Hey, everybody. It's me. Sam Stein, managing out at the Bullwark, and I'm joined by Aaron Banco,

who is the national security reporter for Reuters. We're going to be talking today about a really

incredible scoop Aaron had. It's in Reuters, obviously, but it has to deal with this kind of

evolving situation, involving the Ukraine peace plan, I should say Russia peace plan for Ukraine,

that is being pushed right now.

And I just say that because we're recording here Sunday at like 1230.

This is probably going to be posted tonight at some point.

It's dynamic.

So what we say might seem a little bit outdated, but Aaron's reporting won't.

Aaron, your story starts off at a meeting in Miami that has now gotten the attention of what you say, U.S. officials and lawmakers who are, as you report,

increasingly concerned about this meeting. It happened last month. Set the stage for us.

Yeah. So this meeting took place at the very end of October between October 24th and October 26th.

It included Jared Kushner, Steve Whitkoff, who's the special envoy working on this peace plan, and a guy named Karel Demetriov, who is Russian.

He's a very close to President Putin, and he runs one of the country's largest sovereign wealth funds and has been in, like, the Trump orbit since the first administration.

When you say the Trump orbit, what does that mean? Like, he's just friendly with these guys?

Sort of, yeah. I mean, when Trump won in 2016, Dmitriev was one of the only people connected to President Putin and the Kremlin who tried to make inroads with the Trump team.

His goal was to try to reset relations between the U.S. and Russia.

He had that infamous meeting with Eric Prince in the Seychelles that then ended up getting reported on in the Mueller report.

And he also made inroads with Jared Kushner via a friend of Jared's.

He drafts this sort of plan to reset relations between the two countries and hands it off to

a Kushner intermediary who then gives it to Kushner.

So they meet in late October, Kushner, Whitkoff, and Dimitriv, and what is discussed?

...