Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your daily political dispatch. It’s foreign policy Tuesday and I’m your host, Julia Ioffe.

It is with great sadness that I tell you that I am stuck in D.C. this week while all my friends—and my friend-colleagues Peter Hamby, Tara Palmeri, Abby Livingston and John Heilemann—are in Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, which is, thanks to Covid, the first time everyone is gathering in one place to do this since 2016. It’s also a totally wild and historic time to be there, so follow Tara, Peter, Abby, and John closely for scoops, analysis, and what they’re seeing from their front-row seats to history being made.

Before we get to the meat and potatoes of today’s letter—the Kamala Harris foreign policy staffing parlor game and Dimitri Simes’ response to the F.B.I. raid on his Rappahannock County home last week—here’s Abby Livingston with the latest chatter from the convention floor…

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Meanwhile, there’s still a fair amount of heated chatter in Chicago over Nancy Pelosi’s outsize role in Biden’s ouster. “If they’re upset, I’m sorry for them,” Pelosi told reporters on Monday. “But the country is very happy. I don’t know who they are, but that’s their problem, not mine.” To which former Biden adviser Anita Dunn later responded, with a dollop of sangfroid, “Nobody wants to have a fight with Nancy Pelosi at this time because we’re a united party.”

Dunn’s point is well taken. I followed around the PUMAS, Hillary’s “party unity my ass” diehards, during Obama’s 2008 convention in Denver, and then watched Bernie followers rebel against Hillary in Philadelphia in 2016. This convention is nothing like those conventions. Then again, James Taylor was yanked last night for time, which was a lost opportunity to lock in valuable suburban women voters—and more than a few dads who still break out the Gibson after the second bourbon. —Abby Livingston

If anyone had been hoping for a clue from the party’s platform, they would have been sorely disappointed. The document, published on Sunday night ahead of the convention opening, details at length the foreign policy of… “President Biden’s second term.” Incredibly, this wasn’t a one-off typo or a two- or even three-off. It’s the entire foreign policy section, from Ukraine and Russia to the Middle East. Evidently, whatever committee assembled the platform did not have the desire—or, more likely, the time—to update it after Biden stepped aside and Harris took over. But Democratic “Blob” insiders don’t see a problem with it. “In a strange way, I think it gives her freedom to not be perfectly aligned and not to be pinned down by anything in writing,” one source close to the Biden administration told me. “Politically, I kind of like it.”

Intentionally or not, the lack of any new foreign policy platform has reinforced the feeling in D.C. national security circles that Harris is a bit of a blank slate on these issues. Not that this notion needed any reinforcement. The message from Biden’s foreign policy people has been that a Harris administration would be defined by “continuity with change,” which just so happens to be the slogan of Selina Meyer’s presidential campaign in Veep. One person told me to expect a “10 to 20 percent difference” in Harris’s foreign policy from Biden, whatever that means. The point, of course, is that no one knows what to expect, other than in the vaguest and most obvious possible sense: some change and some continuity, with all the details T.B.D.

But that very ambiguity is also firing up the Democratic foreign policy crowd. “I’m really excited by the opportunity because she’s less fixed and her presidency could offer a reset on a whole host of issues,” one Democratic national security insider told me. “Since her time in the Senate, she’s not been known as a foreign policy/national security person, so there’s a lot of opportunity to grow and deepen.” Others noted the benefit of keeping her messaging vague and hopeful, denying the opposition anything specific to attack.

In the absence of Harris rolling out some vision for national security policy, of course, the key to determining where a President Harris would take American foreign policy will be the people she appoints to these key jobs. And, this being Washington, there are more than a few people not-so-quietly raising their hands in the air.

Few people I’ve spoken to expect current national security advisor Jake Sullivan or his deputy Jon Finer to stay on, especially with Phil Gordon, Kamala’s current national security advisor, expected to take over Jake’s role in a Harris administration. Gordon’s deputy, Ilan Goldenberg, who has since gone over to the Harris campaign to run Jewish outreach, is also apparently in the running for a plum national security job. People I talk to also seem to think that Kurt Campbell, recently confirmed to be the No. 2 at State, as well as Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, are not long for their jobs. But even their detractors admit that they are the ultimate Washington survivors and, for now, no one is taking their exits for granted.

While I’ve written about the widely-held expectation that Harris would choose a woman as Secretary of Defense, the name in circulation has changed in the last month. At first, everyone mentioned Michèle Flournoy, one of the co-founders of the Center for a New American Security and the perennial candidate to be the first female SecDef. Her name was floated in 2016 when the polls showed Hillary Clinton’s inevitability, and again in 2020 when Biden won. She didn’t get the nod either time—and for very different reasons—but when Harris ascended to the top of the ticket, Flournoy, who is also widely loved and respected, seemed a natural contender.

But now, a month later, a different narrative has emerged. Flournoy, who is the managing partner of WestExec, a consulting firm she co-founded with Blinken, is now seen as having too many potential conflicts of interest—and, as one source told me, having “made too much money”—to serve or to get through the confirmation process. Kathleen Hicks, the current deputy to the Pentagon chief, would be another natural candidate, but is seen as having had too many actual conflicts with the Biden White House. So who will it be? The name I keep hearing is Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth.

There’s also a lot of hope that a Harris administration will mean lots of new names and fresh blood introduced into the system that, since the Clinton and Obama days, has been recycling many of the same people. But of course, because they haven’t held the top jobs, no one can seem to think of who, exactly, the new faces would be. Still, the Dems have a deep bench there, too, and a lot of these young national security types, most of them in their 30s and 40s, are raring to go—and to change up the Democratic foreign policy status quo of the last 15 years.

One name I’ve heard come up is that of Maher Bitar, who ascended from Adam Schiff’s legal advisor to senior director of intelligence on the N.S.C. to, most recently, the N.S.C.’s chief coordinator for intelligence and defense policy. He is young (in his early forties) and he is also Palestinian-American, both of which give him a different perspective than a traditional Dem foreign policy staffer. “He has done a brilliant job under very difficult circumstances,” said a source close to the Biden N.S.C. “He has brought a more human-rights oriented approach and has also been behind some of the ways they've declassified intelligence in the run-up to Ukraine.” Could he be offered the D.N.I. job or some kind of senior role in the I.C. under Harris? Very likely.

But again, “the names in circulation have nothing to do with reality,” as another Democratic foreign policy insider cautioned. “There hasn’t been time to even think about the things that responsible campaigns tell themselves not to think about anyway,” added this source, who is also angling for their own job in a Harris administration. “We’re all superstitious. If you even talk about it, you’re jinxing the outcome you want to see.”

And now for something completely different…

Simes has long been the subject of rumors that he was some kind of Russian asset. It didn’t help that he was named repeatedly in Robert Mueller’s report, nor did it help when he got his own TV show, The Big Game, on the Kremlin’s flagship Channel One. In October 2022, a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Simes moved to Moscow to host The Big Game full-time. That fall, Simes, an American citizen, also received Russian citizenship after, he said, he requested it from the Russian president.

Neither the F.B.I. nor the Department of Justice commented when I asked what the search was about, or if there was a criminal investigation into Simes. So I decided to call Simes himself. He and I used to get lunch periodically when he still lived in D.C., and I remember him telling me about the secluded property he and his wife Anastasia had acquired in Virginia’s picturesque horse country. (According to public records, the house was bought in June 2021 for $1.6 million.) Simes, who had just gotten out of the television studio in Moscow, spoke to me on the record about the raid.

According to the warrant that the F.B.I. left in the foyer of the house, a copy of which Simes shared with me, the raid was conducted on Tuesday, August 13, at 9:02 in the morning. It came one day after Judge Joel C. Hoppe, of Virginia’s Western District, signed off on the search, saying it could be conducted “at any time in the day or night because good cause has been established.” Simes’s name is not on the warrant, nor is there anything that would indicate what the good cause is—or what Simes is suspected of. “My understanding is that lawyers spoke to the Department of Justice and they were told that this is a national security investigation and they have the right to do it,” Simes told me.

Simes said he found out about the search last Tuesday night, when neighbors noticed several unmarked cars and people wearing F.B.I. shirts and badges. He contends that they knocked out the doors of the house and searched it for five days. (Again, the F.B.I. and D.O.J. declined to comment.) “They took all the valuables from the house, they ripped paintings off the walls,” Simes told me, “including those by Rabin, Weissberg, paintings that the painters gave to my parents in lieu of fees because my parents wouldn’t accept money.” (Simes’ parents were well-known Soviet human rights lawyers who defended prominent Soviet dissidents. Simes himself was constantly in trouble with the Soviet authorities for his political views, until his emigration to the U.S. in 1973.) “Even the K.G.B. didn’t behave like this in the 1970s,” he said of the F.B.I.’s taking of valuables without explanation. “Maybe the N.K.V.D. in the 1930s did…”

According to Simes, the F.B.I. also took the contents of a few drawers of antiques that his wife had bought at auctions. “She wanted to start a business in Russia for inexpensive luxury items,” Simes told me of his wife’s plans for the antiques, “but she hadn’t done anything to start the process. She was in Moscow and had no plans to go [to the U.S.] in the near future.” Simes claimed they also took a 19th-century antique bed from Anastasia’s office as well as two hammocks his wife used. They took the car keys, the antenna off the roof, and the modems. But they left Simes’ unloaded pistol. “I don’t know, was this a thinly veiled hint that I should shoot myself?” Simes asked rhetorically.

The U.S. government also froze his American bank accounts, Simes complained. That included the $40,000 he had just transferred to pay the mortgage and taxes on the house, as well as to install two air conditioning units. This money, Simes explained, came from his Channel One salary. “My only income in the U.S. is my Social Security,” he said, adding that that money has never been transferred to Russia, whereas the money he made in Russia had been transferred to the U.S. to pay for the Rappahannock house. But if the accounts remain frozen, then he and Anastasia can’t pay for the house, “and if we can’t pay for the house, then we’ll have to sell it and I really doubt they’d let us get the money out,” Simes said, indignant.

The F.B.I. might not have been forthcoming about the reason for the raid or whether it was part of a larger investigation, but did Simes have any theories, I wondered? “I have some suspicions,” he replied. “The first suspicion is FARA”—referring to the Foreign Agents Registration Act—“But everything I do is in Russian, in Russia. Nothing I do is targeted to the U.S. I’ve written no articles in English [since leaving the U.S.], I’ve conducted no consultations during this time. No one pays me anything other than my salary at Channel One.” Meaning, if Simes is not in the U.S. trying to influence any Americans, why would he have to register as a foreign agent? That doesn’t make sense to Simes. But something else does. “It makes me think that they don’t like my opinions,” he said.

I asked if anyone from the Russian government had reached out to help him or offer assistance. They had not, Simes told me. “There have been no official statements because it is premature to issue official statements,” he shrugged. “But this lack of clarity can’t continue forever… The Russian government may see this as terrorism.” Simes went on. “If they rob a person who’s working on Channel One simply for doing his journalistic duties, then they have to accept the possibility that there will be an answer to this,” he continued, adding darkly, “They’re setting up American journalists working in Russia. Why do this?” (He clarified that he is “not in favor of targeting any innocent people, especially journalists.”)

Simes vehemently denies any connections to Russian intelligence. “I now live in Russia and not in the U.S., and, in Russia, it’s not a crime and there’s nothing inappropriate about a person serving his government, including in an intelligence capacity,” he said. “If it were true, I would not deny it. But I cannot claim an accomplishment that is not mine.”

He told me he left the U.S. because, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, “I didn’t think I could express my opinion here anymore.” He saw the U.S. response as “a crusade against Russia” and he didn’t agree with it. “I was totally opposed to the crusade against Russia launched by the Biden administration. I could’ve stayed and just started gardening and said ‘I’m not me and I have nothing to do with this,’ but that just wasn’t my personality,” he said. Plus The Big Game was making ever increasing demands on his time back in Moscow. So he left.

After his departure for Russia, Simes had once told me he was concerned that, if he came back to the U.S., he suspected he would be immediately arrested, though he wouldn’t say for what. But in recent months, he said, he had started wondering about what things were like in America now, nearly two years after his departure. “I was interested in an unofficial dialogue between Russia and the U.S.,” he told me. Not only for sentimental reasons, “but also because this is my profession.” Now he understands that the way back to the U.S. is closed to him, at least for the foreseeable future.

Julia