The New York Times on The Bulwark Podcast

This episode is brought to you by The New York Times. There's a bunch of stories that caught my eye this week in The New York Times. Obviously, the story that the administration is investigating them for. We discussed that last week with you guys. They're reporting on how the hand-me-down Qatari plane didn't have the defenses necessary to get our president out of Turkey. As a result of that reporting, The New York Times is now being investigated by some guy who wants to be Trump's new DNI. It is... Totally shameful. And thank goodness for the work they're doing. They had another story that I wanted to get to because there's so much going on. But we'll just do it right now. It was by Jane Bradley, Michael Schwartz and Adam Goldman. Piece is titled How Putin Turned Japan into a Den of Spies. It's like one of these stories. You're like, how is this real? They found that the Russian spies were expelled from Western countries after the invasion of Ukraine ended up in Japan, where they're part of a secret military intelligence unit called the 20th Directorate to help them figure out Western military technology and strategies so that they can... improve their capabilities in the war in Ukraine. The spies pose as diplomats or business people. It's like the Americans. I guess it's the Japanese. Great TV show. And thanks to this effort, unintentionally, this isn't really Japan's fault. Their technology is propping up the Russian military. Crazy story. You've got to go read it. And this is the thing about podcasting. We've got some great reporters here at The Bulwark. I appreciate doing on-the-ground work. You know, I'm here kind of half reporting in Iowa. So, you know, I do some, I do some baby reporting, but you need people out there in Japan. We're not uncovering shit in Japan. Okay. So you need people doing real reporting so that I can chat about it. So we can analyze it and give perspective and contextualize it so that you guys know what's going on in the world. And so I appreciate all the reporters out there doing that. It takes a lot of time and effort to put together stories like this. This story about the 20th directorate is just one example. There's so many others out there. Support your local journalists here at the Bulwark, at the New York Times and elsewhere, wherever you seek it out nationally, locally, support fact-based reporting.