Best of the Program | Guest: Jefferson Morley | 12/9/22

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Welcome to the podcast.

Today, Glenn is back.

Yes.

The voice is pretty much there.

The throat's a little sore, it looks like.

But he's here.

He's back in the saddle.

A great return today.

We talked about Twitter and all of the Twitter files that are out there.

And the FBI involvement.

Brittany Griner and her trade.

We traded a center for terrorists.

Stu, may I just say that I can make a case for leaving the Marine behind and taking the woman, right?

And making sure, because she's probably in much more danger than the former Marine

in prison.

You can make that case.

However, if I make that case that it would be the chivalrous thing to do to bring her over and leave the Marine,

I don't think her or her allies would like that very much.

Which

is strange to me that I'd be called a monster for saying that.

What a weird world we live in.

Yes, indeed.

We get into all that on today's podcast.

By the way, don't forget to subscribe to the podcast.

Also, Studios America, available right here on this podcast app.

Click over and check, subscribe to that.

On YouTube, tonight, we're going to be doing our next power hour, the Christmas Party 2022 power hour.

I will say this, Glenn.

We've got the power hour going on, which ends usually in a very messy situation.

Right.

Right.

Vomiting.

Yes, it's usually that.

After that is the actual real Christmas party for the company.

So would you recommend the participants come to to the actual Christmas party?

Because you could say it's good prep.

You're already, I think you're doing, yes, yes, and you're doing it on your own dime.

Right.

So,

open bar, and you won't want any of it.

So, I think that's

great.

All right, here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Blenbeck program.

So Elon Musk has released the second set of Twitter files.

Now, there is a caveat to that, and I'll give it to you here in just a second, but gave them to Barry Weiss.

And Barry Weiss, formerly with the New York Times and not a conservative,

but not somebody who is crazy either,

decided to

she was given the files and she outlined it pretty well on Twitter.

One, new Twitter files investigation reveals that teams of Twitter employees built blacklists, prevented disfavored tweets from trending, and actively limited the visibility of entire accounts or even trending topics, all in secret without informing users.

So in other words, everything that we said that was going on was going on.

Twitter once had a mission to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.

Along the way, barriers nevertheless were erected.

Three, take, for example, Stanford's Dr.

Jay, I can't pronounce his name, who argued, what is it, Batacharya?

Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya.

Bhattacharya.

Who argued that COVID lockdowns would harm children.

Twitter secretly placed him on a trends blacklist, which prevented his tweets from trending.

Four.

We should point out she's posting the screenshots of this.

Like you can see on his account, it says

blacklist.

Like, they have these little recent abuse strike, strike count, and then trends blacklist.

This is something that they denied doing over and over and over again.

They not only denied it, the media covered up for it, but this, as the media is now telling us, is old news.

This is old news.

I guess in a way.

Or consider the popular right-wing talk show host Dan Bongino, who at one point was slapped with a search blacklist.

So you couldn't search him.

Twitter set the account of conservative activist Charlie Kirk to do not amplify.

And again, all the screenshots are there.

Twitter denied that it does such things.

In 2018,

Twitter's head of legal policy and trust and the head of product said, we don't shadow ban, and we certainly don't shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.

Hmm, looks like they were lying.

What many people call shadow banning, Twitter executives employees call visibility filtering.

Not Orwellian at all.

No.

Think about visibility filtering, Barry Rice White writes, as a way for us to suppress what people see to different levels.

It's a very powerful tool.

This is one senior Twitter employee.

VF refers to Twitter's control over visibility.

It used VF to block searches of individual users, to limit the scope of a particular tweet's discoverability, to block select users' posts from ever appearing on trending page, and from inclusion in hashtag searches.

All without the users' knowledge.

We control visibility quite a bit and we control the amplification of your content quite a bit.

And normal people do not know how much we do, one Twitter engineer told us.

The group that decided whether to limit the reach of certain users was the Strategic Response Team or the Global Escalation Team.

They often handled up to 200 cases a day, but there existed a level beyond official ticketing, beyond the rank and file moderators, following the company's policy on paper, and that is the site integrity policy and policy escalation support.

This secret group, head of legal policy and trust, and global head of trust and safety, subsequent CEOs Jack Dorsey and Parag, whatever his name is, and others, Barry Weiss said, this is the biggest, most politically sensitive decisions that were made.

Think higher follower account controversial.

Another Twitter employee told us these

for these, there would be no ticketing or anything.

So they did not want the rest of the company even knowing they were doing this.

They wanted this to be kind of their own little pathway to censorship.

And let's just remember when Jack got on to Hannity and he was like, we don't do any of this.

Yes.

I can promise you, we don't do it.

To be fair to Jack himself,

some of these files are showing that he wasn't even consulted on this stuff.

Like they were other levels of employees doing it.

It wasn't necessarily going to him.

Yeah.

He seems to be an Elon Musk supporter, by the way.

Yeah, I know he does.

I know he is.

And Elon supports.

Jack.

yeah he seems to be

it's it seems to be the culture was the big problem this is what i said about um zuckerberg zuckerberg is either completely out of the loop and has no idea what's happening in his own company or he's a fantastic liar

and i i'm not sure what it is i mean i don't think he's a fantastic liar um but uh

I'm not sure.

It's like Jack.

I'm not sure if he really knows what's going on in his own company.

If you believe the Jack story.

The account,

let's see here.

Where was I?

I think you're in 16.

One of the accounts that rose to this level of scrutiny was Libs of TikTok, an account that was on the trends blacklist.

And it was designated as Do Not Take Action on User Without Consulting with the Higher Group.

The account

now boasts over 1.4 million followers was subject to six suspensions in 2022 alone or 20 yeah 2022 alone each time they were blocked from posting for as long as a week.

Twitter repeatedly informed the libs of TikTok that they had been suspended for violating Twitter's policy against hateful

content and conduct.

But in an internal memo from October 2022, after their seventh suspension, the committee acknowledged that libs of TikTok had not directly engaged in behavior violative of the hateful conduct policy.

That's incredible.

And here it is.

I mean, there's the email.

They have the email,

and basically they're saying they suspended her for no reason.

At least no

reason.

No reason

that was identified in their rules.

They came up with a new one.

Right.

The committee justified her suspensions internally by claiming her post encouraged online harassment of hospitals and medical providers

by insinuating that gender-affirming health care is equivalent to child abuse or grooming.

Compare this to what happened when she was doxxed, the Libs of TikTok poster,

November 21st, 2022.

A photo of her home and address was posted in a tweet that had garnered more than 10,000 likes.

When Libs of TikTok told Twitter that the address had been disseminated,

she says Twitter support responded with this message.

We reviewed the report content and didn't find it to be in violation of the Twitter rules.

No action was taken.

The docs tweet is still up.

Still?

Still.

I wonder if Elon will take care of that one today.

I would hope.

In internal Slack messages, Twitter employees spoke of using technicalities to restrict the visibility of tweets and subjects.

Here's Yoel Roth, Twitter's then global head of trust and safety, in a direct message to a colleague.

SI has technically spam enforcements as a way to solve I can't read the whole thing.

Solve a problem created by safety under in under-enforcing their policies, which again isn't a problem per se, but it keeps us from addressing the root cause of the issue, which is that our safety policies need some attention.

Six days later, direct message with an employee on health misinformation, privacy and identity research team.

Roth requested more research to support expanding non-removal policy interventions like disabling engagements and deamplification, visibility filtering.

These are all the things that were

under the banner of shadow bans that they denied over and over.

So it just goes on and on, but it is

more of the same.

Everything that we knew.

Now, this story you would think

can't get any worse, right?

Well,

if you remember back in June 23, on 2022,

there were a number of people

that pointed out that Twitter was hiring an alarming number of FBI agents.

And this is something we pointed out in a special just recently,

that all of them are doing this.

The revolving door from the FBI to Amazon, to Google, to

Zuckerberg's Facebook, and to Twitter is astounding.

One of the guys who went to Twitter is James Baker.

Now,

I'm thinking about an old poster, a propaganda poster from the Soviet Union.

Vladimir Lenin stands in front of a giant red Soviet emblem with his right arm stretching forward and the caption reads, to the bright future of communist society, universal prosperity and enduring peace.

The words, to the bright future,

would be used

by some

at the Politburo, policy officials in the KGB, as an excuse when they asserted their heavy hand on their people.

You don't like reporting nothing but propaganda and lies in the Soviet media?

Don't worry, it's for your safety.

To the bright future.

You don't want your family member go to the re-education camp?

To the bright future.

For others, all the people suffering under communist control, the phrase became a sort of coping mechanism.

Sure, this all sucks, but to the bright future.

Now,

Soviets did that because the ends justify the means.

They had a plan,

the bright future.

And that

allowed them to justify

anything.

We see this happening everywhere.

Now think

about that the next time you use a phone that was made by Huawei or you fire up TikTok.

A product you're using can be used to support Chinese national intelligence work.

But it's not just Chinese, Russian.

It is also Americans.

The FBI is the political

commissars.

They admitted recently to holding regular meetings with all of the big social media companies.

They maintained, quote, relationships and met weekly.

Mark Zuckerberg gave a hint on a Joe Rogan podcast that some of the meetings contained information that would

warn them against things like the Hunter Biden laptop.

Now,

they knew it wasn't Russian propaganda.

So why was the FBI feeding misinformation to social media companies?

We know the FBI didn't want Donald Trump to become president because we saw that when an FBI lawyer was caught falsifying evidence in order to get a FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, Carter Page,

nothing happened to him.

Speaking of FBI lawyers, it was the FBI's top lawyer, James Baker, that helped facilitate the meeting between the Democratic operative Michael Suspin and the FBI investigators to look into the bogus Trump alphabet smear okay that was the top FBI lawyer James Baker he then left the FBI

and guess who hired him

Twitter now this is before

Elon Musk now

We know from the Twitter file disclosure that James Baker, now Twitter's top lawyer, helped suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

So he went from the FBI to Twitter to help shape all of the news that you would get off of Twitter.

But wait, there's more.

When Musk tried to release the file showing how Twitter suppressed the story,

Baker intercepted the evidence to vet what was about to be released.

We're talking real time here, gang.

Was it to take out the parts that showed the FBI was involved?

Musk this week was not amused and fired James Baker.

But don't be surprised if he goes right back to the FBI or to Facebook or to Google or to Amazon.

The Twitter files show how outside political actors, usually from the left, have a far too friendly relationship with big tech, and these companies are all too willing to do their bidding.

We knew all of this already.

It was obvious.

But it is truly remarkable to see in their own emails.

Because it leads one to ask the question, what is the difference between China and the Soviet Union and us?

Here's the bad news.

The difference is that the people of the Soviet Union and China had this kind of behavior forced on them.

Today, Silicon Valley and the media do it voluntarily

for the bright future.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

Mitt Romney yesterday voiced his support for a carbon tax in order to help combat climate change.

So we got that going for us.

Yeah.

And remember, Romney runs again in 2024.

The problem, of course, is

there's no way to change that.

I mean,

he's got the nomination.

Already running.

No, he's running again.

So he would have to win a primary?

No, he'd just have to run and then lose.

In a primary?

No.

Well, in the primary, yeah, I guess he would.

Somebody would have to, yeah,

lose to the Democrat or you think he'd lose to a Republican because I think he'll lose to both.

He may.

I will say

this is the type of race that conservatives should be focusing on.

Look, Susan Collins is Susan Collins.

We know she kind of sucks.

She's also in Maine.

And, you know, maybe that's the best we can do in Maine right now.

We got to work long term to make sure we change the minds of people who live in Maine.

And maybe a lot of people need to move to Maine that are more sane than the typical people who are in Maine.

I love you, Maine, but you know what I'm talking about.

Everyone in Maine's like, yeah, no, I know.

I live right around all those people.

But like, Susan Collins might be as good as we can do in Maine.

I can tell you this, Mitt Romney is not as good as we could do in Utah.

No.

We can do much, much better in Utah.

We can have an actual conservative in Utah.

But we do have an actual conservative in Utah.

His name is Mike Lee.

No, but this conservative, real deep conservative, believes in a carbon tax.

A carbon tax.

Yeah, so that's going to be

those words come through.

A carbon tax.

Something proposed by Barack Obama that couldn't get through.

Now, he, of course, famously lost to Barack Obama.

At that time, he was saying a carbon tax was a bad idea.

No, now it's a good idea.

Now it's a good idea.

Everyone in Utah should be thinking about who...

Look around.

sean rays sean rays seems like he would be sean rays he has not announced a rotten we should be clear or is not ah yeah i'm sure he has i don't think he has i'm pretty sure he would be a pretty good candidate though i will tell you here's a guy who's been i'm drafting him yes he's already announced you know i don't think that's how this works exactly but he this is a guy who's fought a lot of really important battles that maybe you haven't heard about.

I don't know.

How familiar are people in Utah of Sean Ray?

Oh, I think a well-known figure there.

We know him because we run in very nerdy circles.

We know the attorney generals.

Yeah.

We've interviewed like 80 of them.

There's only 50 states.

We've interviewed 80 of them somehow.

But like, you know, Sean Ray stands out as one of the best in the country.

Yeah.

And

he seems like, to me at least, to be a really good candidate to go in there and defeat Mitt Romney in a primary.

It's amazing to have a partner to Mike Lee, one that understands the Constitution, and then the other guy who's known as a fighter that just goes in and just bulldozes and knows how to get things done.

Be nice to have those two, but or you can have your carbon tax with Mitt Romney.

I want to talk a little bit about

the Energy Department official who we all know as Sam Brinton.

They, them, by the way, those are his pronouns.

Oh, did I say his?

Those are their pronouns.

And

he's already been, you know,

put on hiatus from the energy department because he stole a woman's suitcase.

He went to the airport, got onto a plane, didn't check any luggage, then went, got some luggage, looked at the tag.

ripped the tag off and left.

Well, he's done it again.

No, he's no, he's done it again.

Oh, no.

No, he's done it again.

You mean they've done it again?

They've done it again.

I wonder which one of them is the mastermind.

Ah, maybe that's the thing.

Maybe you could just can you blame the other gender?

It wasn't me, it was them.

If you're gender fluid, can you say actually that was the male me who did that?

And you're currently talking to the female me, which you cannot imprison for that charge.

Exactly right, exactly right.

So he's done it again, and they've asked now the Republicans, because they're so extremist, they have called for Britain to step down.

And,

you know,

it's just because of his pronouns.

I'm sure that's the only reason.

Well, there's also this.

This is from the website LGBTQNation.com.

My homepage.

Has Sam Brinton's story always been too good to be true?

Yes.

Sam Brinton, listen to this.

This is an amazing.

This is from an LGBTQ person, a non-binary LGBTQ plus activist and outspoken opponent of conversion therapy has been charged with felony theft.

They allegedly stole a woman's suitcase worth $2,325 from Carousel Minneapolis airport.

He's a nuclear expert at the Department of Energy before being suspended from their duties.

As a December 19th hearing, they face up to five years of imprisonment.

Criminal case, blah, blah, blah.

The writer goes on to say, Sam Britton burst onto the scene October 1st, 2010 in a riveting two-part interview with I'm from Driftwood.

They revealed the most shocking.

I remember, we all remember where we were when that two-part interview came out, and it was riveting.

Well, I'm as riveting as avatar.

Yeah.

Wait.

It revealed the most shocking conversion story activists had heard since the 1960s.

It involved Britton coming out

to their parents at the age of 11 and their father reacting with a swift punch to their face.

My dad just started punching.

It was the first day that I was sent to the emergency room because I had fallen down the stairs.

I was sent to the emergency room about six more times from falling down the stairs or tripping on the sidewalk.

I'm in this constant state of fear, he claimed.

They claimed.

My dad also held a gun up to my head multiple times.

Britton says that he was then sent to a cruel and

sadistic Florida conversion therapist who they saw for two or three years.

Although, the author points out, his timeline periodically changes depending on the media interview.

Britton alleges this practitioner used aversion therapy, which includes sessions where they were tortured with extreme heat, ice, and needles.

We then went into the mouth of hell, he alleged.

Or the month of hell, the month of hell consisted of tiny needles being stuck into my fingers, and then pictures of explicit acts between men would be shown, and I would be electrocuted.

Wow.

Yeah, that's quite a riveting tale.

Yeah, that happened.

Boy, we need to get that.

We need to get that conversion.

Well, that's what this particular LGBTQ person

was saying

because she's one of the activists that try to stop conversion therapy, and this is really really bad

um

and there's more to it but i'm just gonna leave it as an lgbtq plus activist fighting against conversion theory therapy with my organization truth wins out and the author of anything but straight i'm asking lies blah blah blah i had hoped to work with brinton to expose the harm of conversion therapy I excitedly reached out to Brinton and they were oddly inaccessible communicating indirectly through an intermediary in the Boston area.

Yeah,

I just asked a simple question.

Who was your conversion therapist?

And in which facility did the therapy occur?

Seemed like pretty critical

questions.

And the answers would be critical.

First, to share Britton's story, we had to verify if it was true.

Second, Britton's testimony involved a torture center where hideous abuses were presumably still occurring against children at as at least as young as 11.

Well,

he was unavailable to comment.

And that, you know, that was weird that nobody else was reporting this.

And he wouldn't say that.

Then he said, he's not able to comment because

when he tries to dig in deeper to the memories of that time, I simply don't have his name.

I can picture him clear as a day in my nightmares, but his name is not there.

Wow.

So he was in a very fragile state.

So why is he going around different media places and different legislatures, lawmakers?

Were they

exploiting him, putting his mental health at risk?

She writes, to believe Britton, one would have to suspend reality and buy the explanation that they couldn't recall the name of the therapist.

For over two years, I sat on a couch and endured emotionally painful sessions.

Does this even sound plausible, or is Britton more concerned about keeping their story unverifiable?

Also,

one wonders how Britton can recall vibrant, unusually specific details about the therapy experience, but not the identity of the therapist.

One striking

instance,

Britton told NBC News there were seven King James Bibles on a stack on a coffee table.

I checked with a top expert conversion therapy in Orlando region.

He said that no known conversion office in a strip mall existed.

He was talking about that during the years that Britton attended therapy.

After the airport incident, I called Britton's mother, Peggy Joe Brinton.

Uh-oh.

She told told me her child had attended therapy, but it was not conversion therapy.

She refused to provide the name of the mystery counselor, but added, I do love Sam dearly.

For the record, she also denied that Sam was physically abused or attempted suicide.

Of course, let's not deny there's compelling interest in refuting these serious allegations.

Exactly right.

Britton said, I can picture him as clearly as a day in my nightmares every day.

If that's true, she writes, why hasn't Britton tried to identify this monster by finding his picture online?

After all, how many conversion therapists are there in Orlando?

Have they ever reached out to experts in the region to help find this abomination who is presumably still preying on children?

Other holes in his story have emerged.

In some versions, Brinton claims that they went to a Florida therapist, yet the Des Moines Register reports that they began a series of out-of-state treatments.

Which is it?

He also reports: Sam specifies this according to LGBTQ Nation.

Sam specifies their counselor was a religious therapist and not a doctor.

Yet, Britain penned in 2014 for the National Center for Lesbian Rights,

they described their counselor as a psychotherapist.

The same year, they told the UN's Committee Against Torture in Switzerland: when I was a child, a licensed psychotherapist tried and failed to change something I never chose so when Britain was trying to specifically ban licensed conversion therapists from practicing they suddenly upgraded the credentials of their mystery therapist interesting this story goes on and and what her point is is that he has discredited the LGBTQ community and everyone in the community knew that there were problems with his story, but they just wanted

to believe

they needed it to be true.

That always is.

And everybody out there, right or left, should check your bias when you go into a story.

When a story seems too good to be true, make sure it's not because you want it to be true so much.

I feel like we do that all the time.

The left does not seem to do it at all.

I will tell you that all of this, everything that is false, will fall apart.

And you're seeing the beginnings of it now.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

Jefferson Morley joins us now.

Hello, Jefferson.

How are you, sir?

I'm very good.

Thanks for having me.

I am thrilled to have you on.

I don't understand what it is that they are still protecting after 60 years.

Well, there's the big picture and there's the little picture.

The big picture is there's about 16,000 U.S.

government documents that contain some redactions, ranging from a word, a name, to a paragraph, to a whole page.

16,000 different documents, most of those held by the CIA and FBI.

So we're going to,

some portion of those will be released next week.

And then very specifically, people ask me, people at the Mary Farrell Foundation, at the JFK Facts Substack, where I write.

What are they hiding specifically?

And what they're hiding is what they've hidden all along, which is the interest of CIA officers in Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who was accused of killing Kennedy, the interest in him before President Kennedy was killed.

That's the story that's here.

It's a very sensitive story, and the CIA is loath to surrender it.

Okay, so hang on just a second.

It is not necessarily that the CIA contracted him to kill Kennedy.

It's that the CIA was involved with him three months before and had him running operations for them, right?

They were using him for intelligence purposes,

what's called psychological warfare, which can mean a wide variety of things.

But

from the available record, what we see is that we see what's called a COINTELPRO style operation.

COINTELPRO is.

Explain it for the listeners.

So COINTELPRO

was a joint CIA-FBI program, which was in effect from the late 50s to the early 70s.

And under COINTELPRO, the FBI or the CIA would

secretly use tactics to harass, disrupt, destroy groups that were considered subversive, leftist, you know, Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Socialist Workers' Party, for leftist groups that were officially considered subversive.

FBI Director J.

Edgar Huber,

CIA counterintelligence chief James Engels, and they wanted to suppress these groups, harass them, get rid of them.

And so what seems to have been going on was a CIA operation against an organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a leftist group to which Oswald belonged.

That's where he was being used for intelligence purposes.

You know,

is this operation evidence of a conspiracy?

You know, we don't know.

It might be just incompetence.

You know, maybe they ran an operation and then this guy Oswald up and shot the president.

That part we can't tell without getting all of the records.

But something's going on here, and what they're hiding is their pre-assassination interest in Oswald.

Does it strike you as

we are living the same kind of history right now?

Tell me more about

the comparison.

We have the CIA and FBI involved in all kinds of things, like at Twitter, to silence people, to go after groups.

The FBI is being used as a weapon.

The intelligence departments are also being used as

weapons.

Go ahead.

Okay.

I mean, Glenn, if we're talking about the January 6th insurrection, I think the FBI and CIA response has been not inappropriate.

So.

Yeah, no, I'm not talking about the January 6th.

I'm talking about things that have been going on for a while.

Just even look at what was released with Twitter and the FBI's involvement in Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, I don't know how the Hunter Biden laptop story is relevant to the JFK story.

I do know what I'm talking about here.

And, you know, I don't want the JFK story to get wrapped up in contemporary politics.

The people who want the truth from the government on this issue are from the left,

left, people like me, people in the center, people who support President Trump.

Across the political spectrum, there's wide support for this.

So I don't want to get involved in a polemic about Hunter Biden's laptop, and this is just like that.

The JFK story is unique in and of itself.

I want to focus on that because it's a very important story that we're coming to see.

I guess I put that.

Yeah, I understand your point of view and I agree with you.

It's smart to do that.

I actually, I didn't mean it to

I didn't mean it to pull you into politics, but I guess it was a question.

Well, I mean,

it would be a fair question.

Yeah.

It's a fair question.

Yeah.

But I think it's a little bit of a sideshow.

And I'd rather talk about something we agree about rather than something we agree.

I understand.

So what is it that you're looking for that will be possibly released or held?

We're looking at the personnel files of CIA officers who knew about Oswald before the assassination, and these remain classified.

So we're trying to understand how CIA operations worked in 1963.

And the documents that we're seeking are known.

They have been identified by the CIA as concerning things like intelligence methods, cover, travel.

And this, I think, will give more detail to what was going on with these CIA officers and Oswald in the course of 1963.

Do you have any doubt that Oswald did it and did it for his own personal desires?

Yes,

I don't think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the intellectual author of Kennedy's death.

I don't think that.

He might have fired a gun.

I think he knew what was going on, but he was not, this was bigger than Oswald.

And I think that

the records that we're seeking will shed light on this.

Did Oswald slip past all these CIA guys who were paying close attention to him in the summer and fall of 1963?

Or was there something else going on where people were actually manipulating Oswald to make him be what he said he was, a pathy?

And what was the CIA's motivation?

You know,

I think that

we need to understand the depth of hostility to the Kennedy presidency in the upper levels of the Pentagon and the CIA in 1963.

I think that there were people who were very afraid of Kennedy's policies on Vietnam and Cuba.

and regarded them as a threat to national security, a danger that had to be dealt with

by extreme means.

That's, you know,

that's my opinion.

There's other interpretations.

That's why we need to see all the records.

But yeah, that's my best guess.

Okay, so you also wrote the book and just released the book on the, what is it, the Scorpion?

Scorpion's Dance, yes.

Yeah.

About the CIA and Watergate.

Correct.

Can you go into that just a little bit?

So Scorpion's Dance tells the story of the very complex relationship between President Richard Nixon, 35th president, and Richard Helms, the eighth director of the CIA.

These men were both, you know,

very powerful men from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s.

Helms as a rising officer and eventually director of the CIA, and Nixon as, you know, vice president, as lawyer, super lawyer, and as president.

So they have this very complex relationship because they're very, very different men.

Nixon, this humble striver from the West Coast.

Helms is the very picture of an East Coast aristocrat.

But they managed to get along through Nixon's first term, and then comes Watergate.

And so their relationship is tested because all of those Watergate burglars worked for the CIA or six of the seven.

So the book examines sort of

how Watergate culminated in these two men's career, how it erupted, and how they really were both brought down by it.

Nixon was forced to resign, and Helms eventually was forced to plead guilty to obstructing Congress,

and

was the only CIA director ever convicted of a crime.

So, Scorpion's Dance is the story of those two men, Nixon and Helms.

So, out of that came the Church Commission, right?

Right.

And have we effectively

cleaned it out?

Is the oversight there?

Because this

when you have unchecked, spooky kind of power, it's good and it can be bad.

And you're not sure how, you know, most people don't even know who the head of the CIA is right now.

Right.

You know, the church committee was the first effort of Congress to kind of rein in the CIA, cut their budget, hold them accountable.

That's when the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were created.

And sort of the knowledge of what was going on in the world of intelligence was distributed a little more widely in the Washington leadership.

It wasn't just concentrated in the CIA director.

Now there's what's called the gang of eight, which is the House and Senate leadership.

The eight top officials in Congress are also have the

are cleared to see any covert operation that's being undertaken by the U.S.

government.

Now, we don't, that system of oversight is not very strong.

It's been divided on, you know, partisan lines in recent years.

And I mean, yes, we do not have strong oversight of the intelligence committee community, and that's a problem.

Jefferson, will you do me a favor?

If something comes out next week, when is this supposed to be released?

Well,

the deadline set by President Biden last year is December 15th.

So next Thursday, we expect that the archives will

start depositing.

Who's the biggest obstructor of this?

Is it the CIA?

By far.

About 80% of the remaining documents that have redactions are CIA documents.

So they are the agency that is most aggressive in asking for discontinued secrecy.

And Trump tried to get it released.

Biden says it needs to be released.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

Actually,

that's wrong, Glenn.

Trump said it should be released, said it was released.

Unfortunately, he lied, and he caved to the CIA in December 17.

And he kept the can down the road four years

to Biden.

So Biden got the question last year, what do we do with these JFK documents?

And the CIA and the federal agency said, the COVID dog ate my homework.

You know, we couldn't do it because of the pandemic.

So Biden said, okay, you have another year.

So now we're at Biden's second deadline.

Okay.

Well, I

go ahead.

Biden acquiesced, and now hopefully Biden will do the right thing.

Okay.

Jefferson Morley, thank you so much.

And if there's something in there, I'd love to talk to you again about what you find.

Thank you.

We'll be in touch.

You bet.

Take care.

Bye-bye.