It's May 16th. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian

Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. The brief you're about to hear is in the same

spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical

events in the past 24 hours, all delivered to the President each day by the nation spy masters.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy. And this is your brief. Here's what we're going to be

talking about this morning. First up, Finland and Sweden are joining NATO. Well, maybe. We're going

to talk about what's happening and how it could impact America. Your second brief graduation

season is here, but not for some Air Force Academy cadets. And it has to do with the COVID vaccine.

We're going to talk about that. And as always, I'm keeping an eye out for developing stories. Put

this one on your radar. Some Americans think socialism is pretty great, but there's a socialist

country this morning that's actually admitting that its system is failing. We're going to discuss

the latest out of Venezuela all up next on the President's Daily Brief. Your first piece of

intel this morning, Russia's war in Ukraine is causing all sorts of unexpected developments to

include this one. The countries of Finland and Sweden are hoping to join NATO. Now, word of that

started leaking late last week and then throughout the weekend. There are some politics over whether

it'll actually happen more on that in a minute, but the announcement in and of itself is a big deal

for one reason. Both countries for decades have been afraid of angering Moscow, but that's just

not true anymore. To understand this moment, we have to understand just a little bit of Nordic

history, especially Finland. For about 100 years, Finland was under the rule of Russia,

and then in 1917, they won independence. But that didn't last for very long. About 20 years later,

and the winner of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded. Now, the reason was land. The two countries

shared an 800 mile long border give or take, and the Soviets, well, they wanted to take. They wanted

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