Good evening and welcome to Washington Week.

It's been a busy week here.

A state visit from China's president, a new campaign launched by the American president against the media, and more signs that Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump, which might explain why he's so angry at the media because you have to take out your frustration on someone.

I'll get to all this with my guests tonight.

Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times.

Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Adam Harris co-hosts Radio Atlantic, the flagship Atlantic magazine podcast and Vivian Salama is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Um, thank you all for joining me.

Vivian, I want to go right to you.

You just broke some big news this afternoon about the Middle East, reporting that the Egyptian intelligence chief secretly flew to Israel in the weeks before the October 7th massacre uh by Hamas with a stark warning for the Israelis.

Tell us what your reporting found.

So, in the initial days after October 7th in 2023, um there were some reports that the Egyptian intelligence had warned in some way.

Netanyahu's government completely denied those reports and sort of the world went on.

Uh this year, especially with legislative elections coming up in Israel, I set out to try to understand a little bit more about what we knew in advance of the October 7th attacks.

And one of the key issues, the really start startling issues I found was not only did the Egyptians warn Netanyahu's government, but the intelligence chief actually got on an airplane and traveled to Israel for a total of 67 minutes to be exact and conveyed um the ominous signs that they were seeing that Gaza could potentially blow.

It wasn't it wasn't a direct warning that the Hamas is going to invade the kibbutim on the border on October 7th, but it was a warning that things were very unstable.

And this was the problem is that they didn't h didn't have an exact date.

He didn't have the exact way in which Hamas was going to attack and which we saw on October 7 this multi-pronged attack.

But he did see especially through human intelligence their human their their sources inside um the Egypt shares a border with Gaza presumably has good That's right.

They have fantastic access.

In fact, Israel and Egypt probably in the world have the most superior intelligence when it comes to Gaza.

And so for Egypt to convey that to Israel and of course they've been um intelligence sharing partners since Camp David Accords in 1978.

That was really stark because it's someone who know is a country who that knows Gaza very very intimately.

They have sources that are embedded with Hamas and he said there is large mobilization for a potential attack.

You need to make some concessions and get ready for it.

Right.

And Netanyahu's government dismissed the warnings.

Um so so so it's interesting in the Israeli election that's coming up in a month, the number one issue perhaps is this uh who's responsible for that for allowing that surprise attack.

And there obviously the people who are running against Natanya are calling for a national commission of inquiry to figure this out.

How does this play into the election season?

I mean this is one of the primary drivers uh that his opponents in particular one the former IDF staff of chief of staff Gadi Eisenot.

He's been calling for an independent state inquiry as well as a number of other opponents.

Netanyahu's government and and his coalition have pushed back on this notion of an independent state inquiry.

They want to kind of handpick the people who are involved, but obviously a very critical issue going into the elections in October.

Peter, it's quite remarkable actually that Israel hasn't had a 9/11 style commission absolutely in 3 years.

And that's at the at the desk of Netanyahu.

He could allow that to happen if he wanted to.

Yeah.

He said, "We didn't want to do it while we're fighting a war, right?

Let's fight the war first, then we can go back and look at it."

Well, the war is essentially not over, but it's not at the stage it was.

and he still doesn't want that kind of accountability.

He denied repeatedly that they had warnings in advance and now we know from Vivian's fantastic reporting that they had the Egyptian intelligence chief who does not fly there for 67 minutes if he doesn't have something serious.

He doesn't go there very often.

And the leader of UAE also, it turns out called Netanyahu with his own warning.

And I my colleagues have some interesting reporting that that there had been a suggestion by some security people asking Netanyahu to make some military strikes in Gaza in advance of October 7th.

He said no.

And the reason why was because he thought it would disrupt the possible diplomatic rapro with Saudi Arabia that the Biden administration was very very close to negotiating at the time and which of course Hamas sought to disrupt successfully as it turns out.

Susan, we we we've been talking about a prime minister who everybody always counts out, you know, at a certain point who's been prime minister of Israel longer than any person in the country's history.

You've been following this this fairly closely.

Obviously, there's a lot of uh there's a lot of hope on the part of Democrats and many Republicans actually, including possibly Donald Trump, that Israel gets a new prime minister.

Give us your sense of whether that's actually going to happen or not.

Yeah.

Well, you're right that certainly it's a bipartisan phenomenon, frustration in Washington with uh with Netanyahu.

Uh President goes back to President Clinton.

Absolutely.

uh and uh you know we wrote a book about Jim Baker who had the distinction of ordering Netanyahu then a deputy uh foreign minister persona nongrada in the US state department back when George HW Bush was president it's a long history it's a long history look you'd be foolish to count him out he's been a survivor and he's shown a willingness to make coalitions with uh different very different groups in the center and the far right that's how he's been governing with the far right coalition for the last few years.

But I think the time has come when Israel understands it's more isolated than ever on the world stage.

The consequences of the war in Gaza are front of mind.

And this question of how Israel became so dangerously insecure.

I think that is going to be the major issue in the election coming up.

Well, we're going to talk about that as the weeks go