Kim Barker

NABU and SAP conduct the MEDAS operation.

And they feature a detective who's very well lit, very well produced.

And you're listening to it and you're feeling like, oh, this is dramatic.

Something's happening here.

And then you go into these sort of like wiretapped conversations of these people who have given themselves code names like Rocket and Sugar Man and Che Guevara and The Professor.

And you learn through these videos that some of the money that these guys are making is coming from money that was supposed to be spent to build shelters, to protect things like nuclear power substations and power transformers and things like that from Russian missiles and drones.

And each episode ends with something like, you know, more to come and to be continued.

And it really has got Ukrainians glued to their phones.

Yeah, I mean, I made that joke in the very beginning to an editor.

I'm like, it kind of feels like Netflix.

And then started looking at all the sort of social media that was being put out there, and it's exactly what Ukrainians were saying last night.

You had like the memes of Bill Hader eating popcorn, waiting for the next thing to drop.

And you had this sense that, oh, my God, is this going to actually reach the president?

Is this going to reach the president's chief of staff?

Who is going to be on these tapes next?

Yeah, I mean, in the States, anywhere really, you would have a lawyer standing behind a lectern and like reading out the charges, or maybe they would just be filed in paper.

You wouldn't have this sense of like, we're going to have a promotional series of videos around our investigation before we've even brought anybody to court.

Right.

It's very unusual.

I mean, one of the goals clearly could be to inoculate the agencies against any sort of blowback from the president's office.