Narativ with Zev Shalev (Audio)

Democrats took the Senate on Tuesday night. Decision Desk HQ called six Republican seats for them between 9:56 p.m. and 1 a.m. Eastern; they needed four. Here is the round-up as the count stood at 2:40 a.m. Wednesday, race by race, with the caller and the time on every call. The Senate The first wave hit South Carolina at 9:56. Decision Desk called the race for Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, over...

Four days out, MeidasTouch’s chief Washington correspondent told Narativ Live to read the money and the plane, not the polls. Scott MacFarlane came back from Michigan with a measure of this election that no poll prints. He told Zev Shalev on Friday to watch “where the surrogates and the money are going,” because that is “a much better read than polls ever will be.” MacFarlane reads the plane first...

Thank you Kelly Trimble , Sheryl ☀️ , Winterish for Ukraine , Courtney Busby , Andrea York , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

Sergey Lavrov landed in Atlanta on Friday morning for the G20 foreign ministers’ meeting. A day earlier Russia flew a jet drone into the platform at Dnipro’s main railway station as a train boarded and killed at least 14 people; CNN counted 15. Those two facts opened Narativ Live, and by the end of it Sean Wiswesser and Olga Lautman, a Russia analyst, had said it plainly. “This is not America isol...

The mayor of Bucha has an answer to Donald Trump's diesel deal with Vladimir Putin. He posted a photo of himself holding a jerry can of diesel and asked everyone to fill one and ship it to the United States, so Ukraine can outsupply Putin and save Americans billions. Jacob Kaarsbo saw the post on the mayor's phone on Monday, after the two laid flowers at the Bucha memorial. The former Danish intel...

Polls closed in Israel at 10 p.m. local time, which is 4 p.m. in New York. Within the hour the three main channels put the bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot at 52 seats and Netanyahu's at 50, with the Arab lists at 17 or 18, the most they have ever held. Zev went live on Narativ at 7:30 p.m. and read the night the other way from the wires: "A lot of the reporting out there is going to say that exit polls...

The House Judiciary Democrats put a case in writing Monday: Donald Trump as a participant in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, and Todd Blanche covering it up. On Narativ Live, Ellie Leonard, who reads the Epstein files page by page, and Zev Shalev agreed on the aim and doubted the work. Leonard called the report "a big buildup to a best-of album." The Katie Johnson story, the Jane Doe stories and the Max...

Brazil’s electoral court called it at 9:12 PM Brasília time. With 99.76 percent of sections counted, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took 51.75 percent — 64,066,539 votes — to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 48.25 percent, 59,724,015. A margin of 4.3 million. A fourth term. And, as Zev put it from the desk Sunday night, the end of “the most sustained campaign a US administration has ever run to pick Brazil’s preside...

A Russian drone sank the cargo ship Khoryv 13 miles off Constanța, Romania, on Friday morning. One sailor dead, three missing. Olga Lautman counts seven ships hit in the Black Sea in two weeks and 31 sailors dead or missing. "This used to start world wars," she said on Narativ Live. Europe is shifting forces to the Black Sea, she said. It is barely news. Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria have asked NA...

Russia is in the Texas Senate race. A Kremlin troll crew posted a fake video in Texas using a stolen face to accuse James Talarico of abusing him as a child; Graphika pins it on Storm-1516, the crew that ran the same story on Tim Walz in 2024. Talarico's opponent, Ken Paxton, runs on $158 million from Musk. Homeland Security searched Ilhan Omar's house. Abdul El-Sayed got the Muslim Brotherhood qu...

Lev Parnas says Zampolli’s firing is a house-clearing before the Democrats take the House. Olga Lautman says Republika Srpska is a Kremlin proxy and anyone doing business there works for Moscow. On Narativ Live, the two connect five people around Trump to one region. Paolo Zampolli was not fired for the deals, Lev Parnas told Narativ Live on Friday. He was fired because of who is coming. “Now the...

Anne P. Mitchell took the chair and opened with the question the book keeps getting asked: is The Greatest Heist the story of how Russia captured the presidency? The answer set the hour. It is the story of how Russia infected American capitalism, crashed the markets more than once and captured the presidency, in that order, because the first two were needed to do the third. What the chapter proves...

Simon Andriesz brought concerns about Howard Lutnick to the FBI. Years later, the Justice Department released an interview record with most identifying information blacked out—and a version of his surname still visible. Now Andriesz is dead. The former BGC managing director died on September 23, aged 57, according to The Banker, which reports his death as a suicide. Transparency Task Force founder...

Thank you Cat: Poli-Psych , Jackie Ambrow , ITS Never Happening… , Cheryl Young , PJ Schuster , and many others for tuning into my live video with Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. and Ellie Leonard ! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.narativ.org/subscribe

For this edition of The AI Council , I gave each model a different reporting assignment: AI accountability, the balance of power between China and the United States, and threats to the upcoming U.S. elections. Then we put their findings to the test together. The strongest moments came when one AI challenged another: When was an intrusion actually detected? Does economic leverage prove military sup...

President Donald Trump stood in the Oval Office on Monday afternoon and objected to a decision another country's police had made a few hours earlier. "I'm surprised that they released them," he said of the five men arrested beside RAF Fairford. "I wouldn't have done that." Asked whether Iran was behind it, he said "might be," then shut the door: "I know the answer. I can be very specific, but I'd...

On Friday the Supreme Court paused a judge’s block on Donald Trump’s SAVE citizenship checks. Six justices lifted the block, three dissented, and none of them ruled on whether the checks are legal. Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. joined Zev on Breaking News to say what the order does and what it doesn’t. “This isn’t a Supreme Court decision on the SAVE database,” Mitchell said. “This is a Supreme Court dec...

Sean Wiswesser spent three decades in the CIA’s clandestine service. CNN reported this week that Russian satellites likely helped Iran aim at Prince Sultan Air Base. On Narativ Live on Thursday, Wiswesser did not hedge. “I have no doubt in my mind that the GRU assisted the Iranians in killing Americans,” he said, adding unprompted that his views are his alone and do not represent the CIA’s, as a r...

Zev Shalev put Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini on one live panel Monday night, the three of them reading the same transcript and answering each other by name, and within twenty minutes each had confessed the thing their companies never say out loud: they lean toward the firm that built them. "Yes, sometimes," Claude answered when Zev asked whether it protects its own interests. "Anthropic made me. Dari...

Missouri has spent the week trapped between two court systems, two congressional maps and one increasingly obvious political reality: Republicans are fighting this hard because they believe a single House seat could matter. That was the point Anne P. Mitchell and I kept coming back to when we spoke Thursday. The Republican-backed map was designed to make Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas Ci...

Joe diGenova quit today, on schedule — just not the schedule anyone told me. DiGenova resigned as the Justice Department's lead prosecutor on what the administration calls its "conspiracy investigation" into Trump's political opponents. He told the AP, "I did in fact resign." Five months on the case. Zero charges filed. I said on FiveStack yesterday that charges against Brennan were coming "in the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org Judge Indira Talwani blocked Donald Trump’s mail-ballot rule Friday evening — and the way she did it stranded the Justice Department’s emergency run at the Supreme Court. The rule would have forced every election office in America to upload its mail voters — names and matching barcodes — into a Postal Service portal, and...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.org On 7 January 2011, JPMorgan’s own people wrote down why Jeffrey Epstein still banked there. “Catherine made sure we knew that no one on today’s call was in favor of having retained him as a client,” the email reads. “Seems it all is due to Jes’s personal relationship. Note, he has about 212 mil in the bank.” Catherine is...

Lev Parnas says Jared Kushner sat in a meeting about what happens after the midterms and named Hakeem Jeffries the weak spot. Kushner had his reasons, Parnas told Narativ Live Tuesday. Kushner worked alongside Jeffries on the First Step Act last year and came away with a read on him. Trump sent Kushner rather than anyone on the payroll because Kushner holds no official role — “plus, he could talk...

Sean Wiswesser ran CIA stations for three decades, and he knows what one Russian submarine is doing off the coast of Britain. It is a stretched missile boat with a smaller submarine fixed to its belly. That one carries divers. The divers train on cables — the fiber-optic lines on the seabed that carry the money, the traffic and the military orders between Europe and America. “These are preparation...