This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 7th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

The president says he wasn't told about the now public claims that Russia paid bounties on U.S. soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and if

we assume that's true, why on earth would that be the case?

John Glazer directs foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, he argues, no matter how you

slice it, it speaks to either a lack of interest in the substantive work of being commander

of chief of the military or advisors concerned about giving the president information that he won't like.

The bottom line, Laser argues is that the U.S. should get out of Afghanistan.

So I think the administration's kind of response to this news to this

New York Times story has been kind of all over the place. You have high-level officials like

CIA Director Gina Haspel, or Robert O'Brien, or these types of people saying that, you know, making non-denial denials, you know, issuing a statement that sort of seems

like it's pushing back on these findings from the New York Times, but in actuality it is not.

They're doing that because although it is their job,

the intelligence community that is, to inform the president and brief him of

important things, it's also seemingly their job not to publicly embarrass the president.

And this embarrasses the president.

Really any way you cut it, it doesn't look good for him.

Either he was fully informed and didn't do anything about it and still talked to Vladimir

Putin on the phone five or six times and tried to get him invited back into the G7

slash G8 or he didn't know about it because his advisors don't really confront him with

pieces of information that he that conflict with his priors because he reacts in a harsh way

either way it's pretty damnable.

Either way, it's kind of controversial.

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