Gatay, humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas. What a treat we have today.

One of the most consequential Australian politicians in recent history, Alexander Downer,

who was the foreign minister of Australia, which is what Americans call the Secretary of State,

for those American listeners. During the Iraq War, 9-11, he was at the helm of a very

successful conservative government headed by the Prime Minister John Howard for over a decade.

And subsequently became Australia's ambassador to the United Kingdom. Now, in a weird quirk of terminology, ambassadors

between Commonwealth countries are called High Commissioners. So when you hear us talk about

the High Commissioner to the UK, that's just a fancy way of saying ambassador because Australia

and the UK are both Commonwealth countries. And while he was the ambassador slash high commissioner to the United

Kingdom, he had a drink with a gentleman named George Papadopoulos, who was on the Trump

campaign before Donald Trump was elected president. And Papadopoulos mentioned something about the

Russians having dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Now, Downer as the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom and obviously a member of the

Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance between the sort of Anglophone countries, very close with the FBI

and the CIA, thought that it might be appropriate to alert American law enforcement

about the fact that an allegation had been made,

that a foreign adversary was going to interfere in the 2016 election.

Thus began Russiagate, the Mueller investigation,

and a huge amount of global kerfuffle around this inciting incident, which

Downer was part of. I wanted to pick his brain about that. I wanted to pick his brain about

what it was like to be the foreign minister at some of the most trying times in recent history.

And what it was like to be fundamental to essentially coordinating the

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