans' young people.
And he was the primary you know, advocate for a ban of TikTok.
And then suddenly in 2024, he has this billionaire donor who's a one of the biggest shareholders in TikTok, an incredibly valuable company, Jeffrey S. Who goes to the White House, donates a huge amount of money to Trump's campaign, and then you know, obviously has a huge interest in not having TikTok banned and having the status quo reserved, and suddenly Trump comes out and says, I'm the savior of TikTok.
I'm opposed to the ban that that Biden wants.
And you know, you'll never be able to answer the question.
It's kind of like, why did we invade Iraq?
Like, was it because Jeffrey Yass donated money?
Was it because Trump understood that young people love TikTok and don't want it closed?
And by saying I'm the savior of TikTok, you could get all of young people's votes.
Maybe it was a mixture of things.
But as you say, it's important that we know who's spending money to try and influence policy, even if you can't ultimately uh prove it because it sheds light on at the very least how people perceive the system is working.
Um ask you, uh the uh aspect of uh I think this is one of the things I I got most from uh a lot of the parts of your book that I really focused on.
Sometimes I thought about this in the past, but it's been a while.
One thing that drives me crazy is every time we sell a new war, you know, the bipartisan class is able to say, oh, we're going to do it because we want to stand up to tyranny and authoritarianism and defend democracy.
That's our argument for why we liberated Iraq, why we overthrew Gaddafi, why we're on Ukraine side against Putin, why we want to go overthrow Maduro and Venezuela, always this idea that, oh, you know, we're the good guys, we love democracy, we we combat tyranny wherever we find it.
And of course, some of our closest and most important allies, in fact, the ones Trump loves most, the ones that American presidents in the past have loved most, have been the most savage dictatorships in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all over the world.
We not only support them, but we often install them, and this cognitive dissonance is so clear.
And one of the ways that it also is so clear is by this point that I think appears continuously throughout your book, that some of Washington's most respected operatives so often are making huge amounts of money defending the most despicable primitive regimes are the people who are trying to get into power or trying to protect themselves from repercussions of their crimes.
Tony Blair is a great example of somebody who got very rich, you know, representing and serving as a consultant for some of the worst regimes on the planet.
You had Lanny Davis, the kind of Klitney, a lawyer who did the same.
And obviously, Giuliani did as well.
How common is that practice?
Like, how many people in Washington are enriching themselves by defending basically the world's worst people?
Yeah, I mean, it's quite common, and it's there's actually like uh an interesting uh relationship, like correlation between like how bad, how bloodstained the reputation of the client and how much money the well-connected Americans can charge them.
I've heard it called like the dictator's premium, the oligarchs premium.
And you know, they're well aware of this.
They, the Americans and they, the, you know, the foreign clients.
And the reason is obviously these the the worse the reputation, uh the more brutal you are, the more uh to your own constituents, the more anathema are you are to like U.S. ideals about democracy and human rights and freedom of expression, freedom of religion, the more you kind of need the U.S., the more you need to demonstrate to the US, oh, but I'm I'm like the bulwark against whatever.
It's if it's the 80s and nine, early 90s, I'm the bulwark against communism in Africa or the Philippines if you're Fernand Marcos.
And now, if you're Saudi Arabia and you know, you've uh US intelligence has found that you've uh chopped up a uh US-based journalist, you have to show.
You have to do more to show.
Like I we are actually uh, you know, doing something important.
We're an important US ally in this unstable region, and we are able to like hire top uh, you know, top consulting firms and PR firms and lobbyists to make that case, but it's gonna cost us a lot more because there is the reputational risk that comes with being associated with them.
And this is all sort of part of the bargain.
It's very much a part of the way that the Washington professional class, particularly in this foreign influence space, sort of sees the world and gets rich off of this dynamic.
Just a couple more questions.
Uh one of the things about your book that I think is super interesting is, you know, it's not immediately obvious that this should be the way things work in the United States, or that even you would expect it to be.
We do do a lot to restrict influence of foreign money in our politics.
I mean, we don't allow non-citizens to donate to political candidates, for example.
If they try, it's considered an illegal uh fundraising uh activity.
Members of uh, you know, they the New York Post just tried to highlight that Zeran Mandani actually accepted some donations from foreigners, meaning somebody went to his website and donated and and they found that, you know, it's not like he solicited them, but you know, that is a prohibition, and not just a legal prohibition, but kind of a ethos, like, no, Americans should be, you know, our money should be defining American politics.
Well, only we should be able to support our politicians.
This is a very common practice in most countries that they try and exclude foreign influence.
And you know, on the other hand, you have this gigantic amount of cash just pouring into Washington with the very explicit and exclusive goal of manipulating American foreign policy for the benefit of these foreigners by injecting cash into the bank accounts of very influential politically influential people in Washington.
And you reference in one of your early answers that there is this kind of framework of laws, and your book goes uh into this quite a bit, like FARA, which gets a lot of attention when it comes to APAC, like why does an APAC have to lobby, you know, register as a foreign agent.
Um that's designed to bring transparency to it.
There are other legal frameworks that are designed to limit the influence of foreign money, and yet as your book, you know, so amply demonstrates, there's an avalanche of foreign money coming into the country.
Why what is it how can you talk a little bit about the history of these attempts to kind of limit it and why there's so many holes in that system?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, the foreign agents registration act, which you reference, is the main vehicle for this.
And uh you don't have to look a whole lot further than the legislative history to understand why it's uh why it's ineffective in so doing.
It dates from the 1930s, from the late 30s.
It was an effort to limit Nazi propaganda, or not limit it, but uh sort of reveal it.
Uh and it's and it's primarily a transparency mechanism that is intended to uh sort of show where this money is coming from, so that American citizens and American voters can sort of judge these messages and determine, okay, like I'm gonna put more weight in this because it's an authentic, you know, organic American message versus, oh, this is coming from well, quite literally in that case, Hitler's Hitler's Third Reich.
Um, and so, you know, it has been updated a little bit on the margins, but it's really just grossly inadequate and it was seldom enforced for many, many years.
Uh, and you know, it it saw an uptick in enforcement around the Mueller investigation, and in some cases, like over enforcement that revealed the weaknesses of it.
Like there were a number of cases that were sort of Muller spillover cases that were brought that resulted in acquittals because the law was just sort of vague and it wasn't properly uh, it didn't really capture some of the activity that goes on in modern politics.
Additionally, there is this thing called the First Amendment that protects lobbying and protects speech.
And so uh there is um, you know, there is uh sort of a difficulty in going further than that.
And then even further, now under Trump, we have a decriminalizing of FARA, by the way, initiated by Pam Bondi, the attorney general as one of her first acts in office.
Pam Bondi herself, a former registered foreign agent for the state of Qatar, which she was working for Brian Ballard's law for uh lobbying firm.
This is a top lobbyist and fundraiser for Trump.
Uh so you see that if, you know, even if there was an effort to enforce FARA, which there isn't, you know, currently, at least in the criminal sense, the limitations of it.
And then further, you reference APAC.
FARA, you know, it doesn't, it's it's sort of, you know, there's ways to read it.
They would think like, hmm, maybe this would apply.
It speaks directly to if activities are directly or indirectly supervised, directed, controlled, finance or subsidized in whole or in part by a foreign principle.
While APAC argues, no, these are just Americans who happen to be sympathizers of or supporters of Israel who are giving their own money to candidates and are um, you know, are uh lobbying um, you know, the government on on behalf of their own feelings, uh, but it's not being directed by the Israeli government.
So right there, you see a potential, you know, I don't call it a loophole, but uh a way in which there is influence that is helping a foreign government that is not captured by this law.
Yeah, APAC's uh now actually an America First organization.
I don't know if you saw their rebranding recently, um, but it's very inspiring.
So let me just ask you this the last question.
Uh one of the things I've long admired about your reporting, and it's very evident in this book as well, is like I said earlier, I really do think you do reporting without even giving Thought to who it's helping or who it's hurting.
And it's very funny because whenever anybody talks about why they distrust journalists or just like journalism in the United States, they often say it's because journalists are really just partisan operatives, disguised as journalists.
They, you know, really are on one side or the other, but hide their actual allegiance.
But then you have journalists, and trust me, I empathize with this a great deal that if you do reporting one day that benefits one side, that the other side thinks, you know, you're doing something terribly wrong and evil, that you're obviously an operative for that one party, and then the next day you can wake up and you know, you do reporting one day on corruption by Joe Biden, and all the liberals hate you and think you're a covert MAGA operative, and the next day you do reporting on Ruby Giuliani, and all of MAGA thinks that you're, you know, some sort of flaming liberal.
And I've seen obviously the attacks on you along those lines.
And as I said, I recognize them very well from the text I've gotten as well.
And it is interesting because people always say, Oh, I do a Swiss journalist with report facts without regard to, but I don't think people, everyone says that they want.
I'm not really sure there are many people who actually do want that.
How have you kind of tried to navigate that?
I mean, of course, if you're a journalist, you have to be willing to take criticism.
Everybody likes to say, oh, it doesn't really affect me.
But you know, the internet being what it is, social media being, of course, you hear it.
We're social animals.
Of course, on some level it it enters our consciousness and you kind of have to fight not to let it influence you.
But how has that experience been for you?
This kind of whirlwind of accusations to wake up one day and hear that you're, you know, a far right fascist, Trump supporter, and the next day that you're a far left communist trying to take down Mago.
Like, how does that how have you navigated that as a journalist?
Yeah, I mean, I mostly try to tune it out, but uh, as you alluded to there, like it's, you know, we're people, and it's hard to uh, you know, it's hard to accept criticism.
And I think it's also like does a disservice because you know, when you talk about like the criticism actually of the New York Times book review of my book, like, you know, I say, like though there is some valid criticism critiques there, and there are ones that I've like tried to internalize.
And I think that it does serve journalists to be able to like hear from critics who have sort of good faith um arguments to make about like something that they missed or some framing that uh you know could have been different, doesn't really capture the whole situation.
And it's harder and harder to sort of filter out or or to like filter in, I guess, that type of good faith criticism when it's surrounded so much by this like cyclone of bad faith criticism that is like entirely intended just to shape your coverage or to scare you away.
And it's sometimes not even like scare you away from a particular line of reporting.
It's a sort of send a signal to your colleagues and colleagues at other media outlets, hey, like if you take a look at this, we're gonna come after you.
And I think particularly some of the criticisms that we saw sort of during the height of uh the Biden administration over like claims that things were Russian disinformation, or that uh, you know, you're somehow like being manipulated.
It makes it a lot harder to sort of hear the good faith criticism because I don't think that that is good faith criticism.
And I think that that's evidenced by the fact that it's largely sort of fallen away.
We don't hear too much about uh Russian disinformation in the same way as we did when when uh Joe Biden was in office and and uh you know, Democrats were using that as sort of a cudgel to try to shape uh, you know, media coverage.
Now, of course, Trump is using other cudgels and levers to do it in a way that is equally uh manipulative, but in some ways, like a little more clumsy, and maybe there is something to be said for like, you know, a lot of like journalists are sort of like culturally identified with uh institutions of the left, whether they be their, you know, universities or what have you, or where they live.
Um, and so maybe they are more susceptible to that type of um, you know, that the the that type of effort to uh work the refs when it comes from the left and are easy, it's easier to sort of shake it off when it comes from the right.
Um, either way, I do think it's it is sort of uh uh intentional and you know, sometimes frankly, like devious effort to shape media coverage in a way that just redounds to a particular partisan goal rather than the pursuit of the truth that really should be the motivation for journalism.
Yeah, absolutely.
And as you say, even if they know they can't influence a particular reporter or journalist because they're not susceptible to that pressure, it's kind of like let's make an example of this person so that if anyone else cites their work or falls along or pursues the story or any story like it, they know what's coming to them, and it kind of is a deterrent that I've seen work uh in so many different ways.
Well, congratulations on your latest book.
Uh, I really highly recommend it.
Um, I think, you know, no matter where you are in the political spectrum, it's I think everybody understands that corruption in Washington, the influence of money in Washington is one of our biggest problems.
You don't think that's controversial or ideological to say, and this book really, like your reporting, does a great job of of shedding light on exactly how that works and and why it's so pernicious.
So, congratulations on that, and it was great to see you.
