Joshua Geltzer

Right.

You know? And the legal advisor to the NSC, Josh Geltzer, said, "Hey, you know, d- the Department of Justice has been sitting on these indictments for Sinwar and others.

We could put those out." And my-

Kidding, kidnapping and killing Americans.

Well, can you can you explain that insularity then, like who the main players are? Because I think that's really important for people to understand, especially towards the end, as now, you know, Biden was declining cognitively.

He had a very, very small group of advisers, many of them who are currently engaging in this public about face, whether it's Brett McGurk.

or Jake Sullivan, but who were the decision makers on Gaza policy and how did they play into this scenario?

So it's Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor, and now I should note the Henry Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft at Harvard University.

It was very much just Sheikh Sullivan, again, McGurk, the president, Feiner, to a degree.

This is really abnormal.

I mean, even when you think about Israel-Palestine policy, we'll hear often from people, well, all presidents have struggled with Israel and counted on a close coterie of advisers.

Even people who worked with these same officials in the Obama administration and in the Biden era on other crises said this was just strange.

So to outline a few of them, for instance, there were...

Especially by the middle end of twenty twenty-four, really fulsome discussions among what's called the Interagency Lawyers Group, bringing together lawyers from the Pentagon, intelligence community, State Department, NSC, under White House, uh, White House Legal Chief Joshua Geltzer at the time.

Those discussions were heated.

Very often people came very close to confirming a war crime had happened, or the mood in the room would be that, you know, eighty, eighty-five, ninety percent of the lawyers there would say, "We really think we have to find a violation here." What would come out of that, however, would be a briefing that went around in government saying, "This incident was discussed." One sentence or two sentence summary, right? That people present in those meetings felt was not a, a, an actual depiction of the level of alarm, concern, and evidence that, that was there.

Okay, on to today's episode.

For the first fifteen months after October seventh, twenty-twenty-three, one question hovered over almost every major decision in the war in Gaza.

How do you bring the hostages home? The intense negotiations that followed involved Israel and Hamas, obviously, but also Qatar, Egypt, the CIA, the White House, Israeli intelligence, and eventually two American administrations working together.

At the center of those negotiations was Brett McGurk, President Biden's senior Middle East adviser and one of the most experienced American officials in the region.

Brett has served in senior national security roles across four presidencies.

The Bush administration, where I first met him, we overlapped in Iraq, the Obama administration, the first Trump administration, and then the Biden administration.

Brett is explicit that this is not intended as the final history.

It is his reconstruction of events he personally participated in, conversations and decisions made, as he put it, under extraordinary pressure, ambiguity, and uncertainty.