Matt Taibbi: All the Top Secret Information Trump Is Releasing & What He Should Declassify Next

So, everyone's mad that, even some Democrats, I think, are mad about these last-minute Biden pardons of Fauci and the J6 committee, etc., etc. So, let's just set that aside.
My concern is not that these people are punished. Fauci's 81.
Yeah, who cares? I think he'll be punished, you know, in some larger sense. But I want to know what they did.
That's the— okay, so can we just go through a couple of these?

And, like, why would you pardon Fauci?

What are the potential crimes, the crimes you think he committed and could be punished for,

that you're trying to prevent him from being punished for by pardoning him?

Well, with Fauci specifically, the one thing that comes to mind immediately is perjury.

Yes.

Because he's been accused of that essentially already by, you know, the House committee. Lying under oath to the Congress.
Lying under oath to the Congress. In particular, saying, you know, that we have never funded gain of research, that we weren't doing it during this time period.
even as there are other people in the government, like the deputy director of the NIH, saying, yes, we were, or Ralph Baric, who was one of the scientists at UNC, saying, yes, absolutely, that was a gain of function. So there's a little bit of a problem there.
Now, he later amended the statement and said that he was speaking in a specific way under a specific definition.

But there's exposure there. But that's that's not really the issue with Fauci.
The issue.

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Here's the episode.

The issue is, really, it's about the whole rat's nest of gain of function. How much did the authorities know about what was going on at the Wuhan Institute? Did they have human sources at the Wuhan Institute? Was there advance warning that this was coming? Were they suppressing investigations into the possibility of a lab leak because of the connections to U.S.
research? All that stuff is in play. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that's going on that you want to know.
So Fauci was part of the U.S. bioweapons program, obviously, right? I mean, if you're funding gain a function, it's, you know, vaccines are one part of that, but probably not the only part of it, right? So the idea is you make the virus more dangerous in order to create a vaccine to fight the virus.
Right. But in the process, you wind up with much more dangerous viruses.
Right. Right.
And that's one of the things that raised a red flag for some of the people who were looking at the COVID phenomenon is just look at the surface characteristics of the disease. It's highly transmissible.
Yes. It's not terribly symptomatic.
Everybody's going to get it. Not everybody's going to be harmed by it.
It's what they designed, what you would do if you were designing a disease to carry a vaccine, for instance.

Yes.

Yeah.

So my interest is not in Fauci.

I think any normal person can make up his mind about Fauci. It's pretty obvious who Fauci is.
The super bureaucrat. it's in the bioweapon programs and the frankenstein science that's being funded by our

tax dollars around the world to be specific in ukraine in china in djibouti um you know we have biolabs in a lot of places around the world and like what are they doing what are they doing what was their relation to to the wuhan institute also i mean i think those are all important questions, both the bioweapons and the relation to the pandemic. But the thing is about these pardons, they're a mistake.
If you want to know what's happening, they just made it a lot easier for us to find out. Because now, once the pardon's delivered, the person can't plead the fifth.
If they're brought before a grand jury, they can't take the fifth anymore. If they're brought before a congressional committee, they can't evoke their right against self-incrimination.
So, they have to say something. And this is what's so interesting, because I've been talking to criminal defense attorneys, people who are former Senate investigators, some current Senate investigators, and they all kind of said the same thing.
It's so illogical to give somebody a pardon if you're trying to cover up things that the only reason you would really do it is if there's very serious crimes involved, right? So that's a red flag for us. When we see somebody getting a pardon, we think, well, why would they do that unless there's something really bad there, right? So either it's a mistake where they just stupidly made it easier for everybody to investigate, or there's something we don't know about that is interesting.
Well, it's such a profound thing to do. I mean, if somebody said to you, Matt, would you accept a pardon? You would say, well, why would I need a pardon? No.
I mean, it's incriminating. It's morally incriminating, or it has the appearance of moral incrimination just by its fact, right? It's not only morally incriminating, it's legally incriminating.
As the Department of Justice itself said in a memo, I think, on one of the J6 cases, it said, this does not unring the bell of conviction if you get a pardon going forward. So you're making an admission if you accept a pardon.
So yeah, I wouldn't accept one if I were totally innocent. Of course.
Yeah, and also I wouldn't accept one if I had something to hide. Because now, you know, if I'm dragged before a congressional committee or especially a grand jury investigation, now I can't tap out and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm going to take the fifth on that.
That's fascinating. Right? So the whole thing is really illogical.
I think it was more meant to be a symbolic gesture. And this is really, I think, speaks to the thinking of the Biden administration about so many things, right? They were so driven by optics with Trump that they did a lot of things that were incredibly stupid.
So they want to portray him as vengeful and out to get people. And the pardons are a good way to do that.
I mean, if you're aiming for that audience, but it had the negative effect of opening all these investigations up, it seems to me. So you really think this was aimed at MSNBC viewers, just to paint Trump as a vindictive person? So I asked a lot of people, why did they do this? Like, what's the point? And one of the theories was that, that this is messaging, that they were trying to create a headline.
And there were lots of headlines instantaneously. If you saw them, they all basically said the same thing, like, you know, to ward off future vindictive retaliatory acts by the Trump administration, you know, Biden issues pardons.
It's always after the comma, right? That's one theory. The other theory is that in the last days of a presidential administration it gets pretty chaotic in the white house and people who want things and uh you know they will come in and there will be a hurried frenzy to put stuff on paper and that's why there are unprecedented things in these pardons for instance the j6 pardons this has never happened before where you give a pardon to a category of unnamed people, right? It says to the members of the committee, to the Capitol police officers who testified, to the staff, but it doesn't delineate the names of the people who are pardoned.
So now, if you want to invoke your pardon, you actually have to go over a test to prove that you're actually part of that category.

That I testified before the committee.

Does that mean that the committee called you?

That you talked to a staffer once?

Or does that mean you actually sat in front of the hall and testified?

It's very weird.

And the only explanation that I could come up with from people is that they were in a hurry. They didn't have all the names.
It's amazing. Right? So, but why would you preemptively pardon the J6 committee? I mean, that's like the single most legitimate, morally empowered, great group of people ever impaneled in this country.
Like, truly. Well, I mean, there are obviously some theories about why they would do that, right? Mother Teresa, she was such a great person, we're going to preemptively pardon her.
What? This is crazy. No, it is absolutely crazy.
And if I were some of those people, I'd be offended. Yes.
Especially the people who testified and who didn't lie under oath, for instance, right? Because they're all named. Yeah.
All the police officers who testified to the committee. Now, what if they're only really trying to protect a couple of them? And there are some very conspicuous names.
I think we know who they are. Right.
Yeah, exactly. The ones they're trying to protect.
Right. But what if you're one of the other ones who just gave some testimony? I mean, they interviewed hundreds, probably thousands of people, right? It's some number like that.
Massive number. And I assume most of them told the truth.
I mean, most people do tell the truth, actually, I think. I think that's probably the case.
Yeah. I mean, especially if you're under oath and you're a law enforcement officer.
I mean, it's a very serious thing to lie in those situations. And, you know, there are a couple of places in the testimony where it doesn't look good for some of the people who testified.
But for the vast majority of them, I would take it as a

grievous insult to be given that pardon and especially to not be named. That's what's so

weird about it. But it suggests what I have thought from the first week, which is they're like serious

crimes here. I mean, you talk to Steve Sund, you know, who ran Capitol Police, who's like a

nonpolitical person, just career law enforcement, former MP, you know, former Washington, D.C. cop.
I don't think he has any weird agenda. I mean, his story is so unbelievable.
They just didn't give him any intel at all and didn't give him any resources. And everybody else knew this was happening except him.
I mean, the whole thing is so nuts that you're like, wait, there's something going on here. I don't really know.
The pipe bombs at the head cameras? The pipe bombs, the gallows that was erected by some weird unknown group the night before. Will we ever get disclosure? I guess that's what I want.
I just want to know. Again, I am not vengeful.
I don't really want to punish people so much as I just want to know that it feels like punishment enough. Will we? I think we will.
I think we're heading into a golden age for investigative journalism. I think this is after eight years of crazy, misleading news stories and dead ends and unanswered questions and fake news, you know, ranging from Russiagate to Nord Stream to, you origins, where we were actively kept away from one side of that story for years.
I think we're going to find out a lot of this stuff. There are investigations already underway, document hunts going on all over the place.
There are reports that have been commissioned to look into a lot of these questions and they're going to be staffed up with a lot of money and a lot of personnel. And it's just an unprecedented situation where, for instance, the DHS or the FBI or the DOJ would be in sync with congressional investigators to the point where they're not going to have to issue subpoenas for a lot of this stuff.
They're just going to sit down and say, here's a list of the documents we want to find. And I think that they're going to have that collaborative arrangement.
There's panic. I sense panic.
And I sense it in some of these confirmation battles, particularly the sort of offline stuff that you don't see in the media, but just when you find out the lengths to which permanent Washington is going to, say, sabotage Tulsi Gabbard, who's an army officer who's had a clearance for more than a decade, carries an automatic weapon. I mean, clearly we trust her with America's defense.
Why can't we trust her with America's secrets? Well, of course we can. So what is this? And it really is people are panicked that what they've been doing is going to come to light, I think.
Well, they should be panicked because if you read the executive order on the weaponization of government, it specifically empowers the director of national intelligence to conduct a wide ranging report into the possible misdeeds of the entire intelligence community and orders her to come up with you know anything negative that they can find so can you imagine right i mean that that's like trying to make a list of everything you she'll be doing it from now to the end of time.

But no, I mean, in perfect seriousness, this is it's setting the stage for, you know, kind of a second church committee hearings era. And that was a great moment in American history.
Once every 50 years. Right.
We find out what they're doing with their black budgets. Yeah, and really, in the mid-70s, who would have known, right, that we were doing such an incredibly wide-ranging, you know, list of horrible, stupid things from, you know, trying to murder Castro with exploding seashells to spying on Martin Luther King Jr.

to trying to, you know, leak news about mistresses of civil rights leaders. I mean, the list went on and on and on.
And we only found out about it because they went too far, right? And now suddenly people in the Senate had a hammer to start looking, you know, into this direction. And it all came out.
Well, not all of it, But a lot of it came out. A lot of it.
Frank Church, sadly, got incredibly fast-developing cancer, I noticed. Did he? Yes, he did.
He did kind of like Jack Ruby-style cancer, Hugo Chavez-style cancer. It's interesting.
Huh. I did not know that.
Yeah, couldn't treat it. He died.
Sad. Sorry.
No, it's all right.

I mean, look, it's hard not to think.

I never thought this way until like a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago.

I'm like, oh, not only did I not think this way, I attacked anyone who did.

Right.

Yeah.

But can I say one thing that I've noticed now that I'm in middle age is that all my life, the older guys I've known,

like you go on duck hunting trips or whatever,

in Washington where I lived,

like with my dad

and his friends or whatever,

and the guys who were

in their 50s and 60s

all thought this way.

They all thought this way.

You know, after like

a lifetime of government service

as an operations officer,

whatever you're doing, right?

Right, right.

They all had this mindset.

And I remember sitting

like in a duck blind thinking,

these guys are fucking crazy.

They're all nuts.

What I didn't realize was

I'm sorry. Right.
Right. Right.
They all had this mindset. I remember sitting like in a duck blind thinking, these guys are fucking crazy.
They're all nuts. What I didn't realize was there's a reason that people become more open to these sorts of explanations the more they see.
of course and maybe right yeah i don't know why i didn't get that yeah well it's probably just our generation that thought the schoolhouse rock thing was true. I mean, right? It's so true.
Because, you know, we grew up with all the president's men and after the church committee. So we thought it all had come out.
The good guys won. There's transparency.
We have the Freedom of Information Act. We can find everything out.
No it turns out no right no you're i never thought of schoolhouse rock and all the president's men as sophisticated propaganda put there by the intel agencies but i think you're right whether they're whoever did it it was effective want to hear something creepy you are being bought and sold every day without your knowledge data brokers are watching everything you do online they track every website that you visit every link that you click every video that you play they collected information about you and your behavior and your thoughts and they sell it to anybody who wants to buy it including governments no privacy whatsoever obviously it should. It's not illegal.
People are getting paid off to keep it legal, politicians specifically. Politicians, by the way, are some of the ones using your data.
They buy it and then employ it in campaigns to swing your vote. It's creepy as hell.
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www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com. So can we just go through, since I think you're, as I've said many times, and I mean it, I think you're one of the great reporters still working.
Not that there are many. Not that there's a ton of competition.
Yeah, there aren't many. And you are, by your nature, a curious person, which is like requirement one for journalism.
And like the one thing no one else seems curious about, I think, but you are. So can you just go through, in no particular order, the stories whose endings you'd like to know? Like, what are you curious about as we enter an age of disclosure, God willing we do? What do you want to know? So first of all, just to back up, I tried to make a list a couple of days ago.
Oh, did you really? Yeah, of all the things that I would want to investigate if I were, you know, in that kind of a position to order these kinds of things. I'm actually going to take notes as you talk because I want to follow along at home as this happens.
But I couldn't finish. There were so many different things that I never got to the end.
But I would say that the big ones, there are huge glaring questions, which is unusual. For instance, who was president the last four years, especially the last year? I mean, I think that's an enormous question.
Tony Blinken. Do you think it was Blinken? You know, I think Blinken's so evil, so demonstrably evil and also stupid that I just see his fingerprints everywhere.
Right, right. But that's just a pure guess.
That's the problem. We don't really know.
I know that in the last two months, Blinken did everything he could to accelerate the war between the United States and Russia, which is like, it should be illegal. I don't know how he got away with that.
Nobody said anything about but that's a fact so anyway sorry no but he and he you know the his state department was also involved in the censorship stuff too so um who was president who were what who was president let's start with a big question yeah no i mean i think of all the crimes that are on the table and the potential corruption issues, people signing documents

or somehow getting documents signed by an incompetent president or an unfit president has to rank up there with the most serious things that have ever happened in American history.

Right.

So you have to look at what were the what was the process of the White House operation, right? Who was actually running things? We know from a surface point who held the posts, right? So Ron Klain was the chief of staff. We know roughly who else was in Joe Biden what were the what was the schedule you know did he did he sign things by auto pen because they have this this machine that does uh and who and who was who basically had the power of attorney to turn that on right like these are all questions that we have to get answers to what was the day-to-day operation of the biden white house uh and again especially in the last year because i think you know that gets to bigger questions of who was really making these big foreign policy decisions and who was making decisions about things like um you know cutting off the democratic primaries to challengers you You know, I think these are big party decisions, not necessarily White House decisions.
Who decided to kick Biden off the ticket? Biden on July 13th was giving a speech in Detroit and he's like, I'm running. I mean, he couldn't have been more affirmative about the idea that he was not going to drop out of the race.
Within seven days, he was out of the race. Within three days after that Detroit thing, there were stories leaked out in Politico that were basically saying that Nancy Pelosi was going to ask him to or going to try to pressure him to drop out.
but I don't believe that. I think we need to find out exactly what those communications were.

I mean, who had the authority to push the president of the United States off his own ticket unless he had a sudden change of heart? Do you believe that? I think it's really obvious that his statement dropping out on Twitter was issued before he knew. I mean, I've heard that again.
I don't know is the truth, but I've heard that. It's very conspicuous that when he, when he wanted to say things, he said it on camera, but there were all kinds of things where the wording was much more careful and that was done on Twitter or in a letter or in a press release.
I mean, even, note explaining the pardons, who wrote that, right? It was on Biden's Twitter account. I doubt he's sitting there tweeting.
So it's just a coup. I mean, that's a coup.
If you take a sitting president of the United States and force him to drop out, I mean, right? It's on the table. It has to be.
Because, you know, Jill Biden has been very circumspect in talking about it. She's said these really curious things about how she wants to reevaluate her relationships.
I think she was referring to Nancy Pelosi. But what exactly happened in that one-week period between, you know, the middle of July and the 21st or so? And then what happened between the 21st and the 22nd or whenever it was when Biden suddenly came out and made Kamala the nominee? Like, how did that happen? Who made that decision? So that was after the Republican convention the republican convention yes yes so you had this incredible week or two where trump gets shot survives you have the convention and biden drops out i mean that's and as far as i know i don't think anyone's ever done like a real tiktok on that no there were there were stories but they were incredibly incomplete and this is one of the things where you know i was looking at it even from just a professionalism point of view in terms of the new york times the washington post all of these these papers how does nobody ask who made the decision to nominate Kamala Harris? How did that happen? How was he kicked off? Or how did he come to that decision? Normally, there would be a big show of that, right? There would be somebody would come out and give an interview to, I don't know, 60 minutes and say, well, here's how that happened, right? And whether it was true or not, there would be a grand explanation.
Whenever there's something big that happens with the president. Here, they just kind of did a little tweet or a press release, and there were things that were leaked out in newspapers.
None of it made any sense. So, you know, they have to get all those communications.
And I think that's what was important. There were preservation letters that were sent out by some Senate committees.
I hope it captured a lot of this stuff, but we'll see. Do you have any sense of what the answer is to either one of these questions? Who was functionally operating the Biden administration and who kicked Biden out? Who made these decisions.
I've only heard theories about this, right? And that's the problem. It's kind of irresponsible for reporters to speculate.
I agree. We don't know.
All we know, we saw little bits and pieces of things. Like there was a really weird moment, you might remember when Biden said something to effect of, we can't allow Putin to stay in office or whatever it was, right? And people immediately interpreted that as a regime change comment, right? 47 minutes later, the White House comes out with a walkback clarifying statement saying, you know, our policy towards Russia is unchanged or something,

something ambiguous like that. But there were leaks in the press about what happened there.
And there was a remarkable line in one of the stories saying that Biden was allowed to participate in the workshopping of that second statement. How is he not in charge of it, first of all, Right? you know they're talking about jake sullivan is is uh involved in the process but that just gives you a little glimpse into this idea of a collective presidency where at best biden was a participant so i i think we need to know um a lot of things about who was actually making those decisions.

It might be different in terms of, you know, for each realm of the government, right?

Maybe the national security questions were dealt with by one person, then, you know, the foreign policy things by another.

I don't know.

I mean, we'll see.

And then domestic policy, which doesn't even really exist in this country. It's all national security.
It runs everything. Right, right.
Who's doing that? Yeah. Oh, that was only the first thing in the list, right? No, it's so funny as you say this, and I won't interrupt you anymore, but I just can't.
I mean, it's like crazy. You're going through this stuff.
This just happened this summer. Yeah.
And I was there. I mean, I know a lot of the people.
I feel like I'm not that informed, but maybe more informed than average because it's my job. I kind of forgot about all this stuff.
Like so much stuff has happened. It's like, it's amazing.
Yeah. What we have allowed to sort of pass by us without demanding answers.
I mean, I remember being in Russia in the late 90s. There were multiple episodes that you might classify as quasi-coups.
Yes. Right? There was an episode where people tried to arrest Yeltsin's bodyguard, Alexander Karzhakov, and it kind of turned out the other way in the end.
But there was intense reporting about this by the supposedly unfree Russian press at the time. And then there was also the whole question of, you know, why was Putin brought in? What did he do when he was immediately kind of used to clamp down on an investigation of Yeltsin that was done by the general prosecutor at the time.
I mean, that's all in the weeds. What I'm trying to say is, even in a third world country, we got more information about stuff that was going on than we got last year in the United States of America where we had a gigantic press corps sitting in Washington supposedly covering all this stuff.
It blows my mind. I mean, you've done this your whole life, so you know and you grew up in it.
So you must still know people in that gigantic press corps. A few, but the ones that I'm still in touch with mostly have been kind of squeezed out uh you know there are people who who did try to get to the bottom of what happened i mean cy hirsch did a a story about the mechanics of how it got to be went from biden to kamala and you know that story that story came out on Substack, but it wasn't picked up anywhere.
And that's kind of the way the media works. Cypress also broke the story that the United States, NATO, the Biden administration was behind the sabotage of Nord Stream, the natural gas pipeline to Western Europe, to Germany.
And that I mean, that's on the list, too obviously. But that's, I mean, I think we can say that's true.
And I mean, why isn't Cy Hirsch getting the Pulitzer for that? Why, you know, he was immediately, this guy's been a hero on the left for my entire life. Before I was born, he was a hero on the left.
And all of a sudden, everyone's like, shut up, Putin apologist. Oh, I know.
I know. I mean, I'm sorry.
You know, all this is just drives me insane. It drives me insane.
Not only are there almost no good reporters left, the few good reporters left are like attacked all the time. Yeah, they've all been kicked to the curb.
You know, it's I think it's very notable that a lot of the high profileprofile investigative reporters just can't even publish in the United States.

You know, and, you know, look at somebody like Jeff Gerth, who writes, who made a point of kind of keeping ties to traditional media and not burning bridges and doing all that stuff and worked his butt off to get this 24 24 000 word piece about russiagate into the columbia journalism review and it should have landed hard it should have landed like a mike tyson uppercut you know and it people just ignored it so even when they don't kick you out of the club they just they ignore the hard-for reporting. Jeff Gerth, for people who were under 40, was definitely one of the most famous investigative reporters in the world and feared.
Yeah, the New York Times, front page. Worst, Jeff Gerth.
Big deal guy for many, many years. He was the bulldog going after the Clinton administration on everything, right? So, I mean, when he did a story, it mattered.
It was on the desk of every senator in the country. Of course.
You know? And that's what's so interesting about this period, is that there is none of that. The stuff that lands on the desks of people in the relevant committees in Washington is PR.
There's no reporting there, for the most part. Maybe that will change now.
I don't know, but I doubt it. People read your stuff.
I happen to know. That's good.
That would be great to read. They do.
Yeah. So, okay.
But Nord Stream, don't forget. Okay, so Nord Stream, let's go to Nord Stream.
And I'm going to stop interrupting. Nord Stream, what do we know? I mean, we know that there's five or six shifting official explanations of what happened.
They eventually settled on this kind of labyrinthine story about a rogue Ukrainian operation that apparently without our input went and did this.

Yeah, I don't

believe it.

It's laughable to think that that's

true.

That's the kind of...

Nord Stream is just one...

It's like looking up at the stars in the sky.

That's just one of them.

That's a huge story. Think about it.
It destroyed the German economy. It will destroy the EU.
Ultimately, when people wake up from their dream state, it will destroy NATO because it was an attack by one NATO power on a NATO ally. Another NATO member was attacked by the United States on Germany.
And it wrecked the German economy. Absolutely.
It strained the incoming relations. And it could have resulted in an immediate nuclear escalation.
I mean, there are so many different things. And it was a massive ecological disaster.
It was a deep water horizon level environmental event. It's the greatest man-made emission of carbon dioxide in history.
Right. And it's a tiny footnote to the insane lunacies that happened during this period.
I'm sorry, but it is. Nord Stream is, if you're making a list of the 10 weirdest things that happened in the last eight years,

it's probably at the bottom,

I would think.

I mean, don't you think?

I think that's right.

I just, you know,

I like Western Europe.

I think it's important to have a thriving Western Europe.

I don't think they're a rival.

I think they're a complementary region

to the United States.

And to see it destroyed intentionally

by the Biden administration,

let's just wreck Western Europe. Like, why would you do that? And so I'm fixated on it, but you're right.
So what are the others? So COVID? I mean, there are so many different areas where they're going to have to investigate, reinvestigate that. We just went through a period where, you know, there was sort of mass stonewalling of Congress when it was trying to investigate what happened with COVID.
You know, people that were key people like Peter Daszak from the EcoHealth Alliance who just didn't answer subpoenas, right? And so we're going to, there are documents that we know exist that we're going to get now, you know, with FBI communications between the Bureau and a lot of these scientists, you know, dating back 10 years. And it's going to tell a very crazy story.
I mean, a really interesting story. There's a reason why Fauci's pardon is backdated to 2014, because that's the time period that they're going to have to start looking, which is, you know, when did we start defying the ban on gain-of-function research? We clearly did.
I think that's pretty established at this point. Why were we doing it? What connection did that have to the Wuhan thing? What kind of advanced notice did we get? What kind of lies were told about it? Who were responsible for those lies? What information did we get about the inefficacy of the vaccine? And how did that connect to statements by the CDC and the White House? This also connects to the censorship issue in a major way, because there was also a sort of massive effort to control the public conversation about this that went through the health agencies.
So we know they're looking at that um and that's another executive order by the way uh the the free speech order you know directs them uh the department of justice to come up with a comprehensive review of all the censorship stuff so we're going to find out about that but i just think COVID is a gigantic rat's nest of stuff. And, you know, it's going to be like a turkey shoot where every direction they look, they're going to find something, you know, revelatory.
The question is, will that information reach the public? Because there is the intermediaries, the media. So like congressional investigators, executive branch agencies like DOJ, they're constantly inspectors general.
They're always releasing reports and I'm like, no one reads them because nobody picks them up in the media. Do we have enough interested reporters to like disseminate what they find? See, I think we do because I think that what we think of as the media is dead.
They no longer really matter. The media that matters now are people like you and Joe Rogan and other, you know, there's podcasters out there.
There's this gigantic, thriving independent media culture that turned last election clearly yeah uh it was also abundantly clear that the that the old media no longer had any ability to control the narrative about anything they're totally discredited so i i think this stuff is going to come out and because it's going to be so explosive it's going to sort of solidify and heighten the prestige of all this new media i think we're probably going to see whole institutions that are going to be built around i agree these disclosures we're going to have new newspapers new new tv stations so i normally save this for the end but i'm feeling so enthusiastic i'm gonna do it now in case people don't get to the end where do people you? How do they support you if you've made it this far in this conversation? You're like, this guy's unbelievable. I'm sorry, shamelessly promote for just one second.
Oh, thanks. No, I'm at racket.news on Substack where a lot of these news sites are.
For those who didn't grow up playing squash, how are you spelling racket? R-A-C-K-E-T, dot news. Racket, so not squash racket.
Not squash racket, like racket, like that's a racket, which this is. Yes.
It turned out to be aptly named. Nice.
But yeah, no, I'm feeling very optimistic now. I think there are still some holes in this new media landscape we don't have the huge institutions that have reporters who have beats which i think is crucial right uh because you need to have people who develop sources in one small area and but you saw that with julie kelly on january 6th julie kelly i don't even know what she before.
She's purely kind of a creation of the internet. Well, she's a self-creation, but her medium was the internet and X specifically.
And she just got mad about January 6th and just relentlessly focused on that. I'm sure she has other opinions, but she only did that.
And, I mean, man, this one woman, I think she's my my age ish like unearthed all this information that was like no no one else got it except her because she was just so focused on this thing you know it it's great it's incredible and it's a that's exactly how the press is supposed to function they're not supposed to be credentialed like it's not supposed to, you know, somebody confers a title. You are the official media.
No, the citizen, like, that's part of our job is to be the press, right? Like, that's why the First Amendment was designed for exactly for that to happen. And there was lots of incredible reporting that was done by either individuals or small organizations like the U.S.
Right to Know. They filed hundreds of FOIA requests on Fauci and gain of function and everything.
And they really started the ball rolling on that whole side of that investigation. It's a relatively small site.
They had good young reporters there who were hungry and that's how this thing works. Amazing.
It's exciting. It's so exciting.
It's also true that there are increasingly people making a legit living. Not getting, but like paying the bills, doing this job.
Right. Which is important.
And that's also how it's supposed to work. Yes.
I remember hearing a story about I have stone. When I was starting on sub stack, I was calling around to some of the old timers and saying, like, is this a good idea for me to tap out of mainstream media and they told me a story then they said you know i have stone cranked out a newsletter for those people who don't know he was a izzy stone izzy stone he was a you know one of the original and independent investigative journalists he worked out of his house he put out this little newsletter the i have stone.
It was great reporting, independent, didn't have to answer to editors who told him to shape things one way or the other. And he made a nice living, got himself a nice little house, and that was enough, right? And he had an impact.
And you can do that now. The internet makes it easier, actually.
It's amazing. In America, we do things a little differently, and we always have.
But the British said, hey, we're going to tax your favorite morning beverage. The revolutionary Sons of Liberty said no.
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You wonder, again, I'm delaying you in your narrative once more with apologies, but you wonder even just the four topics you've mentioned so far are so big that if we got the truth or some higher percentage of the truth about those things, you wonder about the social effect.

So one of the things the censors always say is they're doing this or preventing you from knowing certain things to preserve societal stability.

Yeah, and trust in institutions. Trust institutions exactly trust institutions so um i mean that's already gone away but it will evaporate completely the more we know don't you think yes yes but it'll be like i mean i hopefully it'll be like the church committee hearings where, we just have to accept people are going to have their minds blown by discoveries, revelations.
For instance, it's already starting in the news media. We're starting to get stories from journalists who were told they had to suppress certain angles, right? You know, there was a Politico story about some people who were told to stay away from the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Two Politico reporters having left Politico admitted that Politico, which is supposedly covering Washington, told them, no, we're not doing that. Right, exactly.
And, you know, my first question is, why didn't you say that when it happened? But I guess people have jobs, right? So that's a thing. But there are going to be a lot more of those.
I mean, there are already kind of whispers going around. But people are going to learn that institutions they believed in their whole lives were fraudulent, that they lied to them about important things.
And it's going to be difficult at first, especially since there are not solid new institutions in place to replace them. Yes.
You know, it's one thing if you're taking down the CIA in the 70s and there's a supposedly reformed CIA there, right? This is different. The media is going to have to rebuild itself from the ground up.
I think it's already doing great, but it doesn't have that look for a lot of people, right? It looks very different. Yeah.
And so, you know, it's going to be, I think that's a good point. It's a transitional period for people.
I guess, look, if you want trust in institutions, and I definitely do. I do.
I grew up trusting institutions. I don't now.
That's their fault, not mine. I think your country doesn't work if nobody trusts any of the institutions, right? It just doesn't.
So we want that. The only way to that is through transparency, honesty.
So I get all that and I'm for it vehemently. I guess what I'm saying is the people who've been administering the system and benefiting from it are completely freaked out.
Right. It's why they're trying to stop Tulsi.
but I wonder if they get threatened enough if they don't become like just flat out dangerous to everybody else.

Like the only way to stop disclosure at this point

would be with like a catastrophe that's so all-encompassing, 9-11, COVID, that it just everything shuts down. All trends in progress stop.
And I just feel like there's a lot at stake for these people. If you're, you know, John Brennan or Jim Clapper and you're like a criminal or Mike Pompeo, you're a criminal.
That's my opinion, but I think they're obviously criminals. Like, you know, you've got a lot to lose.
Absolutely. Yeah.
Yeah. And people in the intelligence agencies whose names are not known to the public, they're about to be.
Exactly. And, you know, we don't know what that's going to result in, what impact that's going to have.
So this was my thinking about, you know, the period between the election and the inauguration this week. I think that's one of the reasons that Tony Blinken was pushing so hard for a real war, trying to kill Putin, for example, which the Biden administration did.
They tried to kill Putin. Really? Yes.
Yes, they did. Wow.
Which is insane. Like, okay, so who takes over Russia? Right.
And what happens to the nuclear arsenal in a country that's like so complex outsiders can't even understand? I mean, you live there, you know. Yeah.
That's demented that you would even think of something like that. so why were they because chaos is a screen that protects them i mean i don't know this that's just like watching what they're doing i'm like why would they be doing that part of it is because like it's it's like when you're taking off the roof of the embassy in saigon you burn all the papers right absolutely but they can't because they're digital so maybe you need like a war to hide your tracks or Or to keep the public's attention.
That's what I mean. Elsewhere.
Right. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I had the same fears. And that was part of my thinking when they started, you know, approving the firing of American missiles into Russian territory and British missiles and French missiles.
I'm like, why would you do like what possible reason would there be to do this? You're not really going to make any military gains by doing this. So, you're doing it either to provoke the other side or to create a headline.
The headline, I don't think it gets you anything. So, what were they doing? And, you know, as you're saying there there were fiddling with regime change in the in the interim yes yeah i think that was a fear that a lot of people had i i didn't think that frankly that that trump would become president i i thought i you know for a variety of different reasons i i don't i don't know exactly what could have happened to stop that, but it was hard for me to accept that it did happen.
I was sitting about six feet away and I just thought, wow, I can't believe this has actually happened. Up until the second he said the oath, I was like, man, you just get superstitious or paranoid or whatever it is, having seen all this stuff.
And I to have those thoughts I agree I totally agree I was like wow I'm becoming crazy yeah but it's not totally crazy when you see the pattern so but I guess my the point I would make is it's like we're not the process has not unfolded fully yet so like there's still a lot that we don't know disclosure is as you've said like imminent and that sets up an incentive for the people being exposed to do something really crazy. It does, but I think the moment is past for the real, like there was a moment where they could have installed, you know, a European-style regime to stop misinformation this is this is the new trend right remember the the hurricanes happened and immediately fema's talking about setting up an anti-misinformation center right uh it just happened in california fucking crazy right i mean The fact that Gavin Newsom had time to try to come up with a state bureau for protecting my reputation, but they could really have done that.
they could have basically put a net over everything with,

I mean, that's the thing that's scary about the European situation

is they already have that massive infrastructure in place to completely control the flow of information what people see what people don't see that they can punish people who step out of line and we were you know this far away from being part of something like that. And if they were going to do that, if they had done that, and I think there was probably some thinking that that would have been accomplished by 2024.
If you go back and look at some of the European Union's papers on the subject, they were anticipating that we were going to be signatories to certain agreements, like the code of on disinformation that we would have our own version by now if they had done that then none of this would be possible you know all these independent outlets they could scream to high heavens but no one would see it it would be like you know no it's totally right right i mean you you know this because you when you were about COVID, well, now we can look behind the scenes and see that the White House was demanding that Facebook dial it down. They turned it down to 50%.
I mean, that's in print. What did you think when you saw that, by the way? I totally ignored it.
I ignore all coverage that in any way pertains to me. I don't want to become self-conscious.
So I didn't spend, you know, one second thinking about it. I've had a couple other things.
And one other thing, particularly in the last year, that was like so shocking. I never thought about it again.
Because you just don't. I'm sure you've been through this.
I mean, you were speaking of mistreated. I'm not going to bring it up, but you were identified as disobedient and, I mean, they tried to end you.
I watched it. Yeah, so you shrug it off or whatever, but you shrug it off.
But from my perspective, it's always, you see things clearly when you're looking at someone else's life. Sure, absolutely.
I didn't even know you at the time. I was like, why are they trying to kill this guy? Yeah.
Right, well, they were. And, well, that's my interpretation of it anyway um but you can't brood on it no but but the the fact that the mechanics they they were trying to install the mechanisms by which oh yeah the all this stuff would have been locked down and and we saw during the covid period how how effective it was yes uh i mean look we've the new head of the nih you know jay bodhacharya mostly didn't hear about his research right i mean this this is the guy who can you believe jay bodhacharya who i love that thoroughly decent man by the way in addition to being right on the science but he's a decent

guy he's like the sweetest guy in the world yeah no absolutely head of nih yeah i know isn't that amazing yeah he went he goes from being censored to being the head of ni it's an it's an amazing transition but the but the thing that that's so extraordinary about it is america would have had a completely different idea about

lockdowns if they had understood how infectious the disease was how fruitless it was to try to physically prevent people from you know getting infected uh and and and how unlikely that was to succeed and how you know know, compared to all the other negatives that could have happened from keeping people at home and everything like that. Like, they wouldn't have made that decision going forward, but they were able to effectively suppress that point of view, which is really scary, right? I mean, there was real research out there and most people didn't see it.
I didn't see it until a year and a half later. No, I know.
Right? No. So, and that's what could happen.
That's what could have happened with all this stuff. So, I know that you, without getting too specific, but you're, you know, you're in touch with doctors, like on a personal level, like you know, doctors.
Just practicing, you know, clinical physicians, right?

My wife's a doctor.

Okay, I didn't know if you wanted to say that.

You're married to a doctor.

So did they know, like it was kept from them too.

Like they didn't.

Yeah, I mean.

Your average like emergency room physician was like aware

that a lot of the COVID propaganda was fake.

Well, yeah, I mean, I know some ER doctors as well.

And they had to go looking for information. And it was very hard to find.
And to this day, if you go on Google and you go looking for things, you're not likely to find the sort of counter-narrative thing easily. and I think for a lot of doctors during that period, it was frustrating because even peer-reviewed research

was not always easy to find for them.

So yeah, during that period,

it affected the whole question of like,

experts who talked to the press,

like they weren't always informed about what was going on or about different studies that had been done. And yeah, we had a completely different idea about the pandemic than maybe we should have.
But the point being is not so much that that was destructive in itself, though I think it was, but that it was a proof of concept of something that was to come. Do you think that as we unearth more about COVID that the biggest question of all, which was what was the point of that? Clearly it was the point.
I mean, if every part of the society was coordinated and aimed toward the same goal, which was increasing the fear, preserving the lies about its origin, hiding a lot of stuff, and pushing you toward the vaccine. And it was utterly coordinated.
If anything was coordinated, that was from the churches to the schools, to the media, everything. Everyone was in the same picture.
Like, why? I don't know. I mean, that's why these documents will be so fascinating to get.

Do you think that we'll ever be able to say with some certainty or confidence, like, this is why they did that? We may not know some of the higher level thinking about things. I mean, you're probably not going to get a document that says, it's really important that we do this because um if we really stress masking then we'll have established the precedent of that visible symbols of conformity are are uh you know a positive goal for an authoritarian regime i mean they're not going to have that on paper anywhere right yes uh, right? But there might be emails back and forth about how we get people to follow instructions about how we manage the problem of academic freedom, right? There are probably going to be emails back and forth saying, we have to change America's thinking about this and get them to start thinking more in the direction of trusting authority, right? There's probably going to be some stuff about that because we've already seen that in FOIA disclosures with some of these anti-disinformation groups and that sort of thing.
So, I imagine there's going to be some stuff with the White House, the CDC, the NIH. There might be some things like that in there.
But the higher level sort of broader conspiratorial questions, I don't know what we're going to get. But I'm fascinated to find out.
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So, okay, so... COVID.
so okay so covid next okay uh russia gate russia gate uh and you know the sort of related phenomenon of fake news intelligence leaks designed to destroy careers which bleeds into kind of lawfare, right?

But Russiagate specifically, that's a big story.

That's a place where I think that's going to be the easiest hit for investigators because we know where the documents are.

In some cases, we even have them already.

We just, they're redacted. So we get to look under the redactions now.
Why did they start the original investigation? What was the impetus for the July 31st opening in 2016 of Crossfire Hurricane? You know, there's some conflicting stories in the past. Did it really come from Britain? Did John Brennan really advise the CIA to look into it? Or was it something else? Why did the FBI open an investigation into Trump specifically after he had taken office in May of 2017? it's just an extraordinary thing thinking back to that time

we don't remember it but the fbi opened a probe into the sitting president of the united states to ask the question of whether he was working for a foreign power at that time and what evidence could they have possibly had for that uh apart from the fact that he fired Jim Comey? If there's... Did they have any...
I mean, they had no evidence. If there's nothing under those redactions more than that, then that itself is an extraordinary scandal, just by itself, right? So the predicate for all of this, I think, and maybe even earlier, but to my knowledge, late in the summer of 16 with the hacking of the DNC and the emails from the DNC.
And the FBI never investigated it, never investigated the actual, you know, the physical removal of this data from their servers. Instead, a company called CrowdStrike, which worked for the Democratic Party, did.
And then exactly at that moment, or right around that moment, a DNC staffer was killed in Washington, D.C. in an apparent robbery in which nothing was taken from him that I happen to know for a fact, the MPD, the Metropolitan Police Department, thought was like bizarre.
And they kind of didn't believe it. A Fox News host went on air and asked questions about this killing.
Why wouldn't you? And the parents of the man who was killed either sued or I think they sued. They certainly threatened to sue and basically scared the crap out of everyone.
So no one's ever asked a question about it since. They hired a private investigator who looked around in that case, I remember, and there were some odd details there.
The FBI ended up in possession of his laptop. Why would the FBI wind up in possession? I mean, this is a local crime, right? Yeah.
This was one of the first reasons I started to look at that case because I got a call from somebody about that. And I don't know why that was the case, but it is the case.

and there were people at the DNC one of whom I know

who thought that he was murdered

for political reasons

at the DNC

a very high ranking person

at the DNC told me that

and I probably should just say

but everyone can guess who it is

who's informed on this, but I don't want to betray confidence, but I'm not making this up. And I don't know what happened, but as far as I know, not one person has looked into that in the media.
No, and even if it is just an unsolved murder of a type that they normally solve, the whole situation, that whole timeline was very strange.

It doesn't really make sense. The hacking of the DNC, the bringing in of CrowdStrike, when the information was released online.

They never really proved that case, but they immediately made inferences about it.

And there was an incredibly sophisticated kind of public campaign to create this narrative that, you know, upon closer examination, turns out not to be true. So we got to go back and find out what did exactly happen there.
Why did they order this crossfire hurricane probe? Why were they sending informants in after Trump or people in his orbit? And we know they did. And who were all those informants? It'd be interesting.
I have some suspicions. yeah well we know they did who were all those informants it'd be interesting

i have some suspicions yeah well we know we know who some of them were right um but we don't know who all of them all of them were i mean i did a story to the effect that the the people in the house intelligence committee who were looking at this you know cash patel's initial uh probe that They came up with a number that it was 26 different people who were being investigated in Trump's orbit. No matter what happened, it's a huge story because it's a political espionage story.
It's not unlike Watergate, really. Exactly.
And we've laughed it off uh or the you know the mainstream press is has shrugged and snorted at the idea that this is a scandal that needs to be um taken seriously but it does uh it absolutely does just because it's donald trump doesn't mean you can ignore the fbi conducting political investigations uh willy-nilly and inventing predicates to look into people's campaigns and using FISA and all kinds of other crazy, can I say crazy shit? I mean, that stuff was all nuts. And we need to find out exactly what happened with that.
and that is one of the reasons I think that people are nervous about this weaponization of government probe

because it's absolutely going to look in that direction yes and you know that's one of the first things they're they're going to to look at is who was behind that uh you know who cooked up the steel dossier how was that released um you know And then cooked up the Steele dossier? How was that released? You know, and then there's the whole question of, you know, leading up to impeachment and the leaks that were done. A lot of them were kind of illegal on their face, right? Like you can't leak signals intelligence to newspapers.
And it was done repeatedly during that time period. It happened to me.
They did it to me. Right.
Yeah, exactly. The NSA read my text and leaked them to the New York Times twice.
Right. Right.
Yeah. And they, you know, admitted it one time, but it was under FISA, so it was like, yeah.
Which is, by the way, hilarious because initially they were denying that it even happened, right? And then, of course, later it turns out it was more advantageous to leak the contents. But people had developed very short memories during this time period.
They were not able to retain information. Among other things, it's because journalists got out of the habit of repeating the that used that was one of the things that we were taught um you know when i i was taught growing up when you're doing a story about anything you have to recount all the facts as if the the reader has never encountered the story before story should stand alone yes exactly you have to you have to retell the whole thing so that they don't have to go looking for another story to find out what this means.
Exactly. And one of the subtle little changes that happened to the media business in the last eight years is they stopped doing that.
They would tell you- That's fascinating. Right? They would tell you the thing that happened that day, and they wouldn't tell you all this backstory that you needed to know to really understand um what you were reading and so yeah i think we're going to have the opportunity now to see these things laid out in full and you know in hindsight and that's hopefully going to be able to persuade people who didn't see it the first time.
That's such a fascinating observation, which I've never heard before or thought of. But isn't it true? It's so true.
It's so true. And so everything's out of context.
Right. Yeah.
There's a certain element of dot connecting required in journalism. Like, why am I telling you this? Why does does it connect to things that happen other things that happened or may happen like even simple things like when you know the if anthony fauci comes out and says well masks are important because of x well you have to put in the the timeline of what he originally said about that.

Yes.

Or, you know, Joe Biden saying, you know,

we have to correct misinformation because they're killing people.

And you got to point out that they were wrong about things themselves,

or that the Biden administration itself was de-amplified by some of these platforms accidentally, but they were, right? But yeah, they just left out a lot of backstory. And we have to get back into the business of telling people the whole story from the beginning.
Fascinating. Okay, Russiagate.
Russiagate. I mean, and that's one of the reasons why the the pardon of adam schiff is kind of interesting um because he's a central figure of uh of both the j6 committee but but also the russia gate story um and you know he was somebody who was giving interviews saying that preemptive pardons should never be given but whatever um yeah russia gate is a thing then there's the whole question of uh lawfare right and the effort to make sure that biden faced no opposition at all uh in his reelection campaign and this is here i'm not just talking about, you know, Donald Trump and the lawsuit to prevent him from being on the ballot because of the 14th amendment and all that.
This extends to even to groups like no labels or the green party or Dean Phillips or Marianne Williamson or Cornel West. There was an extraordinary calculated effort to prevent competition.
Now, that's not necessarily illegal. Parties can do whatever they want internally, but it's still fascinating that there had to have been some kind of coordinated campaign.
If there's any communication between the White House, say, and the groups that were suing no labels or RFK or issuing challenges, no labels went through this extraordinary incident where somebody created a dummy no labels site and it had a big picture of Donald Trump on it so that would try to associate no labels with Trump and there's a lawsuit going on about it right now. What was the real origin of that? Like, you know, who financed that whole thing? I mean, I think there are a lot of stories about little tiny dirty tricks that are going to be coming out.
Well, and also, like, the main question was who makes these decisions? Right. So, if the Democratic Party is running the United States, which they have for four years, I think we can say that, what does that mean? Who's running the Democratic Party? Right.
I mean, I would imagine it's a coalition of, you know, elected officials, you know, Chuck Schumer, big fundraisers, right? Mm-hmm. You know, Jeffrey Kassenberg and, I don't know, Obama, I guess.
But who really is running this? Who's on the Central Committee? Right. And how is that done? How was the coordination managed with these sort of legal action committees that were mass filing suits about everything from, you know, the ballot access issue to there were Klan Act suits that were filed against people? I mean, did that have any connection to people who are actually in office if it did you know then we have another corruption situation involved but yeah the larger question of who who was managing all this stuff uh because it clearly wasn't joe biden that's right who runs the country who who runs the country that's don't in we have a right to know.
Right. Our mutual friend, Walter Kern, talked about this, saying that this was the first time that we had a president that had a sign on his desk basically that said, the buck does not stop here.
We don't know where the buck stopped during this period. And so that's a fascinating question.

But the whole wargaming of the last election season, there are a lot of stories.

People don't even remember this.

New Hampshire held a primary, right?

People went and they voted in the New Hampshire primary.

And then the results were canceled and they held a second nominating event on a Saturday night, months later, where a bunch of officials got together and they just decided to allocate the delegates themselves. Like, I'd never heard of that before, just canceling an election and sort of redoing it in a closed meeting? Like, how does that happen?

And just turning the spoils over to somebody else? I mean, I think it ended up mostly having the same result, but for some reason they held the second contest. It's just very strange, you know, why that happened.
So that we got to get into. you know then there's the whole

question of

you why that happened so that we got to get into You know Then there's the whole question of the investigation of the Trump assassination incidents We heard nothing about that. It was the most extraordinary news story that I've ever I mean apart from the disappearing president and the mysterious nomination and COVID uh you know presidential candidate and ex-president gets shot and the story's dead within like 48 hours uh and all you read in the news from the fbi uh there are these comments saying that they don't have any motive evidence we've done 100 interviews, but we don't know anything about why this happened or what was going on there.
Do you believe that? I have a very hard time believing that there's nothing interesting. He was kind of your classic 20-year-old American kid with no social media presence whatsoever, ever.
Right. Yes, exactly.
And it is a very typical American story where one day you just wake up and decide to die assassinating a presidential candidate for no reason right it's like who has like your first joint yeah your first joint yeah um and then this the second one i mean you know the the ryan Ryan Routh thing, that's not weird at all. Like, I just flew into Florida last night.
I don't think I could have gotten my hands on, you know, a Chinese-made SKS semi-automatic rifle without help. I mean, I don't know.
That's being a little conspiratorial. But look, there are of met with the members of congress he was lived in ukraine what and we know that our intel agencies working through the ukrainian intel agencies have murdered all these people and tried to murder all these people including some i know personally and so that's a like that's just a fact and he he was there with them but But this had nothing to do.
And by the way, are those the only two attempts on Donald Trump's life, do you think, during this campaign season? I don't think so. So why don't we know more about that? I don't know why we don't know more about that.
Yeah, right. So, and I, I mean, I've, you know, talked to the Trump people and Trump himself.
And I, I'm being sincere. I really don't have a sense of what they think of all of that.
I know that in public, they haven't been anxious to talk about it at all. So I've talked to some of them and, you know, I've heard a lot of anger about this, that, you know, and I think this is, this is the impetus for these investigations.
I think probably the second attempt was the last straw for some of the people on his staff. And, you know, it's part of the reason why I think they're going to be very public about this.
It can't come too soon, I really think. And I will say, will say you know whatever people watching think of trump i know for a dead certain fact that a lot of people who work for him really like him personally so i think they are mad about it they're very mad about it and and and then sorry just to finish off the the the censorship thing um that is going to be a major investigation.

There's at least two that I know of

that are already underway.

The government affairs,

Rand Paul's committee,

government oversight committee in the Senate,

they really want to do a big thing

like a government files type of thing

where it would be like the Twitter files, but for the whole federal government, basically. And I think there are so many different wings of the government that were involved in what we got to see in the Twitter files, which, you know, to follow the example of what I just said, I have to repeat what this is.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter, he opened up Twitter, Twitter's internal correspondence, and we got to see that there was this big bureaucracy with government pressuring platforms like Twitter and Facebook to censor content. But we only got to see a little bit of it.
And I think what's going to come out is how extensive it really was, what agencies were really involved in it, how many people were committed to that effort. Also, were we negotiating with the European Union to be part of the Digital Services Act? Was the State Department doing that? I think so there's going to be a big...
For people who haven't followed it, can you just describe the Digital Services Act? The Digital Services Act is like the wet dream of every sensor in the world, right? But basically, it mandates that every internet platform abide by the recommendations of these people called trusted flaggers who are basically licensed content reviewers who look on at things on social media and if they see a narrative that they don't like they will elevate it to the platform if the platform does not abide by the recommendations they get crippling enormous fines and this is one of the reasons why there was a dispute between uh elon musk and europe about whether or not he was following these rules closely closely enough This just came into effect last year, but it's an extremely effective way to regulate speech because it doesn't require the government to actually do it. It's the private platform that actually commits censorship.
And this third-party methodology, which is specifically, by the way, what what Donald Trump referenced in his free speech executive order. We don't want that to happen.
We're going to not allow that. They already have the full blown Death Star version in Europe of that.
Right. And so the investigation here in the United States

is going to basically uncover how far along were we

into developing the same kind of thing.

The Twitter file suggested that we were already doing it informally

and illegally, probably,

but we want to find out exactly.

With Snopes and all the other fact checkers.

Yes, all the fact checking organizations, right?

You know, sometimes that was done informally, by inference, or it was done through NGOs that made recommendations. But I think the really dangerous stuff is when you had State Department agencies like the Global Engagement engagement center or the FBI's foreign influence task force, making direct recommendations to these platforms or the white house in your case.
We're going to find out all of these communications, not just little pieces of them. What about the U S government, the Intel agencies control of Wikipedia, which basically is our collective memory at this point.
It's elevated by Google. It's the top of every search.
It is the only history most people will ever read. And it's controlled by the US government to disappear inconvenient facts.
Yeah. I mean, Wikipedia has a very advanced system for regulating what gets into Wikipedia pages.
If it's not a certain kind of source, it doesn't get on there. There was a bizarre incident last year where the Real Clear Politics polling average, which is a tool that reporters have been using for almost two decades, they kind of left it off their page of polling average sites because they didn't like the page, I guess.
I don't know. But yeah, I think we have to get some clarity about what happened there.
Obviously, the former head of Wikipedia is now in a senior position in NPR. The deputy or the COO.
One government media job to another. Yeah, exactly.
And the COO of NPR is the former head of this thing called the Aspen Commission on Information Disorder, which is one of the groups that we investigated. And the Twitter files was sort of heavily into this whole content moderation question so the merging of state media with platforms and regulation of sourcing and all that stuff that's probably going to come out too kind of weird that the head of the aspens to wrote the biography of elon musk isn it? Right, yeah, exactly.
Yeah.

Walter Pincus, right?

Isaacson.

Isaacson, sorry.

Walter Pincus was the CIA reporter at the Washington Post. Can you cut that?

I'm sorry.

No, no, no, no.

It's just funny.

You remember Walter Pincus.

Yeah.

Walter Isaacson.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, it is weird.

The Aspen Institute, I mean, they played a very strange role in the whole censorship

story, but yeah.

So what happens to the, you said the media as constituted is dead, but I mean,, like the Episcopal Church, they have enormous shells left. You know what I mean? Like the church has died, but they've got great churches, great buildings.
What happens to the Washington Post and NBC News? There still is bureaus and CNN. What happens to these things? They're going to struggle, I think, to get audience back.
You already see that the strategy of some of them is to try to pander to the audiences that they betrayed previously. Yeah, there was a funny episode over last weekend where NBC and Saturday Night Live, you know, they finally did a joke picking on Rachel Maddow.
It wasn't particularly funny, but it was a signal that, okay, we're going to suck up to this group now, right, as opposed to the other one, which is so loathsome, right? Rachel Maddow is not the core whatever you think of Rachel Maddow she just like advertises

herself as Rachel Maddow is not the core. Whatever you think of Rachel Maddow, she just advertises herself as Rachel Maddow.

One person's opinions.

It's funny you sounded like her for a second there.

Yeah, well, I know her and I've never been mad at her.

I couldn't disagree more.

I'm sure she's attacked me a lot.

I wouldn't know.

But I'm not mad at Rachel Maddow.

I'm mad at Ken Delaney.

No, of course.

You know what I mean? People who pose as reporters who are actually just mouthpieces for the intel world. Of course.
And my only point is that just by, you know, changing the direction of their BS, they're not going to win back audience, right? People, you know, and this is something that I've noticed since I've been in the business. People in media continually underestimate audiences.
They think that they're much stupider than they really are. I remember when I covered Wall Street, I was constantly told that you can't do these big stories on credit default swaps and all these other things because audiences don't want to hear about it.
They'll turn the page. But it's not true.
People have a great hunger to find out things and they have a much stronger ability to understand things than most media people imagine. And so when they do these sort of transparent exercises in lying and PR and political propaganda, and they think that people won't notice, it makes it worse.
The numbers are going to go down rather than up when they start. Totally true.
Don't you think? Well, it's just interesting. I actually think it's more sinister even than you described.
So the two topics after 30 years in television, the two topics that they never wanted to do, they always wanted to do stuff about trannies or race or whatever, all that stuff. But they never wanted to do economics or foreign policy ever.
Right. And their view was, or their stated view was, the audience doesn't care.
And then I get fired and start doing foreign policy stuff, and it gets crazy numbers. And I only do it purely because I'm interested.
That's it. I was always interested, and I'm also interested in economics.
I'm not an expert, but I think it matters. That's why I'm interested, right? You do a story like that, you blow out of the water all the pap that they do.
So it turns out there's a deep reservoir of interest among viewers and readers for these stories. And I'm starting to think that maybe the people who run the networks where I worked, they just didn't want to address that stuff because there was a consensus on it that they agreed with and that they didn't want to challenge.
Absolutely. You think so? Oh, 100% I think that.
I think that especially when you're talking about interventionist military policies, whether or not they've been effective.

Try pitching stories to one of the big newspapers about maybe some kind of downside to an invasion or an occupation or the expansion of, you know, a thousand military bases in the Middle East or whatever it is, drone warfare, like, you know, you're going to have a hard time selling that one, right? But they did it in the slyest way. I mean, it went right over my head for decades.
They did it not by saying, you know, we just don't agree, you know, we have one perspective on that and we're going to stick with it. That's a straightforward way to explain it, which I can digest.
They instead said, no, the audience just doesn't care. And you're basically putting the business at risk by covering things that people have no interest in.
So get back to Natalie Holloway or whatever the drama of the moment was. And I believed that.
I believed it. I mean, I just assume people just aren't interested.
I guess I internalized our audience's dumb position, which they had for the whole time I worked there.

Yeah, and it's worse in TV than it is in print, but it shouldn't be, right?

And I got the same thing.

I mean, not so much at Rolling Stone, but I remember we did one story.

Our plan was to do one story on what caused the financial crisis. And we got such an overwhelming response because it wasn't anywhere.
People could not read anywhere what happened to the economy in 2008. There was not a rational explanation that people could read.
Well, you did big I guess, numbers is not applicable to a magazine, but that got, I mean, your stories on that were widely read because you're one of the only people doing it. Right, but it wasn't so much what I was doing.
It was just the fact of, you know, how does this work? Who was really profiting by it? What happened to the people who bought these homes, etc., etc.? Just basic questions, and people wanted to know. And as you discover, they want to know other things.
Where are they spending the money that I send every year that goes to the Pentagon? That's right. Right? How does it disappear into a black hole, and it's not auditable, and that's okay? You know you know it's funny i remember getting back in the summer late august of 2001 from maine i'd been in maine and you know i'm just on vacation going back to work and our i was at cnn then and we were wall to wall literally wall to wall on a story about a congressman from Bakersfield, California, Kern County called Gary Condit.

And the question was, did he murder his intern, Shandra Levy? And then later, whatever, in case anyone cares, turns out she was killed by an illegal alien from El Salvador called Ingemar Guendique.

He killed a couple other people, I think.

Anyway, whatever.

That was the story.

But at the time, we were fully immersed in this question of, is this moderate Democrat from Bakersfield a murderer? And I mean, we did specials on it. It's all we did.
And then that September, that was interrupted by 9-11. And I remember thinking at the time, like 9-11 came out of nowhere.
There was no kind of backstory. It just happened.
It was like truly like the least expected thing that ever happened right right in retrospect i think were there things going on in the world long bigger trends that maybe we should you know as a news company we should have been paying attention to sure to prepare people for the at least the idea that like wow something bad could happen because there's a lot going on abroad yeah i think if you had visited parts of the middle east back then you would have the coal bombing and like the saudis where we had bases in places that were clearly very provocative for no real reason the kenyan bombing yes exactly there was a lot going on and we just kind of ignored all of it but we didn't't just ignore it. We ignored it in, like, this manic way, like, must cover Gary Condit.
And I'm not a conspiracy nut, Matt, but you do sort of wonder, like, what was that? Yeah, those were the good old days when the manias were things like the summer of the shark. Right? Remember that? Do I remember? I think I participated in it.
Should you swim? But then you get 9-11, like this one, you know, sort of beautiful fall morning and everything changes. And it's like, I do think it's fair to ask, even if there's no intent involved, like, how did we, like, what should we have done differently to at least give people the sense that there were highly organized, well-funded elements abroad that hated us? Like, I just did not know that.
And most people didn't. Yeah.
Why didn't we do that? Honestly. And it came as a shock to a lot of people.
Like, a complete shock. Were you in the country when that happened? No, I was in Russia.
Well, so at least you have that excuse.

You know, you're living in another country.

I lived in Washington, D.C., covering the news for CNN.

I mean, I hosted a show on CNN, and I had no idea that, like— That's a terrifying feeling, right?

You've got to cover something that you have no background in.

Well, there was no covering it.

There was just watching it, kind of.

Right, exactly.

And there's never actually been any covering of it.

No one's ever really covered 9-11. Like, that yeah exactly and what followed it yeah exactly yeah well i'm we did cover that but like the 9-11 like how do how exactly did that happen we have all these law enforcement and intelligence agencies protecting us and they had no idea that they're you know dozens and dozens and dozens of you the 19 hijackers, but then all the support people living in our country, training, getting money from someone.
We never really, what? Anyway, I don't know why I'm going off on that, but it's like no one ever asked the basic questions. Right.
Right. And, you know, there are a lot of people who didn't ask basic questions in the last eight years.

I've noticed. Including me, I guess, because a lot of the things you just said are like, yeah, whatever happened to that? Well, it becomes overwhelming after a while.
It's overwhelming. That's right.
I mean, you know, the 50th time they tell you that democracy is going to end in 10 minutes or,

you know, you're going to die if you don't, you know, take this medicine or whatever it is, or, you know, your kids are going to die. It emotionally, it wears on people and it becomes very difficult.
I mean, I think this was a factor in, it was a factor in a lot of the corruption stories because the audiences were not were they were not going to be receptive to alternative versions of what they had just heard because it was such an emotionally wrenching experience for them so it's going to take a while for people to digest a lot of these things you know i think it's happening slowly but um but what's going to be interesting about this period is that there's going to be this avalanche of primary material that's going to come out. And I'm fast.
I can't wait. You're going to need to hire more staff to keep up with it all.
Yeah, probably that's the case. And it's going to be a fun time for journalists like me, but just as a citizen, I can't wait to read it, you know? So can I ask one last question? Your reporting is marked by its command of detail, I would say.
I mean, it is. I read it.
Hopefully. Yeah.
No, but of like a lot of detail. Like a lot of detail.
And so you look at things. I kind of like, you know, I'm not a detail guy.
You are. What name one like tiny detail that you are personally obsessed with and maybe mildly embarrassing, embarrassed to admit you're obsessed with, but like, what's the one thing that you just, you want to know, like you've, that you've been wondering about? I mean, I think the thing that happened last year with that frenzied week in july yeah with with biden and uh you know and the the lying about the poll numbers and the the phony the clearly planted stories about nancy pelosi uh lying about the poll numbers what look there were stories that biden was ahead in the polls that that came out as they were telling us that he had to drop out because the poll numbers were so dire uh npr did a story like virtually i believe it was this a couple of days after uh the debate i'll have to go back and look at this.
But there were stories that he was doing fine in the polls. And, of course, we later found out from Biden staffers that they said they never had – I'm sorry.
That was about Kamala. They never had internal polling showing Kamala ahead.
Yes. Even though there were scads of stories telling us the opposite.

But for me, the story that I just can't get past is what happened in that one week. And how did they manufacture that whole thing without anybody showing any kind of curiosity about it? you know, had the media been so completely paper-trained by that moment that they, I guess so, right? But, you know.
Well, it's the same impulse that maintains discipline in Washington and in the media, which is commitment to party first. And what is, so that is the one thing,

like all the things I disagree with the Democratic Party

and some of the Republican Party on policy,

like I have all kinds of disagreements.

Like I think that, they think that's okay, got it.

But the one thing I really can't relate to

is the loyalty to party.

What is that?

I never understood that.

You know, like what you're going to agree

with a bunch of people on everything that they do and you're going to support that? It's one thing for politicians to act that way, but I cannot understand it in a media person. Do you think that's a defining fact of, like, our life is this commitment to party? Well, right now we have this situation where the only versions of things that you get are essentially party explanations.
And that's why it's so interesting that there's this sort of intermediate podcast space where people are exploring things from all different directions. And that's where all the people are going.
I don't think it's a coincidence. Can that last? I think it can.
I think what's going to happen is you're going to have new institutions that are built up around that, that are just going to find new ways to... Then you can't have, as long as that lasts, you can't have authoritarian rule.
Right. Oh, yeah.
And that was proven. I mean, look, a handful of podcasts that a lot of people chuckled about had a huge impact in the last election.
And you know what? Shame on those media people who laughed at those podcasts because, among other things, they had lower numbers than a lot of those podcasts, like significantly lower. Most of them, yeah.
Right? And, you know, they're snobs about it. They say, oh, well, that's, you know, we have a better quality of audience.

No, you just are not convincing. Actually, they have a much lower quality of audience.
You know, your average Rogan listener is way smarter than your average cable news viewer. Like, sorry.
Right, yeah. And they're more willing, partly because they watch shows like joe rogan which which ask them to entertain multiple points of view on things right that's kind of the whole idea you're like you'll see somebody there are lots of people who go on the rogan show that i disagree with me too but i hear it you know um and that's the whole point right is you get to hear different points of view and that's been excluded from this other form of media this kind of bifurcated red blue landscape um which doesn't work anymore and is in collapse but um i i just think that this this period now uh it's going to be great for launching the this new media that's necessary because they're going to have all this material to work with and because it's going to be all documents people are going to trust it right in the same way that they trusted the twitter files i didn't have anything to say about it i just sort of put it out there but uh all these new these independent organs are going to look at this these reams of material and they're going to discuss it and pass it around and that's going to be how the public is educated which is great i love it it's the best right man you put me in such a better mood matt taib thank you no thank you seriously i mean mean, I think you would do this for free.
I get that feeling.

Absolutely would. I love it.
Thanks, Tucker.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

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