Last night I highlighted “Special” Envoy Witkoff’s interview with Tucker Carlson. The transcript has now been published and a read through of that shows his remarks were even worse than the initial clips indicated.
Witkoff transcript is just eye popping: “Why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? They don’t need to absorb Ukraine. That would be like occupying Gaza…They want stability there… But the Russians also have what they want” singjupost.com/transcript-o…
— Shashank Joshi (@shashj.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 2:49 AM
STEVE WITKOFF: Well, first of all, I think President Trump sets the table for all of us. He really does this whole peace through strength thing. It’s not just a slogan. It actually works. And so when he dispatches you to go to the Middle East, people are almost a little bit intimidated before you get there. And this goes for me and other people who are doing similar jobs. So he sets the table in a pretty powerful way.
But negotiating is being outcome oriented. I talk about this a lot. It’s figuring out where you want to get to. That’s Trump’s game plan all the time. I sit with the president and we talk often about what the end game is, where does he want to get to? And once you decide where you want to get to, then it’s all about tactically figuring out what that pathway is.
With the Middle East, you know, Tucker, when I first got in and I was talking to Brett McGurk, who was the envoy on behalf of Biden, he was a smart guy.
TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.
STEVE WITKOFF: He just didn’t have a great boss giving him direction. So he couldn’t really speak on behalf of Biden. I was able to speak on behalf of Trump because we talked about it. We had a great conversation about it. He said to me, “This is where I want to get to, Steve.” And so when I went in there, I went in with the imprimatur of the president, and that’s the difference maker.
Let me remind everyone that Witkoff and Trump have now been thoroughly completed played by Bibi over the past three months! And exactly the same way that Trump and his other surrogates spent all of 2024 mocking Biden and his team for being played by Bibi. Go read the entire section dealing with Israel, especially the parts where he talks about Qatar. Then go read this Haaretz reporting on what is being called in Israel Qatargate.
STEVE WITKOFF: I think we’ve made more progress again. Look, Tucker, I’m not just saying it – every solution comes as a result of President Trump. And I don’t get paid to say that. I say it because it is the absolute truth. Putin’s got a huge respect for the President. And, you know, you saw what happened in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy and the President. Disrespecting him is not a healthy way to have a good relationship.
TUCKER CARLSON: The arrogance of small countries. It’s like, get some perspective. I mean, come on, how can you imagine acting like that?
STEVE WITKOFF: And they’re dependent on us. Oh, I know. And we’ve been so good to them.
TUCKER CARLSON: I know.
STEVE WITKOFF: But look, that’s been corrected and that’s a really good thing. It got corrected. And hopefully we’ll chalk it up to a misunderstanding and we’ll get to a peace solution here.
But I believe that we have made more progress in this Russian-Ukraine conflict in the last eight weeks than anyone thought we would ever make. I hear people describe this last conversation that the President had with President Putin as unsuccessful. It’s preposterous. By the way, we talked throughout a two-hour conversation about an ultimate ceasefire. And there are conditions that the Russians will need for an ultimate ceasefire, because an ultimate ceasefire is complicated. There’s Kursk where Ukrainian troops are surrounded. Fact. And the Russians…
STEVE WITKOFF: And the president had a great relationship with Vladimir Putin in his first term. So I think Vladimir Putin knew that it was going to be hard for the president at this time to come over to Russia. I think they’re going to meet in the coming few months. But I think it was enormously gracious for him to accept me. And I need to acknowledge that.
TUCKER CARLSON: That’s why I went over there last year, because I thought we’re moving toward a nuclear war. And I just feel like if no one’s talking to Putin, like, someone should at least broadcast his views to the world because we could have a war otherwise. That was my thinking. Anyway.
STEVE WITKOFF: When I came back after—before the first meeting with President Putin, when President Trump said to me, go over and have that conversation. I think we’re going to have a good, healthy conversation. Before that conversation, there was no talk about a Black Sea moratorium. There was no conversation about an energy infrastructure moratorium on hits between the two. We were not talking about prisoner exchanges and all kinds of other stuff after one meeting.
And I am saying to you, not because of me, because this was President Trump sending a signal to President Putin that he wanted to resume his relationship together and that they were going to be two great leaders figuring out this conflict. That was the message. That was me coming there. That was my message to President Putin. I was directed by President Trump to deliver that message, that we were here to begin a real discussion, a productive discussion about how to end this conflict. And President Putin, to his credit, sent all kinds of signals back to the president that this is the path that he wanted to be on, including statements that he made.
In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It’s been reported in the paper, but it was such a gracious moment.
And told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the President of the United States or could become the President of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kind of conversations?
And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to reestablish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy. That is a complicated situation, that war and all the ingredients that led up to it. You know, it’s never just one person, right? So I think we’re going to figure it out.
TUCKER CARLSON: It’s like a marriage. I mean, you can blame the other person all you want, but you’re implicated in it, too. So that’s just a fact. That’s just human nature. So it does raise the question. Everything you’ve said, I don’t think any fair person—everything you’ve just said about Russia, Ukraine, any fair person would acknowledge. Yeah, that’s true. But there has to be some reason that none of this has been acknowledged for three and a half years. Why the effort to prevent Americans from hearing the other side from understanding the conflict in its totality, not just parts of it, but the whole thing. Why the censorship designed to keep us from knowing what’s actually happening?
STEVE WITKOFF: Because that’s what we’ve been enduring.
TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.
There is much more divorced from reality stupidity at the link. Remember, Witkoff thinks the Qataris are great, the Emir is a wonderful guy, and with the Qataris help, he on behalf of Trump had ended the Gaza war. The reality is that Haaretz has now reported that the Qataris were actually running, as in financing, Bibi’s prime ministerial office, which is why Bibi is trying to fire both the Director of the Shin Bet and the Israeli Attorney General. It is also why Israel has restarted the Gaza war, done so with even fewer restraints, if that’s even possible, amended the law authorizing that war to now include the West Bank, and reinstated convicted terrorist Itamir Ben Gvir as Minister of National Security, who is in charge of the Israeli police. They’ve also restarted the war in south Lebanon.
But wait, there’s more!
Walz, like Witkoff, appears clueless on the basics of his own brief. Embarrassing. “…we will have this cease-fire on aerial infrastructure. That went into place immediately after President Trump’s call with President Putin this week” newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/us-sees…
— Shashank Joshi (@shashj.bsky.social) March 23, 2025 at 5:28 PM
WTF is “aerial” infrastructure?
From RBC Ukraine:
The White House confirms progress in the Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. It is noted that it started after a conversation between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, informs CBS News, citing US National Security Advisor Mike Waltz.
A journalist pointed out that Ukraine had accepted the US-brokered ceasefire without preconditions, according to the announcement. Meanwhile, Russia claimed it would restrict its operations to targeting energy infrastructure. She asked about the goal of the upcoming negotiations in Saudi Arabia.
Waltz responded that they were closer to peace in Ukraine than ever before. According to him, it all started when President Trump held calls with the leaders of both countries. After that, he and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged both Russians and Ukrainians in negotiations at their level.
Biden and his senior natsec team were terrible because they were too risk averse on problem sets where they need to be more risk accepting (Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s genocidal re-invasion) and to risk accepting when they needed to be much more risk averse (dealing with Israel and Bibi). This led them to make a number of strategic mistakes and strategic malpractice despite being very smart, very experienced, and very accomplished. Trump and his team are just off the looking glass and their the map in terms of naivete and incompetence.
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 1,123: Not the Best, Nor the BrightestPost + Comments (30)
