David

And I don't think you could make the case

I'm not even sure the DOJ tried to make the case that they were sort of taking tasking from the Russians, but you end up with this very murky, hard to pin down method of influence in which the Russians were financially backing a bunch of, you know,

kind of very right-wing conservative commentators and podcasters.

And yet, just by virtue, to your point, Gordon, of anyone even trying to investigate it or bringing it up, it becomes instantly political.

Really, you end up having debates around, well, you know, because I think at the time it was the Biden DOJ.

It's like, well, is this a political witch hunt?

You're just going after some conservative commentators.

You know, you're not actually trying to go after the Russians.

And so it becomes instantly sensitive to

to even look at a case like this.

Tom, I guess, I mean, question for you is, I mean, as a journalist, political editor now, you know, writing these novels, I mean, how much have you seen Russian influence in British public and kind of political life?

Like, is this, are you seeing it more and more?

I know it's hard to quantify, but how common are these kind of stories in British politics?

Why do we think we're having a long conversation about Russian interference and not, for example, Chinese interference?

Now, obviously, they both do it to some degree, and I think we talked a little bit about this, Gordon, in our series on interference in the US election, but it is a fascinating kind of fundamental piece of this that we're not talking about another country doing this stuff.

We're talking about the Russians, and we're talking about instances all over Europe,

the United States, and frankly, the globe, where the Russians do this.

And it doesn't seem like anybody else quite has the same toolkit.

But not at the same scale.

Well, I guess also, I mean, this is a point that John Cipher, former CIA officer and also friend of the show, we did a live stream with a while back on Epstein and the Russia connection.