Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Jake Sullivan:

The fact that this has been going on now for several weeks and they haven’t yet pulled the proverbial trigger on land suggests something is happening inside the White House in terms of a real debate.

Jon Finer:

I don’t think it would be particularly hard for the United States to go into Venezuela, to go into Venezuela and topple the government. But the question then is what happens afterward?

Preet Bharara:

That’s Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. Jake and Jon spent many years in the White House as the President’s National Security and Deputy National Security Advisors. Now they have a new podcast out on Vox, The Long Game. This week they join me to talk about leadership, judgment and the invisible machinery of national security. We also cover some national security news making the headlines, including Venezuela, the Israel-Gaza Peace Plan, and the intersection of AI and statecraft. Then I’ll answer your questions about how grand jury investigations work and the Senate bill that ended the government shutdown and allow senators to sue over subpoenaed phone records. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Some of you may have heard we have started a new national security podcast with Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer called The Long Game. Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer, welcome back to the show.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks for having us.

Jon Finer:

Good to be here.

Preet Bharara:

A lot has happened since you were last on the show. Of course, there have been things of global significance. The rule of law is in peril in the United States, but most importantly for our purposes, you two started a podcast.

Jake Sullivan:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

I tried saying this to Astead Herndon, who’s also joined the podcast family. I tried calling my podcast brother. He would only accept the moniker podcast cousin. So you can be my podcast cousins too.

Jake Sullivan:

We will happily welcome cousin.

Jon Finer:

We’d take brother too.

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, I think so.

Preet Bharara:

You’d take brother. Is it easy because it’s so much less fraught and scary or is it scary because it’s new?

Jake Sullivan:

I would say it’s both easier and also much harder. It’s easier because obviously you’re not standing up in the White House briefing room where one word you say wrong could end up getting beamed all over the world and cause some crisis, but it’s way harder because you’re not just coloring between the lines like you do in government, right? You get your talking points, you kind of deliver them, put a little glass on them. Here, you got to actually come up with stuff to say that’s interesting, and do that every week. And it looks easy, right? Or it sounds easy, but then when you actually got to do it, it ain’t so easy.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s been a couple of weeks. Want to remind people the long game? What is the phrase that people use? Find it. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. What would you like to talk about first?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, Venezuela’s pretty topical at the moment.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, it is.

Jake Sullivan:

Seeing as how we have an aircraft carrier with massive firepower sitting right off the coast.

Preet Bharara:

So can I ask a dumb question on behalf of the lay public? We keep getting told that Trump consorts with and cozies up to dictators and there are lots of examples of that, and we say he’s a wannabe dictator and people talk about his authoritarian streak and his dictatorial tendencies and will he ever leave office? And yet in Venezuela there’s a leader to whom he does not cozy up. Instead, we have, as you point out, military weaponry and ships of serious weight and heft off the coast. Can you answer the basic question about why some dictators and not others?

Jake Sullivan:

I’ll take a shot at a couple of reasons, but then, Finer, you should jump in. Okay, so one, Trump’s from South Florida. In south Florida, Maduro is pretty damn unpopular. So it’s kind of a local issue in a way.

Preet Bharara:

That’s interesting.

Jake Sullivan:

That’s unique. And that goes back to Cuban-Americans seeing Cuba deeply embedded in Venezuela and Venezuela, this kind of socialist group of leaders that are basically seen as super villains down there. And then related to that on the socialist point, I think Trump really likes either right-wing dictators or straight up authoritarians, just straight up totalitarians. The left-wing dictators he kind of sees are more like Democrats or something. So he sees it through a little bit of an ideological prism. So those are the two reasons I would give for why Maduro gets put in the hot seat when all these other guys not just get a pass, but get a hug.

Preet Bharara:

Jon, do you agree with that?

Jon Finer:

I do, but with one caveat, which is at the same time as he is doing this military buildup and apparently being presented with options to take military action in Venezuela, he’s also said, “I want to resume talking to these guys, talking to Maduro.” And actually at the beginning of the administration there was sort of a fight it seemed like inside the Trump administration about whether to engage or confront Venezuela. And there were people very much on the side of confront, Marco Rubio, then just the Secretary of State now with myriad other job titles including Jake’s old job. But there was a guy named Rick Grenell who was running around doing diplomacy in Latin America and other places who seemed to want to make a deal with Maduro. And so I wouldn’t completely rule out that Trump shifts back not to embracing Maduro the way maybe he has other authoritarians for reasons Jake cites, but to try to use this coercion to do some sort of deal that he could then claim is like the 11th war he’s stopped.

Preet Bharara:

Before we just sort of dismiss Trump’s penchant for certain dictators and not others based on ideology, I seem to remember, and I’m treading on dangerous ground here because I’m just remembering it and I don’t know the details, but didn’t Jeane Kirkpatrick famously have an article delineating between and among different kinds of dictators that was all the rage when I was in college many years ago and flailing miserably in international relations? Is there something to the idea that for American national security interests, trade interests, economic interests, there should in fact be a distinction between dictators of the left and dictators of the right?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, look, I think there’s a proud, or unproud, however you want to put it, history of Americans, American foreign policy, kind of being okay with dictators who are pro-American who basically fall in line with Jeane Kirkpatrick’s argument was that we shouldn’t be so choosy about our friends. So if someone’s going to support the U.S. side in this Titanic fight against communism and the evil empire and they happen to be a dictator, so be it. So she had a kind of realist gloss on this whole thing.

But of course for Trump, this is not just pro-American dictators that he seems to cotton to or be sympathetic to, it’s also highly anti-American dictators like say Vladimir Putin. So I’m not sure he’s bringing some Kirkpatrick strategic coherence to his theory on this. Now underlying your question though, is Nicolas Maduro a good guy? No. Should he be the leader of Venezuela right now? No. He lost a free and fair election and he should get the hell out of there. Should we go to war over that and try to effectuate a regime change by force? No. And then to Jon’s point, I actually do think there’s a chance for a diplomatic resolution here, but my guess is that Trump’s price for that would be Maduro goes. Maybe some other Maduro-like person comes in. But I’d be surprised if they cut a deal with Maduro where Maduro’s just still chilling out in the presidential palace in Caracas.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe I’m beating a dead horse here, but there’s the distinction between dictators that Trump likes and doesn’t like and there’s also the seeming exception to the Trump doctrine of like no war, doesn’t like to go to war, he wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether that’s viable or not is for another day. What’s he thinking in threatening a situation that could lead to war in Venezuela when that’s antithetical to all of his stated principles such as they are.

Jon Finer:

Yeah, it’s a very good point. I think for those of us, and I’d imagine all of us on this podcast are among them who were concerned about what Trump was going to do and how he was going to behave in the world, one of the few comforting aspects of his foreign policy approach, at least as he describes it, is that he’s a bit uncomfortable with the use of force and reluctant, which I think basically generally is a good thing. It should be used when necessary, but not abroad.

Preet Bharara:

Correct.

Jon Finer:

Used abroad, right? Very much more comfortable here, unfortunately. But already in the first whatever it’s been, 10, 11 months of his presidency, he’s taken military action in Iran, which he had more or less ruled out doing early on. And I think a lot of his supporters were not very happy about that. He’s taken significant military action in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific against alleged drug runners and now threatening not just Venezuela, but any number of other countries, including most recently Nigeria, to go and take military action to defend Christians there. And while not judging any of these particular cases, this is not the approach of a guy who is as uncomfortable with the use of force as maybe we thought he was.

Preet Bharara:

Well, if you change an entire department to the Department of War, don’t you have to live up to name-

Jon Finer:

It’s a bit of a tell.

Preet Bharara:

… in a couple of places? So it’s an odd thing. Now, there are some people who suggest that what’s going on between the United States and Venezuela is less about the fight against narcotics and about the region and more about Trump wanting to provide a justification for examples of domestic security. Does that make sense? Is that too complicated a thing for Trump? Or Jake, you’re shaking your head.

Jake Sullivan:

No, I think it makes absolute sense and I think what they’re trying to do is basically construct an argument that we are in fact facing an invasion. This invasion is coming from Venezuela and the fact that there’s now kinetic attacks on boats coming out and potentially further military action gives them some meat to that argument. And once having established that predicate, as you know, it unlocks a set of legal authorities that they can use here at home to deploy the military, to engage in repression, to engage in various forms of emergency measures. And so I think that there is a direct connection between what’s happening in the Caribbean and what they would like to do here in the United States with respect to enforcing their will against, yes, immigrants, but also against their political enemies. So I think we should be very concerned about that.

Preet Bharara:

Who do you think is the architect, if there is one, of the Venezuela policy, Jon? Is it Marco Rubio or someone else?

Jon Finer:

Well, again, I think there was this tug of war early on. Right now it really smacks of a Marco Rubio designed foreign policy. And I think to Jake’s point, and it’s related to a question that you asked earlier about the difference between Jeane Kirkpatrick and Trump, I think one big difference is she was willing to tolerate or allow for close relations with dictators in spite of the fact that they governed in that way. Trump in some ways actually embraces dictators because he wishes he could govern more like them it seems sometimes, and this is a good example of that, importing some of these tactics to our country even as he contemplates military action against this one dictator.

Jake Sullivan:

I think there’s a Miller component to this too, basically.

Preet Bharara:

Stephen Miller?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, I think you have two architects. You’ve got Rubio architecting the kind of explicit Venezuela strategy, which is pressure Maduro try to force a change in Venezuela. That’s very much got Rubio’s hand all over it. Then you have the implicit Venezuela strategy, more this domestic nexus. And I think Stephen Miller sits right at the heart of that. And I think it’s the combination of those two hands on the wheel that’s driving this and that’s why where exactly it ends up going because there are two hands on the wheel is pretty unpredictable.

Jon Finer:

So I agree with that, but I think it’s interesting that I wonder whether Stephen Miller would be in favor of military action in Venezuela because the one thing that could produce is an even more failed state that leads to even more people leaving Venezuela and making their way towards our border. So while they have this kind of probably broad agreement on the current approach, including pressure on Maduro, when it comes to military action, I would imagine he might be, in this rare instance, a bit more cautious just because of the migration dimension.

Preet Bharara:

Isn’t the one lesson of history when it comes to war that the quickest way for nations who don’t want to enter into war, but to find themselves on the precipice of and crossing the threshold into war is to act warlike and to have armaments on the border or to engage in proxy skirmishes or to threaten and have people have guns pointed at the other side without even necessarily the intention of getting into war, but as a warning or as a show of strength or some other kind of thing. And then something goes wrong and someone gets shot or someone makes a mistake and then you’re at war. Isn’t that a fundamental lesson that everyone knows?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, there’s a certain kind of laws of physics quality to this. When they started blasting boats out of the water in the Caribbean with no apparent legal basis or no deep knowledge of who is on them, I started saying to people, “This kind of almost by inertia pushes onto land eventually.” Because you do the boats, then you do the ports, then you do the drug warehouses, then you do the cartel leader. So there’s a natural logic to this extent. But that being said, the fact that this has been going on now for several weeks and they haven’t yet pulled the proverbial trigger on land suggests something is happening inside the White House in terms of a real debate over what to do. And something is probably happening behind the scenes as Trump alluded to between the U.S. and Venezuela about maybe there’s some kind of off ramp. So I don’t think it’s at this point inevitable that we end up striking at scale in Venezuela, but it certainly tips in that direction for the reason you say.

Preet Bharara:

Am I correct, there are no nuclear facilities in Venezuela?

Jake Sullivan:

You are correct.

Preet Bharara:

It’s not like Iran. What actually would it land incursion by the United States against Venezuela look like? How much would it take? What would the casualties be on either side? There’s a lot of questions. What would the casualties be on either side? What would be the goal? How would you know if you reached the… I’m very confused as to what would we even be doing in Venezuela on the ground.

Jon Finer:

So I mean to me the real question-

Preet Bharara:

You guys are confused too.

Jake Sullivan:

Well, I think we’re waiting for each other. We both have views on this subject.

Preet Bharara:

I’m very confused about this. What are we going to do in Venezuela, guys?

Jon Finer:

Yeah, the why is a big question, but you asked the what. And to be honest, I don’t think it would be particularly hard for the United States to go into Venezuela, to go into Venezuela and topple the government. We went into Iraq and toppled the government there and it was not tremendously costly during that initial phase. But the question then is what happens afterwards and how long are we prepared to stay and how does the population react to this foreign presence? And that creates all kinds of challenges that we are just historically pretty bad at anticipating and addressing.

Preet Bharara:

Is there a scenario in which… Just before you answer, Jake, in which we go to… So that’s a good answer, it’s an explicit answer, but is there a version of going on the ground in Venezuela and doing something short of toppling the government or is that the only reason to be on the ground?

Jake Sullivan:

I don’t think they anticipate going on the ground with anything more than maybe some special forces guys. I think they intend to do this from the air. And I think the phrase that’s being bandied about in the White House and the Pentagon is ‘decapitation strike’, which is a fancy way of saying take out Maduro. And I think part of the reason they’re doing that is they’re trying to define a kind of tactical military objective. We’re going to target the president wherever we can find him. But part of it I think is also just PSYOPs. It’s information warfare. It’s trying to rattle Maduro and the people around him, “Hey, you could be dead any day, so maybe it’s time for you to get gone.”

And I think that’s part of the gamesmanship of what we’re seeing right now. They’re also talking about a bunch of other things like they’ve got a series of military bases they would take out. They would certainly take out the air defenses so that we could operate freely without fear that our planes would get shot down. They’ve got airstrips, they’ve got various things they label as drug infrastructure, so they’d make a show of actually following through on this quote unquote counter-drug thing. But at the end of the day, I think the main focus would be on the leadership.

Preet Bharara:

In what circumstances does it work out where a country, let’s hypothetically say the United States of America, topples a leader but doesn’t stick around and leaves it to regional and domestic forces and political struggles and battles to see what comes next or does it work out better for that country and for the United States and the region, and I know there are counter examples of this as well, when the United States does that, whether it’s controversial or not, and sticks around and kind of helps keep the peace and engineers the successor to the person they’ve toppled? Which works and which doesn’t. And does it depend on… You going to say it depends. What does it depend on?

Jon Finer:

No, look, I think the basic historical record is it doesn’t work out particularly well whether we stay or not. The kind of most recent example of doing what Jake described the Trump administration possibly doing, the sort of decapitation approach, which wasn’t the original policy, but it was what actually ended up happening is in Libya where the United States and some other countries went in to protect part of the local population, people who were in Benghazi while the Libyan army was approaching them. But in the context of protecting that population and brushing back the Libyan army, they took a bunch of shots at command and control in the capitol and including ending up sending the dictator Gaddafi on the run. He was sort of wrapped up by local militia and killed. And so you had regime change in Libya. You had nobody in a meaningful presence on the ground to help manage the situation. Libya has been more or less a failed state ever since then, or at least a deeply divided state where there’s been ongoing violence ever since.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any predictability to what happens next if you go in with surgical strikes and decapitate the top of the government? It seems to me that’s so speculative. Why would you risk doing it? And maybe Jake, you’re pointing out it’s a feint.

Jake Sullivan:

Or not a feint, but it’s a squeeze play. It’s kind of classic bully tactics to basically get Maduro to say, “I’m going to step aside.” By the way, I don’t entirely rule that out. Maduro saying, “I’m going to pass off to some other person who’s going to protect my interests,” and keep running the Chavista left-wing dictatorship here just to be the vice president or someone else. I don’t totally rule that out, but no, it’s going to be totally unpredictable.

Preet Bharara:

Right.

Jake Sullivan:

You take out Maduro and let’s just take their stated objective for all of this, which is to reduce the threat of the drug cartels in Venezuela. Okay? What’s the fastest way to expand the power of a drug cartel? Create vacuums of power that they flow into, which is the history of South America. When there’s a vacuum of power, when you don’t actually have a country being run from the center, the drug cartels just gain territory, they gain capacity, they gain weapons. And so it’s unpredictable in the extreme. And then there’s also to this point that Jon was making before the question of migration flows out of Venezuela and what happens if there’s total chaos there?

Preet Bharara:

You know what you didn’t have in the Soviet Union? You didn’t have drug cartels and organized crime.

Jake Sullivan:

Okay, and what do you got today?

Preet Bharara:

Now you have that, now you have that. Do you have an understanding or a sense of what the U.S. public generally would feel about such a strike and then in particular Trump’s base? I haven’t looked at polls on this, but I would think that the consistent with what his general predisposition is of not doing these kinds of things that his base would not be in into it.

Jon Finer:

I haven’t looked at polls on this either. The way military action tends to go is in the very immediate aftermath, people tend to have, I think a bit of a rally around the flag reaction, especially because we tend to be pretty good operationally. If we try to take something out or hit it, we tend to be successful at it. You saw that most recently in Iran. And then these things sometimes age quite badly, sometimes quickly, sometimes less quickly. So I don’t think there would be this just immediate negative backlash against it. But if it started to look really ugly and some of these after effects that we’ve been projecting start to happen, I don’t think it will be very popular. By the way, it’s worth just mentioning, he’s also threatening military action potentially in Mexico as well, which is in many ways a much bigger undertaking, much more complicated, more proximate with even greater consequences, negative consequences potentially for the United States.

Jake Sullivan:

Let’s not forget Nigeria too, he’s a threatening military action there as well. But just on this, to Jon’s point about military action being popular in the first instance and then not aging well, I think here right now, if you look at polls, the boat strikes are kind of 60/40, it seems like. People more or less, at least okay with them. Strikes on land. People say, “We’re not really interested in hitting Venezuela,” but if there was a day or two or three or four it strikes or something, okay. If it dragged out, I think the popularity of them would fade really fast and people would say, “What the hell are we doing?”

But I think Trump understands this, which is what made the 12-day war in Iran so interesting. He made the decision to strike, but then he as a companion decision was like, “It’s over, we’re striking and then it’s done.” And he said, “Shut it down,” because I think he has a kind of gut instinct about this, which says, do military action but do it for a very short time. Remember also with the Houthis, without us having succeeded really in anything, he just called it. He’s like, “All right, we’re done with the Houthis, we’re not going on anymore.” So I think he has his own clock on these things because he’s sensitive to that.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’m going to mention something about a clock. Would I reasonably be described as having Trump Derangement Syndrome if I were to speculate that the odds of a strike on land in Venezuela goes up, not insubstantially on some future date, if there is a bad revelation in the Epstein files about Donald Trump? The old wag the dog, that’s a real thing. Is it not? Whether it’s a real thing with respect to Trump and this scenario? I don’t know, but I put this fraught political question to you two gentlemen. The question was an easy one. Trump Derangement Syndrome was the question.

Jon Finer:

When political questions would come up in front of the president when we were in the Oval Office and he had his national security team there, he would basically turn to us and be like, “You guys don’t know what you’re talking about when it comes to politics,” and, “Let me handle this.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, but now you got to know because now you are-

Jon Finer:

Yeah, now we’re on podcasts and we have to answer the question.

Jake Sullivan:

Got to have a take. Got to have a take.

Preet Bharara:

Podcaster with a capital P, gentlemen, it’s a capital P, not a little pod.

Jon Finer:

It does not sound crazy to me to employ that. It sounds crazy to employ that tactic. Doesn’t sound crazy to predict they might employ that tactic.

Jake Sullivan:

I definitely think part of what is happening with these boat strikes is politics, it’s optics. It’s like, so would there be a political calculus if there were bad revelations to, hey, do something over here? Sure, sure. Not Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Preet Bharara:

The guests are unanimous that I do not have, on this score at least, TDS.

Jon Finer:

It can be yes, and. Yes, you do have it. And also, you know.

Preet Bharara:

I try not to have it. Let me ask you a question about Marco Rubio and then we’ll segue into a couple other topics. We talked about this last time you were on, I think. When I think of Marco Rubio, I think a couple of things. One, he’s a pretty reasonable guy. He saw in my view, the correct Trump back in 2016. Obviously he was running for president himself and politics ain’t bean bag and all of that. And so one view of him is that he’s changed his colors and it’s served him very, very well. But I don’t consider him to be in the mold of Stephen Miller and some of these other folks just in terms of approach, temperament, strategic thinking, seriousness, radicalism, et cetera. So I guess the first question is does he have as much authority, influence, and scope of remit given his two titles as it looks like? And if so, how is that the case? Does that speak well of Trump in a way?

Jake Sullivan:

Well, just starting on that question, as someone who was National Security Advisor and did not have time left over to also be Secretary of State-

Preet Bharara:

Secretary of State, right.

Jake Sullivan:

First, I don’t know, actually. It’s a great question. What is his actual level of influence over shaping the policy? On Russia, Ukraine? I don’t think he’s the key actor. I think that’s mainly Witkoff driving that. On China, so these are huge files, that’s Bessent, and I think Rubio’s not playing a quarterback role on that.

Preet Bharara:

What about Gaza?

Jake Sullivan:

On Gaza, it’s Kushner and Witkoff. Rubio’s there, but again, he’s not the quarterback. I think on this Venezuela thing, he is more the quarterback, but there are limits to that which we’ve talked about earlier. There’s Stephen Miller, there’s other voices in the administration on this. So I think he plays a really important role. He’s in the room for everything. He’s in good graces. He is a voice who can make a difference. Proportedly on this whole question of whether to sell all these Nvidia chips to China, Rubio played a role in kind of saying, “Don’t do that,” but he was backed up by Bessent and a bunch of others in that. So it’s an interesting circumstance where he holds the big titles. He’s in the room, he’s respected, but I’m just not sure actually that he is the driving force behind any of the really the top line files with the possible exception of Venezuela. But Jon, do you have a different view on that?

Jon Finer:

No, I think my impression of people who you know probably deep down are not very comfortable with Donald Trump but have kind of made their peace with that is that they tend to justify it based on the fact that he produces some outcomes that they like. You see senators say this sort of thing sometimes when it comes to tax decreases or whatever. In this case, I think if Rubio gets the outcome he wants on Venezuela, he will feel like this justifies all manner of other compromises he’s had to make to stay in this role and still unclear whether he will, but it’s trending in that direction. And so I do think that Venezuela is, the policy is going to be a very big test case of both his influence and how he’s going to ever justify the time that he’s spent here, given many of the policies that have been adopted that are contrary to things he’s said to believe in for most of his career.

Jake Sullivan:

I think there’s one other thing going on, Preet. Our friend Tom Wright has a piece out in the Atlantic right now basically making the point that MAGA foreign policy, America first foreign policy used to be this point of division in the Republican Party. You had huge number of Republicans who were kind of traditional foreign policy types, and then you had the MAGA America first crowd and actually MAGA America first has kind of won the day and Republicans are all essentially saying, “Okay, that’s a viable foreign policy. We’re going with that.”

And you can see Rubio in the early months when they show him in the Oval or in the Cabinet Room, he had this kind of hostage video vacant stare thing going. The life force had been sucked out of him.

Preet Bharara:

Is that gone?

Jake Sullivan:

I think it’s gone. I think now he’s going into work thinking, “You know, I’m kind of into this mostly.” Now, it comes back and flashes like, we may be looking at a sellout of Ukraine here in the near term based on recent discussions, and I think Rubio is profoundly uncomfortable with that. But I think at a macro level, he’s much more comfortable with where things are than one would’ve predicted a year ago.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Jake and Jon after this.

Let’s talk about Israel-Gaza. Good peace plan? Let the record reflect there’s a long pause. Is it a complicated question?

Jon Finer:

I think I just tripped over the word good. There’s almost nothing good about this issue, and so it’s hard to describe anything that’s happening with that adjective. I will say, given the problem that they are confronted with, the fact that they have up till now produced an outcome after a very complicated first eight or nine months, that has brought the hostages out of Israel, that has stopped the preponderance of the violence for now. And that has led to at least an increase in humanitarian assistance going in is a good thing. And they are now confronted with a really hard challenge of trying to get to the next phase, which is going to involve two things that do not seem likely to happen in the near term, Israel withdrawing from Gaza and Hamas disarming.

And so the only way that they will ever get an international force into Gaza, which is a prerequisite to any of this happening, is if they got some sort of resolution from the United Nations. Any country or most countries that would contribute troops to that force are going to say they require the UN to bless it or they will not go forward. And so they produce this resolution, it passed. I think you could pick it apart quite easily, point by point if you wanted to, and we could do that, but it is necessary to get foreign forces into Gaza, which is going to be necessary if we ever get to the second phase of this peace plan and actually end the war.

Preet Bharara:

Explain the headline to listeners from the last day. A major breakthrough, security council adopts U.S. peace plan for Gaza. Is that a big deal or what?

Jon Finer:

What I would say is it is a big deal because it’s necessary if other countries are going to actually contribute to reconstructing Gaza, providing troops to provide basic security for the population there. Disarming, demobilizing Hamas. The security council resolution gives essentially cover for countries to do that. That’s not just at the demand of the U.S. President. And I think when the US was going around the world asking who might help, what they were hearing from other countries, whether Indonesia or Azerbaijan or some of these countries that have hinted that they might be willing to actually contribute even forces is that security council resolution was necessary to get them to that point. And this was the resolution that passed by the way, Russia threatened, maybe they would veto it. They did not. China complained a lot about it, but ultimately abstained and everybody else supported it, including the countries in the region even if they didn’t get a vote. So again, there’s a lot I think that is imperfect or flawed about this resolution, but they needed it to have a chance of succeeding at the next phase of the peace plan.

Preet Bharara:

Would it have been the natural inclination for Russia and China to vote against rather than abstain? And if so, what was the kind of work you think was done behind the scenes to get this result?

Jake Sullivan:

I think Russia and China are both very sensitive to their relationships with the Arab states. And so the Arab states basically saying to them, “Hey, let’s not stand in the way of this because it’s the only way to get troops in and move this forward,” was probably the dominant thing. But at the same time, the fact that Trump just cut this deal with Xi and the fact that Trump seems to be putting on the table a pretty Russia-friendly deal on Ukraine didn’t hurt.

Preet Bharara:

Before we leave Israel and Gaza, and as I’m thinking of the question, it’s probably more complicated because no view is formed of Trump in a vacuum or based on one particular foreign policy success or advancement. But the question is, what do you think it is that allies and adversaries alike learn and take as a lesson from the way in which the United States involved itself and at least a temporary resolution of hostilities in Gaza? Do they look at Trump and they think, “Huh, that’s a blueprint for us in our part of the world if we need it in the future.”? Is it, that’s a special circumstance because Israel and Gaza are always special circumstances? What do they take from it, you think?

Jake Sullivan:

It’s a great question. I mean, I think it depends on who the they is. I think Arab countries for a period it looked like were essentially in a position of saying, “We’re going to follow the U.S. lead as they go.” But I think there are limits to that. And we saw the limits to that with the visit of the Crown Prince who Trump really wanted him to move on normalization with Israel, and he wasn’t prepared to do that, partly because of the Palestinian issue. But then if you go further afield and you look at China, I think China is not looking at the Gaza example. They’re looking at the dynamic they’ve had with President Trump over the last nine months and thinking, “We actually to a certain extent understand this guy. We know how to deal with him. We know how to produce an outcome we want.”

So it depends on where you are. I think for core allies, like in Europe, Japan, Korea, at the moment, what they’re doing is saying, “Look, the U.S. wields a big enough stick that we kind of got to accept. They can slap tariffs on us and there’s not much we can do about it. They can demand money from us and we’re going to have to give it.” But I think over the midterm, they’re also going to think, “How do we reduce our level of risk and exposure to the United States?” Because I think they’re quite concerned that we have them over a barrel and we’re showing that to them and they don’t like it.

Preet Bharara:

In five years, if you come back on the show or discussing it on your show, which will have a long run, what do you predict you’ll be saying about the status of Hamas?

Jon Finer:

Really good question. Really hard question. Whether Hamas continues to exist under the current Hamas banner, the ideas that it represents and many of the people who follow it are still going to be there, still going to be living in Gaza, still going to be living in the West Bank as well. And so I think absent a significant change in the political circumstances of the Palestinian people, the level of extremism that produced the October 7th attacks, produced Hamas in the first place is still going to be a problem for the world and for Israel to contend with. And so I think the big open question here is, yeah, how do we bring finality to the immediate circumstances in Gaza to try to disarm Hamas, try to get Israel off the rest of Gaza territory? But the bigger question is where does this all go from there? And without a political horizon, along the lines that Jake described, there’re going to be more conflicts, there’s going to be more violence, and unfortunately this situation is not going to be permanently addressed.

Preet Bharara:

Before we conclude, I do want to talk about the most common issue that I hear about no matter what the discipline is, whether it’s business or law or education. And Jake for the YouTube non-watchers is nodding his head, and that is artificial intelligence, which I know you folks have been focusing on. Can you give a thumbnail sketch about how AI affects our world, our strategic interests, how much of the battle for… I mean, I remember thinking some years ago that quantum computing was the big fight. It seems like that’s not it. It’s AI. How should we be thinking about it? And do we have people who are knowledgeable enough in government and in power to deal with that challenge?

Jake Sullivan:

I think AI is going to be just radically transformative across every dimension. So you think about the military, it’s going to just fundamentally change the way that we fight and prevent wars. And we’re already seeing that play out in living color in the battlefield in Ukraine, and the U.S. military is going to have to get prepared for that for the future. China is certainly tooling up.

Preet Bharara:

Can you give a concrete example of that, Jake?

Jake Sullivan:

Yeah, sure. So first, how do you think about drones and autonomy in terms of targeting, battlefield mapping, being able to basically see and identify your enemy across every dimension, and then be able to hit them essentially through a kill chain? Yes, with a human in the loop, but where you can essentially launch these massive drone swarms, unmanned, and cause just an incredible amount of damage. And we’re seeing that happen every single day in Ukraine. But then also command and control is going to change. Logistics is going to change. Everything. The decision-making loops are going to get more rapid, more precise. The ability to move equipment, support our troops is going to become significantly more efficient. So across every dimension of the battlefield, AI is going to have a transformative effect. And there’s going to be huge questions about what the relationship is between the human and the machine in that, and our adversaries may have a different answer to that question than we have. So that’s one big set of issues.

But then secondly, it’s going to transform our economy. And that’s going to be true with respect to both the services and knowledge economy and the way in which AI will actually come to a point where it’s going to be as effective as us probably at podcasting, to be honest. So our jobs may be in some peril. And then in the physical world, you’re going to see basically a world in which the ability to produce, manufacture at scale through advanced robotics and what are called these dark factories, because they run 24 hours a day because they need very few humans basically to operate them. This is going to become a much bigger feature.

And then scientific discovery, I mean, already we’re seeing AI change the way that scientists are able to establish hypotheses and then prove them out, and that’s just going to accelerate. And finally, on the question of society, I mean, I think we have basically rooted the entire enlightenment, liberalism construct, and modern democracy around human judgment. And now people are increasingly going to rely on machine judgment. And that’s I think, just going to have radical effects on how we relate to one another as human beings. And I don’t think we’re ready for any of it. And that’s not to cast dispersions on individuals in the U.S. government, it’s just the technology is moving way faster than policy.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So not that big a deal then, Jake, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Jake Sullivan:

No, no. It’s just one more thing. One more thing.

Preet Bharara:

I was at a dinner party recently with people who are knowledgeable about another aspect of the use of AI and robotics, and that’s the exoskeleton. That can be an additional, depending on what it is, prosthetics. And so the RoboCops, I don’t mean to upset anyone or excite anyone either on the other side of the coin, but RoboCops as military personnel, so to speak, are in the not too distant future. Am I right?

Jake Sullivan:

Not too distant future. I mean, I do think on the robotic side, particularly when it comes to things like touch, it’s interesting. Vision, reasoning, the computers have gotten extremely good at these things. Touch is the most complicated piece. And so actually replicating joints, human hands, things like this, I think we’re a little ways off on that, but yeah, sure. Not too distant future. And by the way-

Preet Bharara:

They’re already being used in… I mean, individuals can wear an exoskeleton and move massive tonnage of weight, which would be useful in the battlefield too, not just in a warehouse.

Jake Sullivan:

I was just about… That was by the way, this human machine teaming. Yeah, I think this is one of the next steps on that in that field, so-

Preet Bharara:

It’s like, “Stanley, you build the barracks.” Just Stanley alone build the barracks? “Yeah, I got it. I got it.” Any final predictions? What are we going to be talking about in a year, folks?

Jake Sullivan:

That’s a great question.

Jon Finer:

’26 midterms.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, you are voluntarily wading into politics right there, Jon, you have time to be-

Jon Finer:

I didn’t say what we’ll be saying, just what we’ll be talking about.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. But does that affect foreign policy in any real way? It feels like the executive branch has long since gotten all that power unto itself.

Jon Finer:

Which we liked.

Jake Sullivan:

Look, I think we’re going to be talking in a year about ways in which… First of all, AI is going to be a dominant issue even more next year than it was this year. Anthropic just came out with this interesting report basically saying-

Preet Bharara:

I meant to ask you about that. Yeah.

Jake Sullivan:

… the ability now of these models to be jailbroken, basically to have the guardrails removed and used for massive scale cyber attacks. And they can also be used to defend, but in the near term offense probably has the drop on defense. I think in a year we’re going to be talking about things like that. Things like the democratization of lethal technology because of AI, so that all kinds of different countries, groups, et cetera, are going to have their hands on capabilities they haven’t had before. And this is going to increase threats, threats directly to the U.S., threats to our allies and partners around the world. So for me, that’s something that’s quite, quite worrying.

Preet Bharara:

The podcast, which is terrific and smart and insightful, is called The Long Game, which actually reflects the thoughtfulness of the conversations. Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer. Thanks so much.

Jake Sullivan:

Thanks, Preet.

Jon Finer:

Thanks, Preet.

Jake Sullivan:

Really appreciate it.

Preet Bharara:

The conversation continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, Jon Finer and I discussed Trump’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Jon Finer:

I take your point that maybe transactionally the President felt like this was in service of the relationship, but he also could have just said nothing.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership, head to CAFE.com/insider. Again, that’s CAFE.com/insider. Stay tuned. After the break, I’ll answer your questions about how grand jury investigations work and the Senate bill that ended the government shutdown and allow senators to sue over subpoenaed phone records.

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from Betsy. She writes, “Can you help me understand the provision in the Bill Congress passed to end the government shutdown that lets eight Republican Senators sue the government over special counsel of Jack Smith’s subpoena of their phone records during his investigation into the January 6th attack?” Betsy, thanks for the question. We received a bunch of emails about it, and I’m not sure I understand the provision in the bill because it’s odd in a number of different ways. But before we get into the specifics of this new odd law, let’s start with the events that led up to it.

What are we actually talking about here? This as a reminder, Special Counsel Jack Smith had as his job, the investigation of possible crimes related to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And so when Jack Smith filed his indictment in 2023, one of the indictments, one of the allegations was that Trump tried to pressure Republican senators to delay the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. And part of that evidence, and part of the allegations was that he made calls to senators on January 6th or around January 6th, 2021. So part of the scheme that they were charging, the Special Counsel’s office was charging, related to that conduct on the part of Donald Trump. So if that’s part of the accusation, that’s part of the allegations, Trump calling senators to delay the certification of a vote. It seems only reasonable that investigators would want evidence that those calls actually occurred, and to find out who was called and then to corroborate a theory that that was what was going on in those phone calls.

And of course, we learned recently that that’s what Jack Smith did, which is what you would do in an ordinary investigation where you’re alleging particular things like that. So anyway, Chuck Grassley, the top Republican senator on the Senate Judiciary Committee, released an FBI document showing that, shockingly, in 2023, the Bureau conducted a limited toll analysis for eight Republican senators and one house member. So what does that mean? Well, in plain terms, that means investigators looked at who those lawmakers spoke to and when. To be clear, not the contents of the calls, just the numbers and the time stamps during a very narrow window of three days, January 4th through January 7th, 2021, the days surrounding the fateful January 6th attack on the Capitol.

After Grassley made that information public, several of the senators whose phone records were subpoenaed reacted angrily. They got in high-dudgeon. Some of them actually have law degrees claiming incorrectly, and I dare say falsely, that their phones were wiretapped, not just that they got toll records showing the fact of phone calls years after the fact, no content of the communications was disclosed, nor could they have been disclosable in any way, shape or form. In any event, five of those senators sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding an investigation into Smith’s investigation. In their letter, they accused him of acting as a, quote, “Rogue special counsel”, end quote, and claimed there was, quote, “no sufficient rationale or cause”, end quote, to seek their phone records. I’m not sure that I agree with their police work there, but that’s the claim and allegation that was made.

So fast-forward to the recent government shutdown and the budget compromise. Congress reached to reopen the government during the final round of negotiations, even though it has nothing to do with the shutdown, this bill, this law was slipped into the fold. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, added this provision, which as I said, had nothing to do with funding the government. So what does it say? Going back to your original question. It says that if a Senator’s data, and that includes phone records, are collected in some fashion or subpoenaed in an investigation, and that Senator is not a target of the investigation, he or she must be given notice that the phone records of the Senate office data has been collected by a U.S. government official, and that would include a special counsel at the Justice Department.

And if that notification did not happen or does not happen, the Senator can sue the federal government for $500,000, quite a boondoggle. But that wasn’t all because you might ask, how does that help the people from several years ago? Well, the bill also contained a retroactivity clause applying these new so-called protections back to January 1st, 2022, just before Jack Smith’s team subpoenaed the phone records. In other words, the law covers the exact period of Smith’s investigation, meaning the eight identified senators whose phone data was obtained, to my mind totally reasonably, can now sue the federal government for half a million bucks each. So far, only one of those senators has said he plans to do it. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina, maybe he’s hard on cash, told reporters he will definitely file a lawsuit under the new statute.

But there are critics, including Republicans who say the measure looks like a self-serving thing. Representative Chip Roy of Texas called it self-dealing and wrong. And even house speaker Mike Johnson reportedly said the provision was way out of line. So a couple of other interesting things about the bill. The language allows only Senators not house members to sue, even though at least one house Republican had his phone records subpoenaed. That may be one reason house Republicans are not in love with the provision. And of course, the other peculiar thing is how can that law be applied retroactively? Because some laws can’t be, the ones that I’m most familiar with, the criminal laws can’t be applied retroactively. That’s actually a thing in the Constitution. It’s called the ex post facto clause that prohibits Congress from passing criminal laws that apply to conduct that was committed and undertaken before the law was passed.

But the Supreme Court ruled a long time ago that that restriction only applies to criminal laws, not to civil ones. For civil legislation, the courts assume a new law applies only moving forward unless Congress explicitly states that it should apply retroactively, and that’s exactly what the Senate did in this case so eight of their members could have a nice payday. By the way, this might not be the end of the story. Speaker Johnson has since promised a fast-tracker bill repealing the lawsuit provision entirely, and if Johnson’s repeal goes through, those potential lawsuits vanish along with the half-million-dollar payouts, which makes me happy as a taxpayer. Final note, those senators phone records were obtained through a grand jury subpoena, which is a standard part of a federal criminal investigation. In the next segment, we’ll talk about how that process works.

This question comes in an email from David. David writes, “As I was listening to a recent Insider episode, I was struck by your discussion of the grand jury investigation in South Florida. I’ve always understood a grand jury’s role as reviewing evidence and deciding whether to issue an indictment, but you use the phrase grand jury investigation. Could you explain what that means and how it differs from a grand jury simply voting on an indictment?” David, thanks. I’m glad you asked this question because sometimes we just assume people have an understanding of various institutions, including the grand jury. A lot of people misunderstand all the things that a grand jury actually does. So like you, you can be forgiven for thinking like a lot of people do, that the Grand Jury is just a group of folks who decide whether to indict someone. That’s true, and that’s an important role, perhaps the most important role, but it’s only part of the story.

Grand juries are also an investigative tool. They’re an investigative body, not just a decisional body, and they investigate potential crimes before that vote ever happens. Now, sometimes it’s the case that evidence is presented to the grand jury just prior to asking them to vote on a proposed indictment. That can be because the case is fairly simple or straightforward, but often when you have extended grand juries that sometimes grand juries serve for 18 months or more, there have been a series of presentations of witnesses and discussion of documents with a grand jury over time in an elongated investigation. Everyone is familiar with the major tool that the grand jury has. It’s called a subpoena, but it is issued on behalf of the grand jury. It’s a grand jury subpoena, and it’s a very powerful legal tool. That tool allows prosecutors acting on behalf of the grand jury to compel witness testimony or the production of documents and records, and it’s very, very hard to get out of the compulsion of coming in for testimony and providing documents and records.

So in almost every investigation that has any degree of complexity at all, grand jury subpoenas are used to collect bank records, financial documents, sometimes phone records and the like. Now, there are some things that require a higher threshold in connection with an investigation. You can’t search a home or an office. You can’t wiretap a phone. You can’t get certain tax records without going to a judge. But for lots and lots and lots of basic documents that are the building blocks of an investigation, an ultimate case against an individual or a corporation, it’s the grand jury subpoena that does the trick. It’s also a powerful investigative step because among other things, a grand jury subpoena allows you to lock in testimony of an important witness. Memories fade, and sometimes witnesses change their stories. Having someone testify under oath early in an investigation where there’s a transcript of that testimony creates an official record, and it can later be used to check for inconsistencies or refresh recollections.

So when an investigation is going to take a long time, the grand jury may often as an investigative body hear testimony from various witnesses along the way. Those of you who’ve been listening to the podcast for a while know that it takes time to do an investigation the correct way. Grand juries don’t just meet one time and make a decision in a lot of cases. They reconvene periodically over weeks, sometimes even months. As new evidence comes in, they hear witnesses review documents, and they weigh the facts until it has enough information for the prosecutors to determine that it’s right for a vote on an indictment.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guests, Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. You can reach me on Twitter or Bluesky at @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is now on Substack. Head to staytuned.substack.com to watch live streams, get updates about new podcast episodes and more. That’s staytuned.substack.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The supervising producer is Jake Kaplan. The lead editorial producer is Jennifer Indig. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. The video producer is Nat Weiner. The senior audio producer is Matthew Billy, and the marketing manager is Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. Special thanks to Torrey Paquette and Adam Harris. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.