The 24sight Pod - Episode 8: 'If he's not an asset, he'll do until one gets here'

“Russia without Ukraine is a country, Russia with Ukraine is an empire,” Reed Galen, co-founder of The Lincoln Project and author of

The Home Front

said on the latest episode of the 24sight Pod, paraphrasing the late American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezienski. “It's got the Black Sea, it's got the wheat fields, it's got high-performing individuals. And so you know, Putin wants it back. He's an unreconstructed Soviet.”

As Congress remains paralyzed by the debate over sending the next round of aid to Ukraine to fight back the Russian invasion, Russia has ramped up its efforts to sway the 2024 election — again, a repeat of its 2016 efforts.

The head of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Turner, a Republican stalwart who gets special access to classified intelligence rarely seen by other lawmakers made this astonishing comment on CNN, “We see, directly coming from Russia, attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”

A blockbuster report in The Washington Post published this week detailed exactly how Russia is running its latest coordinated attack on the U.S. election system, pushing and amplifying disinformation and propaganda even promoting some of the most powerful lawmakers in Congress, like Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida.

And the leader of the Republican Party has been making the same assessments about the Russian invasion of Ukraine as Russian President Vladimir Putin, whether he understands what he’s saying or not, and repeating other Putin attacks on the U.S.

“Is Trump an asset of Russia?” LoBianco asked Galen on the 24sight Pod.

“If he’s not, he’s certainly playing the part,” Galen said. “As Tommy Lee Jones famously says in No Country for Old Men, ‘If he’s not an asset, he’ll do until one gets here.’”

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Pilar, Warren and Tom