Jeffrey Sachs Is Trying To Fix The New York Times' Iran War Coverage, One Email At A Time

Our timeline of events leading up to Operation Epic Fury reveals a puzzling jump cut.

At around 4 p.m. EST on Feb. 27, Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi appeared on CBS News online and announced that Iran had agreed to major concessions in the negotiations with the U.S. that he was mediating: “If the ultimate objective is to ensure forever that Iran cannot have a nuclear bomb, I think we have cracked that problem.”

A few hours later, at 2:30 a.m. EST on Feb. 28, President Donald Trump appeared on screens around the world and announced that Iran’s nuclear enrichment had become intolerable. “They’ve rejected every opportunity to renounce their nuclear ambitions and we can’t take it anymore,” he said. America was going to war.

Into the breach, Columbia University Prof. Jeffrey Sachs has offered an explanation. The march to war with Iran had begun much earlier, decades earlier, but at least as early as March 2025, with a speech by Scott Bessent before the Economic Club of New York.

Bessent described the aim of an executive order that Trump had signed just 16 days after assuming office. It called on the the Department of Treasury to apply “maximum pressure” to Iran. (Sachs is familiar with the consequences of U.S. economic statecraft.)

“Watch this space. If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither,” Bessent said.

By January 2026, Bessent would boast that “President Trump ordered the Treasury … to put maximum pressure on Iran and it worked.”

“In December their economy collapsed,” he said. “We saw a major bank go under. The central bank has started to print money. There is a dollar shortage. They are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the street.”

Though Team Trump had promised an end to forever wars in the fall of 2024, it had set regime change into motion within three weeks of Inauguration Day.

News coverage reflective of Bessent’s comments would move the Iran War out of the realm of nuclear negotiations gone sour and into the thornier realities of permanent Washington’s designs on the Middle East.

Sachs has personally appealed to the New York Times for their coverage to incorporate Bessent’s comments, but to no avail.

I do not agree with Sachs on everything, but value his insights as one of the only geopolitical analysts willing to identify the schism between the change voters are frequently promised and the vexing consistency of American foreign policy, and willing to stick his neck out to venture some explanations.

Transcript:

Emily Kopp: To what degree should Americans be concerned about a global energy crisis and that crisis spiraling into stagflation or even a global recession? And is that possible even if as reports are just emerging in the last hour suggesting Trump begins to withdraw?

Jeffrey Sachs: It’s a very serious crisis. If the US and Israel continue their war of aggression will have a profoundly deep economic downturn. This is the kind of energy disruption that led to two massive crises in the 1970s, and this is on a similar scale. So we had the so- called oil shock of the Arab oil embargo in 1973, 74, and we had the shock in the Middle East around the Iranian Revolution actually in 1979, 80. In both cases, the US experienced a very intense stagflationary period, which means inflation rose, output and employment fell, living standards fell, and the sense of crisis was very deep. In both of those episodes, we’re basically entering a similar global crisis now, except if Israel and the United States stop their war of aggression.

Emily Kopp: Is there still an opportunity to undo this potential damage to the global economy?

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, because essentially it is something that can still be repaired. The main disruption actually is that ships cannot pass through the Strait of Hormuz. Because of that, storage facilities are filled. Because of that, pumping from the fields is shut down. And then on top of that, of course, is the direct damage from the military hits in both directions — Israel bombing oil bunkers in Iran and Iran retaliating by attacking energy infrastructure across the Straits of Hormuz and into the Arabian Peninsula. So the damage from the military attacks can take weeks and months to repair. The opening of the straits of Hormuz could be not quite instantaneous, but essentially so. The longer this goes on, of course, the greater the crisis, the far greater damage to the world economy. We could have the biggest downturn in the world caused by this if this were to be prolonged for weeks or months.

And if, as is said by many military analysts, the anti-missile defenses in the Gulf run out or maybe already have run out and in Israel come close to running out — if the US and Israel continue to prosecute the war under those circumstances, the physical destruction of the energy system will be so great that it would take years to recover.

Emily Kopp: Do you get the sense that this was something that the administration thought about before it initiated the strikes?

Jeffrey Sachs: I get the sense that Trump never thinks about anything very much. I get the sense that he is increasingly delusional and living in his own world, and that something happened three or four months ago. I don’t know whether it was a physical event or a psychological event or some other reason, but Trump has lost all restraint in threatening other countries, in bombing other countries, in calling for war with other countries, in expressing disdain for human life and not even faking it anymore. I sense something changed. I may be wrong. Of course, as Netanyahu said, this is his dream for 40 years, so it was quite clear that we’d be at war in some way with Iran, and that has been on the agenda for decades, literally. But there’s something unhinged, especially about this group right now. Trump, who is obviously a profoundly malignant narcissist, meaning that he absolutely cannot brook any opposition or any evidence that is contrary to his gut, which he refers to increasingly often.

Hegseth is clearly an idiot that knows nothing about what he is doing, but has all these murderous toys at his disposal right now. And we are in La La Land with a whole group, including Mr. Huckabee (U.S. ambassador to Israel) and others who are seemingly craving the armageddon and the end times. So it’s a very weird environment, and there must be some grownups in Washington someplace. They’re hiding. Congress doesn’t want to take this on. Every Republican, other than a couple of heroes like Congressman Massey and Senator Rand Paul, absolutely are unable and unwilling to serve the constitution that they are elected to defend. It’s their responsibility to prevent this from happening, but when they’re given the opportunity to express their views or to have the oversight of the people on this. They say they don’t even want to take it on. So we have left this unprecedentedly unjustified, dangerous, unprovoked, potentially disastrous war to one crazed man and his sycophantic team.

Emily Kopp: Well, I hope he proves you wrong in terms of his capacity for restraint. I’m encouraged by the recent reporting that he’s-

Jeffrey Sachs: I haven’t seen any recent reports of restraint, but my belief is that there is a path to restraint, and that’s for the rest of the world to say, “We are not going over the cliff because of your madness.” And to say that to Trump and to Netanyahu very clearly. I really can’t believe that we’re going to have 191 other heads of government watching their economies implode and having virtually no one say so. We have in Europe, of course, Pedro Sanchez, the very astute and brave president or prime minister, goes by both titles of Spain, say, “No, this is not our war. We’re not part of this.” We had a wonderful statement by the president of Ireland that this is an addiction to violence and it’s illegal. We have some leaders elsewhere. Most are just hunkering down. They don’t want to be the one to call out this madness, but I do believe that the madness is felt everywhere.

And if they find their voice or get behind Pedro Sanchez and others, then we would see a crescendo worldwide saying to Israel and the United States, “You cannot destroy the whole world on a whim. Stop it, go home.” That’s what needs to happen. We don’t even need negotiations. We don’t need agreements on anything. They need to stop the carpet bombing of Iran. This is the main point.

Emily Kopp: So professor, you said that you trace a lot of this to Trump’s psychological state. And I think regardless of what you think about his psychological state, it’s clear that he’s on a sugar high from the decapitation strikes in Venezuela, some of the cartel leaders in Mexico. And I’ve seen you emphasize in many of your interviews that the violations of international law and the bucking of our multilateral obligations here, and I’ve seen you talk about your frustrations that leaders in Europe aren’t doing anything about that. Hegseth said in an interview with 60 Minutes over the weekend on the question of whether this is in accordance with international law and whether this is technically a war or not, he said that-

Pete Hegseth: The lawyers will debate all these things and we have great lawyers and we’re making sure it’s all buttoned up. There’s a reason we changed our name from the Department of Defense to the Department of War, not because we seek war, not because we want more war. Frankly, we want peace. That’s what the president has put us in charge of — creating a world where we can live more peacefully. But if war is necessary, call it war, call it conflict, call it a campaign, call it an operation, call it a contingency, call it what you want. If war is necessary, we’re going to fight to win.

Jeffrey Sachs: The only buttoning up these people need is a straight jacket, frankly. They’re out of their minds. They know nothing. Peg said, “Oh my God.” Well, maybe our secretary of war would actually read the UN charter. Under the UN charter, article two, paragraph four, it says that no country can use force or even threaten force against another sovereign state. And the only exception to that is Article 51 of the UN Charter, which allows for acts of self-defense, but that is understood in international law very clearly to mean self-defense when you are under armed attack. You cannot preemptively launch wars claiming, well, that was a threat to us, especially when you’re in the middle of negotiations where the lead negotiating mediator, who was the Omani minister, said, “We’re making very good progress.” That is not a casus belli. So they have nothing buttoned up at all. They have nothing buttoned up regarding the United States Constitution either, which gives the power to declare war exclusively to the United States Congress.

This was not an emergency action. This is a war of blatant aggression, and that’s a difference. We were not attacked, we were not threatened with attack. I have met over the years and over the months and over the weeks with diplomats from all over the world, including from Iran, I have met twice with the Iranian president in the past two years. They were wanting, above all, negotiations. They were repeatedly insisting we do not want nuclear weapons. It’s against the religious orders, and it is not what we want. We want the United States and Israel to stop threatening us, and we want the destruction of our economy at the hands of the United States to end. One of the lesser remarked points of recent weeks was a statement given by our Secretary of Treasury [Scott Bessent], who really is a thug. And he explained in very precise terms in an interview with Fox Business in Davos that the United States, starting last March after Trump came into office, introduced policies to break the Iranian economy, to crash the Iranian currency, to make the Iranian banks fail, to make people suffer, and to bring them out onto the streets to overthrow the government. And Mr. Bessent called that “economic statecraft.”

Scott Bessent: Making Iran broke again will mark the beginning of our updated sanctions policy. Watch this space. If economic security is national security, the regime in Tehran will have neither.

Jeffrey Sachs: That’s what passes for economic statecraft. All of that was brazenly illegal under international law. The same thug, our treasury secretary said today that the United States has given permission to India to buy Russian oil. How the heck does the United States determine that it can give permission or withdraw permission for India to trade with Russia? This is their mindset. They think they run the world. This is the delusion of Mr. Trump, and he has dragged our whole country into a disaster because of this delusion.

Emily Kopp: A lot I want to dig into there, but I did want to ask specifically about one of the end games that the administration has laid out in one of its rationales, among many, that it’s listed for going to war with Iran, is that Iran could use its ballistic missiles and drone capability, its conventional weapons, to safeguard a potential future nuclear program. Is there precedent for that in international law - asking a nation to unilaterally disarm because it is so noxious? Can you imagine a situation where a regime is responsible for so many atrocities that it could be asked to completely disarm?

Jeffrey Sachs: It’s not responsible for so many atrocities, first of all. It doesn’t want nuclear weapons, and it signed an agreement to have strict supervision over its nuclear program with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Emily Kopp: But hypothetically, if you were to strong arm that position, let’s say, and there was just a completely noxious regime that was a global terror, could you ask that nation to unilaterally disarm to give up all of its conventional weapons? Is there precedent for that at all?

Jeffrey Sachs: No, but if that was the idea, you could go to the UN Security Council on which we are a permanent member and make that case. So then it’s possible under the UN charter for the UN Security Council to do many, many things, even to have military force. If you make the case that there is a regime that’s so dangerous, they thought of that in 1945. They thought about the fact that we have collective security, that if there is a situation that is so dangerous that the world sees that there’s a madman loose — I’m not speaking about the American president for the moment — but that there is a madman loose. There is a way to approach that, and that is through the UN Security Council. And interestingly, well, Iran is not a permanent member and has no veto in the UN Security Council. So if that case were real, it could be presented.

It’s not real at all. It’s not remotely real. It absolutely has no relevance in practical terms for anything that we’re seeing right now, and that’s why they wouldn’t even dream of bringing such an argument forward. It’s all the more ironic because it is the United States that absolutely unequivocally is the world’s rogue nation. We’re the one with Israel that goes to war when we want. We’re the one that kidnaps presidents. We’re the one that bombs other countries. We’re the one that is bombing, carpet bombing, Tehran this moment. We’re the one that killed 160 school girls, and then Trump brazenly lies about it because also he’s a psychopath, not just a chronic liar, but he’s a psychopath. So we’re the one that’s the rogue nation. Now, the problem is we do have a veto in the UN Security Council, so the other members of the Security Council cannot take us to task under the UN charter because we’ll veto it.

Iran is not in that situation. Iran does not have a veto if the UN Security Council acts. It’s also the point — it’s the key point, it’s the essential point that 10 years ago, the UN Security Council voted unanimously an agreement with Iran, the joint comprehensive plan of action, which put Iran under strict supervision. That was the UN Security Council unanimously acting — China, Russia, the United States, Britain, France, and the 10 rotating members unanimously. And who broke that agreement? Not Iran. It was complying utterly with the agreement. It was being monitored in detail by the International Atomic Energy Agency, but Netanyahu and Trump ripped up the agreement in 2018. So your hypothetical is interesting because it applies to Israel and to the United States. These are two rogue nations that threaten the entire world. Israel is in nonstop war with all its neighbors. It was given a green light by the United States ambassador two weeks ago when Ambassador Huckabee said that Israel has within its rights under not quite international law, but Genesis 15: to all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.

And if they take it, that’s fine. Then he tried to walk it back afterwards by saying, “Well, they aren’t taking it. “ But Ambassador Huckabee, they are taking it and they’re taking it together with us.

This is the crazy point. We are the rogue nations, Israel and the United States, and it poses a question that we’ve not seen since 1945. We’ve never had such a deranged leadership. We’ve never had such a utterly militaristic — I won’t call it a policy — but a militaristic reflex to attack any country that moves. Trump has bombed more countries in the last year. I think the count is eight now, without a moment of scrutiny by Congress, by international law, by the United Nations, and without a moment of remorse from that psychopathic personality of his.

Emily Kopp: Well, they keep trying war powers resolutions, but can’t get the votes, can’t get enough people-

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, because Congress has basically died, and this has been true for decades. Nobody wants to look at the CIA. Nobody wants to look at the deep state. Nobody perhaps since the assassination of John F. Kennedy wants to take it on. And anytime anyone has raised a question, they’ve been shut down. I just finished a very remarkable book by the deputy attorney for the House Assassinations Investigation Committee in 1997. If I remember correctly, his name is Tannenbaum. I may have the name wrong. I apologize. The book, and I may have the title not quite right, but it’s that day in Dallas. “Lee Harvey Oswald Did NOT Kill JFK as the title. And just to recount, he uncovered as the investigator for the House Investigation Committee, absolute, terribly distressing, but now understood evidence about the CIA’s complicity in the murder. And when he went to the committee chair, who was Congressman Stokes from Cleveland, the congressman shut it down and said, “Well, we’re not going to have subpoenas. We’re not going to do investigations.” The kind of thing, Emily, you face all the time when you see that the government absolutely refuses to tell the truth or look into any issue.

And so he shut it down. And this lawyer who wrote this book decades later said to the congressman, “Well, why did you hire me if it comes to this? “ And the congressman said, “We didn’t think you’d get this far.” But then the congressman said, “In this town, you don’t go after the CIA.” So we have had an unexamined state. We have had a Congress that has played dead for decades, but never so dead as now. Here you have a war of aggression that threatens the whole world and their answer is, “We don’t want to talk about it.”

Emily Kopp: And I’ve seen you say in other interviews that you trace a lot of US foreign policy to the CIA. And your point about Bessent, I think, I agree, has not been examined in the way that it should be by the US media. And to me, the fact that-

Jeffrey Sachs: Well, more than that, Emily, when he said it, of course, as an economist, I know these things, I tried to explain them, but here’s the treasury secretary saying, “We’re thugs. We destroyed the economy. We brought people out onto the streets.” And the New York Times didn’t report it at all, didn’t report it. So I wrote to the reporters on the Times, “Don’t you think you should report it?” They didn’t answer, of course.

Emily Kopp: Of course.

Jeffrey Sachs: Then a couple of days ago in another article, I don’t know, this is how I spend my time writing to these reporters, “Don’t you think you could tell the truth?” They had a story about Iran and unwillingness to negotiate to meet Trump’s terms. I wrote, “Don’t you think that maybe the article could mention that actually Iran had reached the agreement and the United States ripped it up?” And a reporter wrote back to me, “I agree with you, but the higher ups don’t let me say it.”

Emily Kopp: Wow.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yeah.

Emily Kopp: Quite an admission. I mean, for my part, I saw you talking about that, the economic state craft of our treasury secretary within hours of the strikes. And we did a timeline of all of the events leading to the March to War, and started with that maximum pressure executive order that Trump signed within two weeks of being inaugurated.

Staffer to President Trump: The intent here is to give you all of the possible tools to, I’d say, engage with the Iranian government to ensure that going forward, they’re less of a malign actor on the world stage.

President Trump: So this is one that I’m torn about. Everybody wants me to sign it. I’ll do that. It’s very tough on Iran...The Iran situation, hopefully I’m going to sign it, but hopefully we’re not going to have to use it very much. We will see whether or not we can arrange or work out a deal with Iran and everybody can live together, and maybe that’s possible, and maybe it’s not possible. So I’m signing this and I’m unhappy to do it, but I really have not so much choice because we have to be strong and firm, and I hope that it’s not going to have to be used in any great measure at all.

Emily Kopp: To me, that suggests that the wheels started turning towards regime change much earlier than the negotiations around nuclear weapons.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes. This has nothing to do with negotiations. And it is this deep state truth that needs to be understood. The specific timing of events does get determined by politicians to an extent. The president can say, “We go now or we go next week.” So I think probably the president gives the order, not the CIA, but the deep state sets the agenda. This president doesn’t set the agenda. He couldn’t set the table, but he could say yes or no. And so we saw this, by the way, in Venezuela tried to also explain this. When Trump — The United States tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government for 25 years. It goes back at least to 2002 to a coup attempt at the time. Then it proceeded in the 2010s under several presidencies. It included maximum pressure. It included an attempted color revolution during the Obama period. Obama was the one to first put on comprehensive sanctions on Venezuela.

These are deep state activities. Of course, Trump put the maximal pressure on in 2017, 2018, but Obama started the process after protests in which the US played an active role as usual in 2014, 2015. Okay. But when Trump came in in the fall of 2017, just first year of his presidency, he had dinner on the margins of the UN General Assembly debate, general debate, it’s called, which is September every year. So he came to New York to speak to the UN, and then he had a dinner with the Latin American presidents. And two of them told me in detail the story that he said already back then, “Why don’t I just invade Venezuela?” And I had the same story told, I won’t say which countries obviously, and they talked him down. “Mr. President, that might not be a good idea,” and so forth. So instead they put on maximal pressure, squeezed the hell out of the economy, prevent oil exports, seize control of financial assets.

They did all of that. That didn’t work. So they actually announced a different president. Mr. Guaido said, “That man’s president, not Maduro.” And okay, this time they kidnapped the president. In other words, this is not a spur of the moment or a late development. This is an ongoing long issue. And in the case of Iran to come back to our current woes, we had this explanation all the way back in 2001 when Wesley Clark explained that he saw just after 9/11 the memo that said seven wars in five years. And these were wars of choice to clean up the Middle East, U.S. and Israel hand in hand. And those wars included Libya. They included Sudan, they included Syria, they included Iraq, and of course they included Iran. And so this is the seventh actually of the wars. It’s been on the agenda for a long time.

Turns out with Trump, you don’t really need a reason to launch the wars. You just launched them. For the other presidents, maybe they follow these niceties a little more. They have to find convenient excuses or do the operations covertly. But this is what I mean by saying that Trump seems to have lost any kind of remaining inhibition. Maybe if enough people have told him that he’s the savior, I don’t know what it is, but something to my mind has, something got loose and he’s on a war rampage right now.

Emily Kopp: Well, I think even people with drastically different opinions about President Trump and you are asking, we were told that America First meant realism, conserving military assets for when they’re needed most, and most of all antipathy to regime change in the Middle East. And increasingly, the Trump administration seems to be defining it as flouting international law. So it sounds like your thesis is something like the deep state met sort of its perfect match in someone who was as willing to flout international law as President Trump. Is that sort of—

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, another way to put it that I’ve said for 25 years, the main job of the U.S. president is to keep a foot on the break because the war machine is always revving. The deep state is always aiming for more conquests, more military bases, more territory.

And the job of the American president — we don’t have an idol, by the way. You lift up your foot from the brake, the war goes forward. We now have a madman who has his foot firmly on the accelerator. So it’s not only not on the break, but we’re having a grand old time on this. This is the greatest thing going right now. We can smash anybody. We can kill anybody. I can pick the new leader. We’ll kill that one if we don’t like them. Oh, sorry. We killed all the leaders that were on our list. This is a kind of madness right now. I hope you’re right that somebody is signaling some restraint of the madness. But to my mind, the deep state is always revving because the grand strategy, as these people call it, of the United States is global dominance. That’s the grand strategy.

Anyone that threatens the dominance, any country that threatens the dominance is an enemy. So you can’t be just another major power if you are, you’re an enemy by definition of the U.S. because the U.S. quest is for hegemony. Israel’s quest is for regional hegemony, and that’s why the fit is so good. That’s why the CIA and Mossad are basically absolutely linked agencies and from all we can gather have been since the early 1960s. This goes back to Engleton and Mossad. So to my mind, this is exactly like you said. They have the perfect political front right now who loves all of this stuff. This is our chance to corner the world oil markets. This is our chance to run the Middle East. This is our chance to cut off Russian oil exports and to stop the flow of oil to China. This is madness, but that’s what we’re seeing right now.

And for Israel, it’s a somewhat different agenda. This is the chance to, I don’t know, relive the Book of Joshua. Or for Huckabee, it’s the opportunity to live through armageddon. God only knows — I shouldn’t say it that way — sho knows what’s on these people’s minds, but the basic agenda is shared. It’s not Israel pushing us. It’s not the U.S. pushing Israel. Israel is for regional hegemony. The United States is for global hegemony, and it’s been a partnership for at least 60 years, ever since Kennedy’s death, by the way.

Emily Kopp: And professor, I think there are people on the right, some of the president’s supporters who would support the U.S. exerting its power for global hegemony, but the administration is not making that case. And it feels sort of insulting to our intelligence that they won’t make the actual case and that we’re being told that it’s about nuclear weapons that were bombed into oblivion six months ago. And a country that never had a nuclear weapons program [since 2003] they just were enriching uranium up to 60%.

Jeffrey Sachs: Right. And by the way, as people should understand, the reason that it went up to 60%, whatever judgment one has about that is because the U.S. and Israel first ripped up the JCPOA because it was at 3% and rigorously monitored, and then they ripped it up, and then they started assassinating Iranian generals and leaders, and then they bombed or destroyed the Natanz plant. So there was just aggression, and the Iranians responded in this way to the aggression, but saying all the time, “We want the JCPOA. We want to get back. We want an agreement.” But again, the reason why none of this was “tested” is that Israel and the United States absolutely — I mean, with these particular leaders and with Mossad and the CIA, I think they don’t want an agreement. They want to overthrow the regime. There’s also, I’m sure everybody understands, a grudge match aspect to this, which is Israel wants to overthrow the regime because it wants regional hegemony.

And the United States remains pissed off that Iran got away from them because they had actually overthrown the government of Iran in 1953 and successfully put in a plea state. So they did it. They did just what Trump wants. And then damn it, the Iranians got away from American control in 1979. And you know what the United States did almost immediately afterwards? It provided massive amounts of armaments and finance to Saddam Hussein to go kill Iranians. So this is a war that goes back to 1953, essentially. And this is also, that’s why the deep state part of this is so real.

Emily Kopp: And when Witkoff talks about the fact that the Iranians came into negotiations very bellicose and said we have enough uranium or enriched uranium for a dozen weapons or so. That doesn’t — to put it politely, to put it mildly, that doesn’t match up with your conversations with the Iranians?

Jeffrey Sachs: What Witkoff said was that Iran did not cave to all of Trump’s demands. He was surprised that they didn’t just capitulate. They agreed on many important matters, and the JCPOA was there all the time. And the principle of a strictly monitored non-nuclear program was their country’s doctrine and was the doctrine of the supreme leader, which they went out of their way to murder. And they went out of their way to murder him because he was an obstacle. What was the obstacle? He didn’t want nuclear weapons, so you better murder him. Come on. This is absurd. And Mr. Witkoff is a little bit overworked, it seems, because he negotiates everything, but he didn’t pay much time on this.

Emily Kopp: No, he got the acronym for IAEA wrong. I noticed that across several interviews.

Jeffrey Sachs: I believe it. I was told, by the way, by many people, there were no experts in these negotiations at all. None.

Emily Kopp: Wow.

Jeffrey Sachs: This is fatuous. This is fatuous that this is the way the U.S. government behaves. By the way, I’m looking at the composition of cabinets around the world. The U.S. is one of the least educated cabinets of any major country. We don’t have one PhD scientist or engineer in the whole cabinet. Nobody knows what they’re talking about on any technical issue at all.

Emily Kopp: Well, for my part, I value integrity.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yeah, integrity’s very important. Expertise and integrity goes — it should go hand in hand.

Emily Kopp: Yeah. I’m less concerned about the expertise actually. I think you can hire people with good expertise, but it’s not-

Jeffrey Sachs: But they don’t. These are locker room boys. They’re having a great old time of it. They’re just going to kill as many people as they can.

Emily Kopp: And locker room boys who mean what they say are fine with me, but it seems like what they said right before they needed everybody’s votes is very different than the policies that they’re implementing now.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes. And can you imagine that US missiles kill 160 schoolgirls and the president lies about that too? He lies about everything. He doesn’t say it’s a tragic mistake or whatever. He just lies. He says it’s the Iranians that did it.

Emily Kopp: Will there be consequences for that?

Jeffrey Sachs: This is the state of affairs. Well, these are — all of it’s war crimes. Will there be consequences? The main consequence we need is for the world to stand up and say to Israel and the United States, stop destroying the world. That’s the consequence we need.

Emily Kopp: And you don’t see that being any sort of formal resolution. You just think world leaders need to find their voice on this and their spines.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, because if they do and they call out what this really is, which is so cruel, so benighted, so unlawful, so unthought through, so violent, so vile. If they call this out for what it really is, it will stop. Because actually, if the whole world says to Trump, “Stop,” and says to Netanyahu, “You have caused a hell of a lot of damage for 30 years. You’ve been delusional for 40 years, I guess. You must stop. Go live within your own borders and stop wrecking the world for everybody else.” It will stop.

Emily Kopp: What do we do about the deep state? Because I would say public awareness of the existence of a deep state has never been more widespread. You mentioned JFK’s assassination. We saw the declassification of many documents related to that case, and I think that did advance-

Jeffrey Sachs: Showing all the linkages.

Emily Kopp: And certainly the way that Schlesinger was investigating the CIA and how that might’ve upset people at Langley. But what do we do about it? Because it seems completely immune to electoral politics.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, of course. When Kennedy was assassinated, Truman wrote a famous op-ed weeks afterwards that said, “This was the biggest mistake I made.” It’s widely interpreted almost obviously so as Truman saying CIA did this because the timing was absolutely unmistakable in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. There was one time and one time only that there was an attempt at a real investigation, and that was Frank Church’s committee, Frank Church, senator of Idaho, in 1975. And it was a strange confluence of events because J. Edgar Hoover, who was one of the most vile people of American history, had died because Watergate crisis had come and Nixon had resigned and Ford was an unelected president and could not and did not want to buck Congress in this. And because Richard Helms at the CIA had gone and Colby had come in and Colby did not want to inherit all of the crimes of this agency, which were countless.

And so there was a confluence of just that moment with a very brave U.S. senator, relentlessly brave, extremely decent, a real Boy Scout personality, if I could put it that way, who wanted to get to the truth. And he held hearings for several months against all odds and uncovered countless assassination plots and coup activities and MKUltra and spying on American citizens and CIA, FBI collaborations. Well, that was 1975, and we’ve never had such oversight again. And the crimes just continued, and it’s been 50 years now without oversight. So what I would recommend is an oversight committee to review what the hell happened to our republic, and what is this agency doing, and what is the deep state doing? Are we going to get it? Well, you never know. There are some strong, independent-minded senators. My candidate is Senator Rand Paul should do this.

Emily Kopp: Totally.

Jeffrey Sachs: I think he’s the finest senator that we have in the United States. He’s got great integrity. He’s independent. He’s smart. I think he should do this, but we haven’t had it for decades and we need it urgently.

Emily Kopp: Well, you might be interested to know, professor, we published some stories on Friday actually about this separate tranche of FBI documents called Prohibitive Access or Prohibited Access Documents. And Matt Taibbi likened it to the family jewels of the CIA. And apparently this is where the FBI has squirreled away all of the documents that it doesn’t want rank and file FBI agents to see. It’s only a few select deep state folks at the FBI who have access to this separate filing system. We don’t know what’s in it yet, but there are at least people in the Senate who are interested in looking at it. Although to your point, Congress has been greatly defanged, and I have a healthy amount of skepticism when it comes to any congressional investigation, but-

Jeffrey Sachs: Well you’ve done incredible work uncovering some of these secrets. And you and I intersected a bit because I chaired a commission on COVID and reached the conclusion thanks to a lot of your discoveries and findings, which were brilliant, that this virus, to my mind, I won’t put words in your mouth, but I think they came out of US lab and that the US made this virus. I think it probably accidentally leaked, but it’s another one of these huge events in the world that our government doesn’t want us to know about. And it’s so obvious, obvious what needs to be looked at. And yet actually looking at it seems to be impossible because the government closes the curtains, says there’s nothing there. You just listened to us. It’s all China or whatever baloney they want to feed us. And this is like so many things, where these wars come from, where these pandemics come from, where these assassinations come from.

I thought Tulsi Gabbard was going to get us some of these facts. I don’t know what’s happened to her. I hope she’s safe and alive and actually doing something for us. Well,

Emily Kopp: That’s what I mean too about this whole system seems so unaccountable to electoral politics. You have Tulsi Gabbard of all people at the head of U.S. intelligence, and according to your thesis, which I’m pretty persuaded by, we’re still doing the CIA’s foreign policy.

Jeffrey Sachs: Yes.

Emily Kopp: So it just seems completely unaccountable.

Jeffrey Sachs: It’s very tough. No doubt this is a real machine. This is, by the way, almost every CIA director has been pathetic because when they come in as political appointments, they immediately determine that their biggest cause in life is to prove to the CIA itself how loyal they are. Panetta, for example, was an example of that. You read his memoirs and you just gasp that rather than overseeing the agency or trying to bring it back to legality, he needed to prove he’s one of them. That was the biggest challenge he faced. And they are all like that. Terrible. [Mike] Pompeo. Oh my God. I mean, we could talk for hours about how this criminality continues. But it’s 50 years — it’s time actually for us to retake a republican constitutional form of government. That is republic. It’s not a party label. It means that we have a republic rather than an empire.

Emily Kopp: Well, it’s interesting. I was just talking to Alex Berenson, another independent reporter about this phenomenon, but in civilian health agencies, and I was talking about the fact that we still don’t have a gain of function research ban and that I have seen ... I don’t want to drag you into my dispute with Jay Bhattacharya ... but I’ve done critical reporting on the fact that a gain of function research ban is five months overdue. And it seems like people come to Washington as renegades and then they get co-opted by the agency that they oversee.

Jeffrey Sachs: That’s it.

Emily Kopp: And if there is enormous pressure even within a civilian agency, I just imagine that the CIA has more creative ways, let’s say, of enforcing compliance with its dictates than the NIH, say. So if I’m seeing that a phenomenon of people who come in as critics of the institution and reformers being completely co-opted by the people that they were critical of, I just imagine that happens with the deep state too. But I did want to ask, I mean, do you have any thoughts on the fact that we still don’t have a gain of function research ban in this country? I guess it just speaks to the wider unaccountability problem.

Jeffrey Sachs: To tell you the truth, I haven’t followed the specifics in recent months, but when I spoke to Mr. Bhattacharya, as he was coming in, he told me, “We’re going to have it immediately. That’s my highest priority. I’m going to get control over this.” So I haven’t followed the twists and turns of this. I will try to look into it, but I frankly have lost track of that. I am still stuck on the fact that after several million deaths, it would be nice to actually understand where that virus came from. And I’m completely amazed that so many other quote mysteries of American life like JFK’s assassination and all the rest, that one too, has gone down the memory hole it seems, except for people like you that keep us coming back to these crucial issues.

Emily Kopp: Well, I’m sorry to deliver the bad news, but yeah, gain of function research is still not banned. And I think I see the issue slightly different in that I think it is American intellectual property, but started in a Chinese lab. But regardless, it is no longer a conspiracy theory to say that an advisor to the U.S. intelligence community, Ralph Baric, designed viruses-

Jeffrey Sachs: There you go. And if we had Baric’s lab notebooks and we had other things, we could learn some interesting things.

Emily Kopp: Certainly, certainly.

Jeffrey Sachs: But that seems not to be relevant, not to be of interest, nothing to look at there without making any accusations. Why don’t we actually look at some data? But that seems to be well beyond the capability of the United States at this stage of its history.

Emily Kopp: Except for someone that we share admiration for, which is Senator Rand Paul. There you go. Well, I know you’re tracking a lot. I’ll let you go, but just greatly appreciate your input on all of this and you taking the time.

Jefferey Sachs: Thank you very much.