“One of the greatest things about this national security approach is it's actually a really affordable national security approach. You know, for the price of two F-35s, you can prevent the need for any F-35s by stopping the wars before they start, by attacking the corruption, by deterring.”
The Lawfare Podcast: Patreon Edition · US Politics · October 2026
An archive episode, recorded in spring 2022 after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Massaro argues that whistleblower rewards, oligarch task forces and sanctions could become a self-funding system, with recovered money paying for the next cases.
Transcript
Absolutely. Their efforts have been tremendous. And going from here, we spoke about
how, again, Russia accelerated this strategy's implementation. And at the same time, we've seen a multitude of coordinated actions from the FinCEN alert to the kleptocracy asset recovery rewards program. Can you expand upon what the importance of these initiatives are going forward?
Yeah. So this is, you know, we talked about the kleptocapture, talked about repo, the kleptocracy asset recovery rewards program is, of course, this was actually legislated by Congress, again, in the National Defense Authorization Act 2020, that provides, you know, like there are other American rewards programs. It provides whistleblowers an incentive to come forward and sort of show us the money, you know, show us where the money is hidden, and then you can actually get a cut of that money when the money is recovered. This is a very classic American whistleblowing incentive program. America actually, believe it or not, invented this form of incentive program with the False Claims Act back in the day during the Civil War. It's very cool, actually. The Union soldiers were, the Union Army was being sold these rations that were being filled with sawdust and stuff like that. So the Congress legislated a rewards program that would incentivize these individuals to step forward and fraud against the government would be revealed and you could claim a cut of the money recovered.…
So, this optimism is quite welcomed. It's quite proactive, forward-looking, which is great. But what kind of message do you believe this sends to other authoritarian regimes? I know Russia is in the spotlight, but China and these other states who aren't as active right now, at least…
It's a message of deep, deep, deep deterrence. It's a message that we have woken up to your game, that we understand it. Authoritarians win when we sleep. There is no way, because of their reliance upon us, because of the way that modern dictatorship functions, their ultimate goal is to undermine…
Hopefully, this period of optimism will be leveraged for the positive for more transparency and accountability, both at home and abroad. Thank you, Paul. This has been a fantastic discussion, and thanks for coming on.
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