Glenn Beck is joined by Cheryl Atkinson, Steve Dacey, and Rashida Tlaib to discuss all the latest in the Benghazi scandal, Iran, and the media's total denial about what happened in the streets of Benghazi.
00:00:00.000Hey, welcome to the podcast. We kind of started a little differently than I thought we would.
00:00:07.460As soon as I opened up the mic today on the podcast, some stuff started spilling out.
00:00:11.920Also, we have Cheryl Atkinson, who is a five-time Emmy Award winner, the, you know, Edward R. Murrow Award winner several times.
00:00:21.400You know, they hate her now because, well, she investigated the truth during the Obama administration about Benghazi and also Fast and Furious and others.
00:00:32.540But then she said that the government was spying on her.
00:00:38.020And of course, we all know that's impossible until she just filed another lawsuit.
00:00:45.600Now, she says she has five people who were part of it in the government.
00:00:52.340We give you that and so much more, including Steve Dace.
00:00:57.420As we try to figure out who's going to be president, he makes some bold predictions.
00:05:59.380You know, he, he, one time, I was in a meeting with Chairwoman Maxine Waters and two other colleagues about pushing this amendment to stop fossil fuel investment.
00:06:12.300Us, the government, stop investing in fossil fuels.
00:06:15.000And he whispers to me, mom, can I have a piece of paper?
00:06:17.780And, of course, he doesn't know how to whisper.
00:08:08.140So, everybody said – well, not everybody.
00:08:11.520The press made you look like a loon and a crazy person when you were reporting the facts on Benghazi.
00:08:18.980And then I'll never forget the video that you took.
00:08:23.100Maybe you were in a hotel room or something.
00:08:24.920I can't remember exactly, but I remember you having on your phone tape of someone turning on your computer and I think deleting things from your computer.
00:08:36.060Well, that was way after the initial forensics and discovery of the government intrusion on a third computer.
00:08:42.020Yes, while I was working, there was a remote access and hyper-quick deletion before my very eyes of something that is not possible to do by holding down a key yourself or anything like that.
00:08:54.440And, yes, Media Matters launched an effort to talk to a supposed forensics expert who had never looked at any of these computers who declared I was holding down my backspace key or that it was stuck.
00:09:07.000And, therefore, none of the computer intrusion story was true, and it was all just sort of made-up craziness.
00:09:13.620I don't think it took hold as much as they hoped.
00:09:17.400I mean, that was widely reported in the liberal press, but I do think most people understood we have and had the forensics that proved the government intrusion from the start.
00:09:28.780And now, as you said, we have a federal agent, former federal agent involved in the surveillance who has admitted being part of it and helped us with some information.
00:09:40.420How did you get this – how did this guy flip or this woman flip, and why?
00:09:51.000The lawsuit that I fought for about six years at great expense with the government fighting every step of the way, so I never got a page of discovery, was ultimately dismissed last year with the main judge,
00:10:03.300although there was a great dissenting judge who disagreed, but the main judge saying I should have the names of the agents, not just the forensic proof showing the government did it.
00:10:12.100I needed to know the names of the people who were involved, and we argued we can't do that unless we get discovery, so it was this horrible loop.
00:10:20.500But we put out sort of an all-call for information because we were at a dead end, if that's what was required.
00:10:25.880And we were contacted by a number of people that had been vetted, not by me, so I have limited information, but my attorneys have been researching and vetting people for four to five months.
00:10:38.400And as for motivation, I don't know, except it could be – these are shady characters involved in doing this.
00:10:44.900You can imagine the federal agents would be willing to do illegal surveillance on lots of Americans, according to this information, not just me.
00:10:51.820That's all along why this was important.
00:10:55.360But one of the people we name in the lawsuit is a former Secret Service agent who is in prison for other government corruption already.
00:11:02.860So these are the kinds of people you're dealing with that you have to sort through the truth and sort through their information, and my vetters think that they have very good information now.
00:11:13.720Will it be enough to convince the judge to let us open this case with the names?
00:11:18.540So, Cheryl, it would be kind of comforting to know that these were all rogue agents, but do you believe that that is true?
00:11:31.280Is that what the evidence is showing you, that these might be all rogue agents, or was there coordination?
00:11:36.140There was, according to our information, coordination out of a sort of a task force, you could call it, run out of a U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore at the time under then-U.S. attorney Rod Rosenstein with a task force of people that included FBI, Secret Service, contractors that were tasked sometimes to ATF, DEA, Secret Service, and FBI.
00:12:02.040This is a group that, and I believe this is just my theory based on information I have from people who work on the inside.
00:12:10.140There are numerous dark groups that do work like this totally outside the FISA process.
00:12:15.540I mean, people have asked whether FISA warrant should be approved, but we knew all along there was no FISA warrant on me.
00:12:24.780So we knew all along that the spying on me was done outside the system entirely, sort of this extra-legal system that happens, yes, I believe, with the knowledge of important people inside the Department of Justice.
00:12:37.900Therefore, Glenn, we're at this loggerheads where no matter what we know, even if the guys bring themselves in handcuffs to me or to the government or to the courts, if the Department of Justice doesn't want to hear it, doesn't want to prosecute themselves, it still goes nowhere unless there's, I guess, somehow enough public pressure for people to say do something.
00:12:57.680So the Justice Department, I mean, we've lost justice and intelligence in this country in more ways than one, but those two departments, I think, are really, really screwed up.
00:13:15.780They were turning a blind eye at best, but I think the corruption starts at the very, very top.
00:13:26.960Is there any indication to you that any of this stuff – because, I mean, Trump is paying the price for this kind of corruption himself right now.
00:13:38.260Is there any clue that this stuff is going to be cleaned up?
00:13:42.060Is there anybody that is going to ride into the rescue here?
00:13:49.560I mean, nothing has changed for us in fighting our lawsuit at the Department of Justice between the Obama administration and the Trump administration.
00:13:56.560The same people are still fighting it.
00:13:58.680They don't seem to care about the forensics, which, again, these are undeniable forensics.
00:14:03.200It's not something you can dispute as to whether the government's software and the government's IP addresses were involved.
00:14:10.460Instead of doing the obvious, which they should say, boy, this is serious.
00:14:13.740We need to get to the bottom of who may have done this.
00:14:16.820They're, you know, in essence, covering up and obstructing.
00:14:20.200And I don't know what to do about that except to say that, in my view, there are still people in important places that don't want things like this to come to light.
00:14:30.500And I think that's in part because, as I said, this is way bigger than just the surveillance on me.
00:14:37.920But this was done, we believe, and our information says on hundreds of innocent U.S. citizens and other journalists.
00:14:45.180I just happen to have the intel contacts to get the forensics examined and prove it.
00:14:50.760So tell me exactly what they were doing to you and what you think they might be doing to others.
00:14:56.500They were around March of 2011, surveilling me, ATF agents who were involved in exposing the illegal fast and furious operation that the government had denied at first,
00:15:09.500moving weapons into a sovereign nation of Mexico into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
00:15:14.560And they were ineffectively monitoring everything I did on my computer through government software proprietary only to the U.S. government intel agencies that we see in our computer, in my computers, while I was at CBS.
00:15:30.000So they could monitor all my keystrokes.
00:15:37.200The, you know, the programs were, their computers were infiltrated, not just my forensics, but we hired a separate forensics team at CBS that confirmed the intrusions.
00:15:50.360You know, I don't use Skype anymore because I didn't know at the time.
00:15:54.360It can be activated silently by government or government software.
00:15:58.540They can listen in on what your conversations are without you knowing it, and they can exfiltrate files through Skype, which they did.
00:16:05.100Which means they can go in, which means they can go in and take files that you have on your computer that are not related to Skype and take them without you knowing it.
00:16:28.620It's basically wanting to know, I assume, what I was working on, what I was about to report, and most importantly, what Obama officials or administration folks were talking to me and giving me the information that I was using to break stories with.
00:16:44.860Who do you think this affects in the real world?
00:16:48.480What I think some people may miss about all of this is, if they are – there were three classified documents planted in my computer as well.
00:17:01.180What do you mean, planted in your company?
00:17:03.360Well, the forensics show that deep in my operating system, in a place I didn't even know existed because I don't know that much about computers, there were government classified documents that I didn't put there.
00:17:13.460So the conclusion was that someone obviously put them there.
00:17:17.460Are they trying to frame somebody for having supposedly given them to me so they could take action against an insider?
00:17:34.820Well, imagine the mischief that can occur if the government's not on your side or if there are bad actors inside the government who are willing to do bad things to make you look guilty or to make it seem like you've done something.
00:17:47.980There's other information that's not in the complaint yet that's very chilling that I don't want to talk about yet for legal reasons, but the kinds of stuff they were allegedly doing to me and other Americans would just, you know, it's even more chilling than what I've described.
00:18:37.120And if these things aren't resolved, we're just going to expect more of the same.
00:18:41.220So I would say, can you tell the Trump administration, the Justice Department, tweet, say publicly whatever you can do, don't sweep it under the rug.
00:18:52.620Investigate this Baltimore task force that was conducting, allegedly conducting surveillance on hundreds of Americans and journalists and government whistleblowers and so on.
00:19:01.260And, you know, don't let it go away, regardless of what happens to my individual case.
00:19:18.300I mean, my eyes were were opened to a new reality when I had to fight a lawsuit and the government had all of the information.
00:19:31.580And I happen to have been passed all of the information, but the court wouldn't accept it unless it came from the government and the government wouldn't release it.
00:19:42.460And I mean, it's when they decide you're done, you're done.
00:20:14.220Investigative reporter Cheryl Ackeson, who has been under the thumb of the government for quite some time.
00:20:21.100This is stuff that if we don't stop it now, we don't stop it and we become Mexico or Russia.
00:20:29.400And there are people I can guarantee you there are people on both sides of the aisle that don't mind this stuff because, yeah, they'll not use it for bad.
00:20:41.060They've got to use it to stop the other side.
00:20:43.180I'm telling you, if we don't stop this stuff, if we don't investigate, if we don't clear our intelligence and justice department, we don't make it and we become a very, very dark state.
00:20:58.860This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:21:41.740I didn't know he had died on the operating table.
00:21:44.260And find this out in the middle of this amazing podcast.
00:21:48.660He just he wrote a book called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It.
00:21:53.500And and I think his his life did depend on it.
00:21:58.080And what he learned, I mean, he had already written this book, but he used what he wrote in this book to pull himself back from the darkness.
00:22:10.860I went through some really traumatic surgery three months ago, like and I was basically dead.
00:22:18.300And where I bled to death, I was spraying blood everywhere after surgery, after I was leaving the hospital, artery burst and I was spraying blood on everyone and basically bled to death.
00:22:27.200And they had to grab me and shove me into an operating room and slash me open and go fix it.
00:22:32.440And literally, it was that that close.
00:22:34.780And so when I got out of the hospital, I was in an insane amount of pain because when your blood builds up enough that it bursts out of your body, you know, it's not pretty.
00:22:54.520And I was in a level, I didn't know pain like this could exist, you know, like the level of pain I was in because it was also in the lower abdominal area.
00:23:46.880And now the publisher was sending me the final proofs for the copy edits.
00:23:51.160And if, and as you know, when you're a writer, you care about every word and you want your words to be there, not the copy editor's word.
00:23:57.760And I was looking at the material and realizing my mind wasn't there.
00:24:02.960If I was on these drugs, I couldn't give my all to this book.
00:24:06.260And so it was like, I realized, look, this was purpose and that was, it was bigger than pain.
00:24:12.840I would deal with pain, forget the drugs.
00:24:15.260I need to be clear because I have purpose.
00:24:17.460And I think, and I realized looking at times in my life when, when I had, when I struggled with, when I was just like, okay, I'm going to go.
00:24:40.620And no one will ever know, you know, and no one ever really did, honestly, you know, but for the grace of God, here am I, because I tried them all and there's dangerous stuff out there.
00:24:50.880And I was, I think I was trying to destroy myself.
00:24:53.700And, but those are the times where I think I didn't have purpose, where I was drifting.
00:24:58.960But if you have purpose, if you have a vision, if you have something you move towards that you think is bigger than you.
00:25:03.940For me, this putting this book out to the world, this book is so important.