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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, life and culture.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator.

I am delighted to be joined today by Casey Michelle, who is a journalist whose work has appeared

in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Vox, the New Republic, and Politico

magazine. And he is the author of an amazingly timely book

called American kleptocracy, How the US Created the Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.

And this book is particularly interesting on the subject of Ukraine, which, of course,

is the only story that anybody wants to talk about in the world at the moment.

And your book, Casey, details quite extensively the curious financial ties and very shady financial ties between Ukraine and America.

First of all, I want to say, obviously, nobody wants to benefit financially out of a terrible situation like

this, but you must be pretty struck that your book is more relevant than ever now.

Yeah, Freddie, obviously, it's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me. And obviously,

thank you for the kind words for the book. And as we were just talking off Mike, one of the few

silver linings of all the horrors we've seen out of Moscow's invasion over the past few weeks

is suddenly there's this realization of the relevancy and the salience of why it is important

to follow these transnational oligarchic money laundering networks and then beyond that the kind of

national security threats that certainly those of us who've been covering this and working on this

angle for years and years have been kind of banging our drums about that.

It's not just shell companies.

...