Part 2: Dear William Spaniel, The Leaked Call Isn’t the First We’ve Seen of Witkoff
- john raymond
- 2 minutes ago
- 7 min read
You treat the Bloomberg transcript as if it dropped into a vacuum. It didn’t.
The October 14 Witkoff–Ushakov call is not some surprising, free-standing data point about a naïve businessman over his head. It is the hard proof of a pattern that was already visible to anyone who bothered to track Steve Witkoff’s role, his record, and the way the system around him has been trying to get him under control.
If you want to analyze leaks, the first obligation is simple: build a file.
On Witkoff, that file already existed before Bloomberg ever got its hands on the audio. You ignored it. That is why your conclusions about what this leak “means” are wrong.
Context one: Witkoff as known quantity, not mystery man
By the time of the October call, Witkoff was not an unknown cameo. President Trump had already made him the de facto main channel to Vladimir Putin in the second term. Public reporting and even his own on-the-record comments had laid out a clear profile.
He is a real-estate developer, not a career diplomat. He opposed sanctions on Russia over Crimea. He has echoed Kremlin narratives on Ukraine, suggesting Russia was “not necessarily” the aggressor, blaming NATO for provoking the war, and claiming eastern Ukrainians “mostly” want to live under Russian rule. He has repeatedly insisted Putin is not interested in invading the rest of Ukraine or Europe.
In 2025 he became the president’s point man on high-stakes diplomacy: first with Moscow on a prisoner swap; then with Iran’s nuclear program; and, by mid-year, on the “grand bargain” for Ukraine. His own praise for Putin as a “great friend” and his boasts about the “friendship and relationship” he personally developed with Putin in Moscow were already public.
None of this is secret. It means that when you encounter a transcript in which this same man:
tells Yuri Ushakov he “knows what it’s going to take” for a deal and lists Donetsk and additional land as the price, and
coaches Ushakov on how Putin should flatter Trump and echo Trump’s “man of peace” persona in a Gaza-style 20-point plan,
you are not seeing a random, naïve error. You are seeing a known Putin-sympathetic cutout performing exactly the function he was tapped to perform.
Any serious analysis starts there. Yours doesn’t.
Context two: the Schwartz profile and the first anti-Witkoff strike
The next piece of context you ignore is the Felicia Schwartz episode.
On 29 August 2025, Politico published her profile: “‘His inexperience shines through’: Steve Witkoff struggles to manage Russia as Trump peace envoy.” The article, based on interviews with thirteen U.S. and foreign officials, painted a picture of allies and professionals deeply uneasy that Trump had handed Russia policy to an improvising real-estate man with direct, lightly supervised access to the president.
Schwartz did not claim Witkoff was secretly loyal to Russia; she documented that:
he was the main operational channel to Moscow;
he conducted sensitive business outside normal State Department processes;
European governments and U.S. officials were already alarmed by his methods and instincts.
In other words, she wrote the first public indictment of Witkoff as a security and strategic problem.
The reaction inside the Trump–Vance universe was instantly revealing. JD Vance did not rebut the facts. He led a counter-offensive against Schwartz herself, accusing the Politico piece of being a “foreign influence operation” designed to undermine a supposedly effective envoy, and turning an evidence-based critique of Witkoff into a loyalty test.
That is what I have already described as Vance’s tactical lie inversion: when someone points at Russian leverage, you do not address the leverage. You instead accuse the critic of being the tool of a foreign operation.
European optics were central here... As I have argued elsewhere, Trump and Vance are exquisitely sensitive to being seen by European leaders as Russian assets, because they need European elites to accept them as plausible guarantors of any “peace” architecture.
Schwartz’s piece threatened that, which is why Vance lashed out in paranoid, projection-heavy fashion.
That was the first anti-Witkoff endgame: the policy class and allied governments trying—via journalism, quiet pressure, and internal dissent—to get this channel constrained or shut down. It failed. Trump kept Witkoff in place and doubled down.
Again: this is part of the file. You do not get to pretend the Bloomberg transcript is the first time anyone has seen Witkoff.
Context three: allies, analysts, and the “useful idiot” verdict
Between the Schwartz piece and the leak, the external assessment of Witkoff only hardened.
Analysts like Daniel Drezner described the Politico reporting as a “doozy,” underscoring that allies saw Witkoff as an inexperienced but empowered central actor on Russia.
Subsequent commentary in the European press, after the leak, bluntly calls him exactly what the transcript reveals: “in Witkoff, the Russians have found their useful idiot.”
By the time Bloomberg published, members of Congress—Republican and Democrat—were using even harsher language, with Representative Ted Lieu calling him an “actual traitor” and others demanding his immediate removal.
They framed him, explicitly, as a danger to Ukraine, to U.S. security, and to the larger Western project of resisting Putin’s aggression.
You may or may not accept that language. But analytically, you have to register what it represents: a broadening consensus, in Washington and European capitals, that:
Steve Witkoff is not just clumsy;
he is acting in ways that materially advance Russian war aims and undercut Ukrainian sovereignty;
the Trump–Witkoff channel is structurally aligned against the causes of freedom, democracy, Ukraine, and the wider West.
When the system keeps producing that judgment—from diplomats, from allied services, from legislators—and then you get a leak that graphically confirms exactly why they felt that way, a serious analyst asks: who has been trying to stop this, and how long have they been trying?
You did not ask that. You treated the outrage as if it were triggered by one five-minute phone call that nobody had any prior reason to worry about.
Where the leak fits: planned endgame, not random revelation
Now bring the Bloomberg leak into that frame.
We know:
Bloomberg obtained recordings and transcripts of two calls: Witkoff–Ushakov on 14 October and Ushakov–Kirill Dmitriev on 29 October.
Reuters, Le Monde, and others report that these calls show Witkoff internalizing Russian requirements (Donetsk and more), expressing “utmost respect” for Putin, and emphasizing the “space and discretion” Trump has given him.
They also show Dmitriev, a Kremlin financial envoy, working with Ushakov on how to shape an American plan that in fact drew heavily from a Russian “non-paper” laying out Russia’s preferred terms.
The Kremlin has angrily confirmed at least part of this picture: Ushakov calls the leak “unacceptable” and “hybrid warfare,” admits that some conversations ran over insecure apps like WhatsApp, and promises to stay in contact with Witkoff anyway.
Trump, confronted with bipartisan calls to fire Witkoff, has chosen instead to back him and proceed with sending him to Moscow.
This is not “bloodless process gone wrong.” It is an exposed, running operation: a Kremlin-coded peace framework being channeled through a pro-Putin envoy who has already been flagged by allies as a security problem for some time. For some time.
So when you, correctly, infer that the leak is an intelligence operation—that some service decided to burn access to tapped Russian lines to get these calls into the public domain—you then stop one step short.
You treat that as an isolated, intellectually interesting twist. You do not connect it to the already-visible attempts, over months, to disable the Trump–Witkoff-Putin channel by other means.
The anti-Witkoff endgame has been in motion:
First, by internal officials and European partners, speaking anonymously to Schwartz and others to raise the alarm.
Second, by analysts and legislators ringing bells about the Kremlin alignment of his words and actions.
Now, by whichever intelligence actor decided that, with the 28-point plan advancing and Witkoff preparing new trips to Moscow, the only way to halt it was to torch the secrecy around the channel itself.
That is what “intelligence written all over it” actually means: someone with access to Russian communications saw the same structure Schwartz’s sources saw and chose an escalatory tool—an intercept leak—to achieve the same anti-Witkoff goal that journalism and quiet pressure had failed to achieve.
You concede that the leak likely came from signals intelligence on Russian lines. You even say whoever did it “means business.” Then you strip the politics out of that act and treat it as an interesting side plot rather than as the logical next move in a campaign to stop a man who is, in functional terms, a cutout for Moscow.
Analytic failure: treating the transcript as origin, not culmination
The through-line here is methodological, not ideological.
You looked at the transcript as an origin point: here, at last, we can see what Witkoff is like; here, at last, we can debate whether he is naive, foolish, or compromised. From that starting point, you naturally drift into personality and process stories: business guys in over their heads, misdesigned “peace” frameworks, fumbled incentives.
In reality, the transcript is a culmination. It lands at the end of a traceable arc:
Witkoff’s long-standing pro-Kremlin record and elevation to de facto envoy.
Months of alarm from U.S. and allied officials about his role and methods.
The official Trump plan for Ukraine bearing the imprint of Russian drafting.
A political apparatus—Trump, Vance, and their media ecosphere—trying to stigmatize any criticism of that structure as “foreign influence.”
From within that arc, the leak is not a curiosity to be pondered. It is exactly what you would predict: the moment when someone with the technical ability to do so decides that the only way to stop a traitor-general—someone functionally betraying the cause of Ukrainian survival and Western security—is to show the world what he is doing in his own voice.
You do not have to adopt my moral language. But if you claim to be doing game theory, you do have to honor the basic discipline: treat the leak as one move in a long game, not a single freak event floating in ahistorical space.
That is the lesson you keep missing. The leaked call is not the first we have seen of Witkoff. It is merely the first time those who have been trying to warn you released the tape to prove it.