On today's episode of Triggered, John Solomon and Matt Taibbi join host Alex Blumberg to discuss the border invasion, the Joe Biden/Russia scandal, and much, much more! Subscribe to TRiggered to get notified when we deconstruct the latest breaking news and bring you the most important stories you can find on the show. Subscribe today using our podcast s RSS feed to stay up to date with the latest episodes of TRIGgered every single day. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships/Triggered. If you like what you hear here, please consider becoming a supporter of our show by becoming a patron patron! We'll get you notified when a new episode is released so you can get the most out of your ad-free version of the show wherever you get your shows. Thank you so much for all the support you guys have been showing throughout the past year, and we can't thank you enough. We're working hard to make sure we keep bringing you the best and most impactful stories that matter the most to you, the people who need it the most. You're not going to want to miss it. Stay tuned for more episodes like this one! Stay safe and stay tuned for the next one coming soon! Your continued support is greatly appreciated! -Jon & Matt - Alex Timestamps: 1:00: 2:00 3:30:00 - What's the truth? 4:30 - What can you do? 5:00 | What s the deal? 6:15 - What do you believe? 7: What can we do about it? 8:30 | What are you waiting for? 9:15 | What do we know? 11:40 - Is it a hoax? 12:30 13:40 15:40 | Is it possible? 16: What's your opinion? 17:00 Is it true? 18: Is it really a conspiracy? 19:10 | What can I do about this? 21:10: Does it really matter? 22:10 ? Is it all a hoax or is it a fake? 25:30 Do you think it's a hoax ? 26:30 What do I believe it really?
00:05:06.000hello guys welcome to another huge episode of triggered This one's going to be a big one.
00:05:35.000Tonight we're joined by two incredible investigative reporters.
00:05:39.000People who are doing actual real journalism, not just sort of carrying out the narrative and the wishes of the deep state.
00:05:46.000First and foremost, I'll be talking to news founder John Solomon on the big news surrounding the border invasion and the big guy, Joe Biden.
00:05:59.000Then we're going to go to racket news, editor and award-winning journalist, author Matt Taibbi, who's broken other major stories like the Twitter files, big stuff on Russiagate, who has even more Big reporting on Russia collusion and spying scandal.
00:06:18.000You're not going to want to miss any of these because these are unique.
00:06:21.000We've been in a world where we've been lied to by our governments,
00:06:24.000where we're told things to distract us from what's really happening.
00:06:55.000So this is going to be a big deal because it's really relevant when we talk about what's going on right now in Ukraine and as we're being hoaxed and lied into telling you that we must fund Ukraine indefinitely because Russia's doing big things.
00:07:06.000Maybe in the grand scheme of things, maybe looking back at history, making sure that we look at the lies that our government has told us and sold us as though it was the gospel for years, maybe...
00:07:19.000We shouldn't be listening to everything that they say.
00:07:21.000Maybe we should be thinking what's actually happening.
00:07:25.000Maybe we gotta look a little bit further than that baseline before we risk getting into wars, before we send unlimited amounts of money mortgaging our children's future to the hilt and destroying our country so that if you guys in D.C. can get rich off the spoils of war, okay? So guys, make sure you're liking, sharing, and subscribing so you never miss any of these major episodes.
00:07:47.000You know, I'm not on every day like others.
00:07:51.000I want to make sure that you guys see that, but because it's not as consistent as other people, I want to make sure you're subscribed so that you see what's going on, that you can get notifications.
00:08:01.000And I also want you to remember that you can find these episodes on Spotify and on Apple Podcasts after they air here on Rumble.
00:08:09.000So... Ultimately, if you're traveling, if you're in your car, and maybe that's how you get your podcasts, you can do it there and share it that way with your friends, okay?
00:08:49.000So we did, we have, we've launched a new version of that so you can stay on top of it, even expanding into local news for what you're doing.
00:08:56.000So, you know, when they say build your own, guys like me and others, you know, we're actually out there doing that.
00:09:01.000So any support you can give us to make sure that we can keep that going is greatly appreciated.
00:09:40.000Remember when my father accused them back in 16?
00:09:42.000They said, it's crazy. What can you do?
00:09:44.000How can that? It can't be. You're lying.
00:09:46.000There's no evidence. Well, turns out to be yet another Hoax that wasn't so much a hoax.
00:09:55.000A hoax that ended up being 100% right.
00:09:58.000Like about the 2 million other supposed conspiracy theories that you were told were conspiracy theories that you're not supposed to believe that also turned out to be 100% true.
00:10:12.000A concerning new report accusing President Obama's CIA of curating the 2016 Russia collusion hoax by asking foreign intelligence agencies to illegally spy on the Trump campaign?
00:10:24.000Lucas Tomlinson in Washington with more.
00:10:26.000Lucas. Good early morning, Carly and Todd.
00:10:30.000This report from Substack citing multiple unnamed sources claims the U.S. intelligence community asked foreign spy agencies to help spy on more than two dozen associates of Donald Trump in the run up to the 2016 election.
00:10:43.000It reads in part, quote, President Barack Obama's CIA Director John Brennan had identified 26 Trump associates for the Five Eyes to target.
00:10:52.000A source confirmed that the IC had identified them as people to bump or make contact with or manipulate.
00:10:58.000They were targets of our own IC and law enforcement, targets for collection and misinformation.
00:11:04.000Now, the Five Eyes nations are the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
00:11:08.000Here's one of the reporters, Michael Schellenberger, who spoke to Jesse Waters last night.
00:11:14.000If this binder contains what we have been told that it contains, which may include raw
00:11:19.000intelligence information showing that the U.S. government, the CIA and the intelligence
00:11:24.000community of the U.S. government, initiated the Russia collusion hoax, that it did not
00:11:30.000occur in the way that the official story in the Durham investigation had portrayed it,
00:12:40.000And again, it's all relative when we're being told this week that we must For the sake of democracy and freedom and other things that these people in Washington, D.C. talk about like soundbites just to get a paycheck.
00:12:53.000They don't actually mean anything to them, but that's what they're doing.
00:12:57.000As we're being told, we must fund another $60 billion in the never-ending war in Ukraine that they can't articulate a real reason for...
00:13:05.000Maybe we want to think about just how badly we've been manipulated, and if we think that's not happening to us right now, we probably deserve whatever we have coming.
00:13:16.000And speaking of Russia, House Intelligence Chairman Committee Mike Turner must think we're all idiots.
00:13:24.000Yesterday, Turner released a statement about a serious national security threat.
00:13:30.000Turner's goal is obviously to stoke hysteria and fear about Russia.
00:13:37.000Yeah, the timing of this statement makes it very obvious what he's trying to accomplish.
00:13:44.000The Senate just passed a bill sending billions of dollars to Ukraine, and Turner wants to pressure House Republicans to support the never-ending war.
00:13:54.000How dare you not just sign on the dotted line?
00:13:58.000Right? Democracy's at stake in everything.
00:14:01.000Let's make up, I don't know, a boogeyman.
00:15:02.000It will be suppressed. And it will go by the wayside as though it never happened.
00:15:06.000Meanwhile, folks, the Democrats' lawfare continues.
00:15:10.000Alvin Bragg's baseless case is scheduled to start the last week of March.
00:15:15.000Bragg is focused on targeting Joe Biden's political opponent...
00:15:20.000My father, instead of criminals destroying Manhattan.
00:15:25.000My team looked at the data, and the number of arrests that Bragg's office has declined to prosecute has increased by 125% since he took the DA job in New York City.
00:15:39.000Alvin Bragg lets illegal immigrants terrorize New York City.
00:15:43.000He doesn't care if New Yorkers get killed, raped, or robbed.
00:15:47.000His focus is on helping Joe Biden win the election, and it's disgraceful.
00:15:52.000He won't prosecute those crimes so that he can say, hey, crime went down.
00:15:57.000You know, it's not a real crime if we don't actually report it in the official stats.
00:16:02.000If you get robbed, raped, or bugged, then we just don't highlight it.
00:16:08.000Alvin Bragg's political persecution is just one part of the Democrat's scheme to abuse the court system ahead of the 2024 election.
00:16:17.000Special Counsel Jack Smith right now is trying to rush along his bogus January 6th indictment.
00:16:24.000In a filing before the Supreme Court yesterday, Smith said that a delay would frustrate the public interest and cause serious harm to the government and the public.
00:16:35.000Okay. By public interest, Jack Smith means Joe Biden's interest in my father being convicted.
00:16:48.000You don't just rush ahead of the line, get rid of the rules and norms to go after your political enemies unless you're doing exactly what I've been saying he's been doing for years.
00:17:01.000We know that. Smith never spells out why he needs to rush the case.
00:17:06.000That's because what he's doing is in violation of Justice Department rules.
00:17:12.000Minor details. Again, me and maybe four other people in America will actually call him out on this.
00:17:38.000Okay, some of that's still going on as we speak, but like, I mean, from what I was able to see, Fannie Willis' bogus case against my father and several other defendants in Georgia is falling apart.
00:17:50.000Fannie Willis and her lover Nathan Wade lied to the court about when their affair started.
00:18:32.000Because that's what would happen to anyone else if they had an R next to their name rather than doing the bidding of the Democrat Party.
00:18:38.000If you watch the rest of the testimony, you realize that it's actually a shame in America that people like this can actually pass the bar, let alone represent one of the largest counties in the country.
00:18:49.000It was going so poorly for Fannie Willis that she ended up taking the stand to defend herself.
00:18:55.000And we learned quickly that Fanny Willis loves Grey Goose Vodka and will give you a G. I assume that meant $1,000 if you need it.
00:19:04.000We're just going to give you a G. I mean, on the stand.
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00:23:26.000David Weiss, the special counsel appointed by Joe Biden, just indicted the informant who claimed that Burisma bribed the Bidens.
00:23:37.000What do you make of this indictment, and what can you tell us in the context of all of your other reporting?
00:23:43.000Because, I mean, this just seems like literally deep state retribution at this point.
00:23:50.000I remember a time where all informants, all people, all people who are willing to come out there and say something about the president, especially as it related to potential corruption, were treated as heroes, and this seems very different.
00:24:07.000Yeah, listen, this is a long line of informants who have blown up on the FBI. Now, whether or not people will believe what David Weiss charges depends on the evidence, right?
00:24:16.000We know that Mr. Smirnoff is assumed innocent, and he's going to get his chance in court.
00:24:21.000And the government's got to prove why they think he lied.
00:24:24.000And here's another thing. Why it took four years for the FBI to suddenly come to this conclusion when not that long ago the FBI was telling the Congress that this guy was one of their more credible and well-paid informants, somebody who had been useful before.
00:24:38.000So there are people tonight already out there, Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, wondering whether this is political.
00:24:46.000There's not enough information in this indictment yet to make a really informed decision about what went on here.
00:24:51.000But let's suppose the worst case scenario for Mr.
00:24:54.000Smirnoff, that there's really strong evidence against this.
00:24:57.000What we now know is the very FBI that went after you because of the Trump Tower allegations that turned out to be a big nothing burger, went after your dad and created the illusion of collusion then when it was not an iota of it there.
00:25:11.000The FBI is in a really terrible state.
00:25:16.000And three of the most famous informants in its history, Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, and now this man, Mr.
00:25:22.000Smirnoff. If the final narrative of the Justice Department turns out to be true, all three of them bamboozled our premier I've been raising a red flag about the FBI for a long time.
00:25:35.000The people in the FBI, many of them are so good, they're good agents, but this agency is really in distress.
00:25:41.000It can't tell a good from a bad informant, apparently, according to its own Justice Department.
00:25:45.000It wasted three years of your father's presidency going after something that never, ever existed.
00:25:51.000It took Hillary Clinton dirt and tried to pretend it was...
00:25:54.000But John, but that was a win for them because, I mean, they did that on purpose.
00:25:59.000That was a win. I mean, it should be, if you're the American public looking objectively at the FBI, yes, you say that, but that was a win.
00:26:08.000They got what they wanted. Now that they got caught, it's, you know, oh yeah, my bad.
00:26:12.000There's no accountability. There's nothing.
00:26:14.000So there is a difference between when they get it wrong and And maybe they were trying.
00:26:19.000Literally, it seems like every shooter who's shot up somewhere in rage was, as they say, on their radar.
00:26:26.000But they were too busy prosecuting concerned parents at PTA meetings or the true terrorists in America, people who are conservatives or practicing Catholics.
00:26:37.000In the case of my father, though, that was not a loss for them because that was part of their M.O. Maybe they have to eat crow, but that was a plan.
00:27:13.000Now, everything I reported back then is now confirmed to be true.
00:27:16.000All the time, until Senator Grassley mentioned this guy, my sources, who I've been very public, were inside the FBI. They never mentioned this guy.
00:27:25.000They had other evidence that was super strong against the Bidens, including the firing of the prosecutor, including the meeting that Joe Biden had with a guy that allegedly was a crooked company executive.
00:27:38.000He's meeting with Joe Biden at Cafe Milano.
00:27:41.000So this guy wasn't on my radar when I did my reporting.
00:27:44.000And quite frankly, I was surprised when this 1023 came out.
00:27:59.000So it wasn't like this is just a guy randomly that came in and gave them supposedly false information.
00:28:04.000And again, if they're saying it's false, I have to almost at this point And again, I agree with you.
00:28:08.000There's some guys doing great work at the FBI, the door kickers.
00:28:11.000Although it's getting harder to honestly give them the pass when I see all the corruption and they're like, well, I'm just doing my job.
00:28:18.000I'm like, well, you know, if you're just doing your job and that job you think entails violating Americans' rights, arresting pastors at their home in front of their children for nonsense, going after the Amish because, you know, they sold some meat that, you know, that wasn't inoculated 9,000 times by the FDA. Yeah.
00:28:36.000You know, I don't know. It's getting harder for me to give them a pass.
00:28:41.000And again, the door kickers, they're on my team.
00:29:20.000What you said, some of the most senior executives of past generations of FBI are now saying, people like Kevin Brock and others have been warning about this, which is, this is a sick institution and it is losing the trust of the American people and is developing a losing record.
00:29:38.000We keep seeing them. They keep looking into Section 702 with impunity, and Congress does nothing about it.
00:29:44.000They're spying on Americans without a warrant.
00:29:46.000They violate the rules, and nobody really pays a price.
00:29:48.000So no matter what has come, the ills that the FBI had when it was improperly weaponized to go after you and your dad and your family and so many other people, They aren't cured yet.
00:29:57.000No matter how many times Chris Ray smiles and looks into the cameras, I got it fixed.
00:30:28.000And there are Republicans in Congress actually saying, no, no, no, I mean, hey, I'm all for it.
00:30:33.000They want to spy on foreign nationals and stuff like that, but they're trying to amend it to make it easier to spy on Americans, to then go after them with nonsense that would otherwise be undiscoverable sort of evidence.
00:31:21.000The agents who did came forward have been treated so badly, and Congress has failed to fully protect them, that anyone else who's thinking about it is like, I'm not going to go do that.
00:31:29.000I've got kids I've got to worry about.
00:31:30.000They chilled the ability for people to come forward in the FBI. That is a legacy of Chris Wray that he will not be able to shed.
00:31:37.000What they've done by pulling all these security clearances, Marcus Allen, all the other ones, Steve Friend, they found a way to not fire them and get into the adjudication process, but strip them of their pay and starve them out of the FBI. That should be shameful.
00:31:53.000That is a wrong way to deal with whistleblowers.
00:31:55.000It's not the way they dealt with Eric Charmello in Ukraine.
00:31:59.000A lot of his information turned out not to be accurate.
00:32:02.000But it's the way that most of the people who come forward and spoke out against January 6th, Russia collusion, Joe Biden perhaps, now with this guy, that's how they're getting treated.
00:33:16.000Are we just being stonewalled and stalled to death?
00:33:19.000Because, you know... Man, when I look at the way the Democrats do this stuff, I look at where I was in this stage with no evidence of something that was later proven to be 100% a lie.
00:33:28.000And by this point in time, I feel like I had done over 50 hours of testimony before Congress.
00:34:05.000And he was shamed by Democrats and Republicans because he took money from Buddhist monks and Chinese intelligence agents and anybody who would give him money.
00:34:12.000And he sold the White House. He put a for sale sign out in the White House.
00:34:15.000And the cost was $100,000 to get in, right?
00:34:19.000Joe Biden and his family did it at a much higher cost.
00:34:22.000But the same sort of characters, right?
00:34:24.000communist Chinese, Russian oligarchs, you corrupt Ukrainian companies,
00:34:28.000and the media today doesn't give it the oxygen and air it needs.
00:34:32.000So the Republicans have to build that knowledge around the roadblock of the media.
00:35:51.000He lied and said, my family didn't get a single dime from China, when we now know they got about $9 million into the various companies.
00:35:59.000Not all of it went to the Biden family, but that's a big number to forget if you're Joe Biden, no matter what Robert Hur says about his memory.
00:36:05.000Joe Biden lied, and he was the guy that made these deals possible.
00:36:09.000No one would have hired Hunter Biden were it not for his father's name.
00:36:13.000Even Hunter Biden admits to that today in some of the interviews he's done.
00:36:16.000This was an influence-peddling scheme, and the influence was Joe Biden.
00:36:20.000And all Joe Biden had to do was show up for a couple minutes, flash his grin, and then these crooked oligarchs and other people start writing checks to his family, and they get rich, and then the money gets dispersed to his family.
00:36:31.000In any other era of journalism, in any other era of politics, Democrats and Republicans alike would repudiate it, but not this Democratic Party and not this mainstream media.
00:36:42.000Yeah, I mean, it sort of feels, you know, we're three and a half years into this thing.
00:36:46.000And again, I take it a little bit more personal for all the reasons I discussed and everything like that.
00:36:49.000But unlike Hunter, you know, I'm a 46-year-old man.
00:36:52.000I'm not a 50-year-old baby who is, you know, clearly incapable of answering for the things.
00:38:36.000I think most of the key people leading the investigation believe that they've proved their impeachment.
00:38:42.000Can this dysfunctional house caucus get it there?
00:38:44.000I don't know. They can't get a budget.
00:38:46.000They can't even get their impeachment vote headcount right.
00:38:50.000They had to do it twice, which I've never seen in my entire life.
00:38:53.000It's just one of the problems right now is that there is a dearth of true leadership in the Republican Party, and I think that's why your father...
00:39:01.000You know, he exudes so much enthusiasm when he's on the trail, because people look at the guy's like, that guy's gonna do what he says and says what he does.
00:39:06.000Even if you don't like it, you gotta admit, he's gonna do what he says and he says what he does.
00:39:10.000And I don't think that there's a lot of Republicans like that in the powers of Congress right now, and they're bumbling and fumbling along.
00:39:16.000Now, that said, Jim Jordan, Jason Smith, and James Comer have gotten all the goods, right?
00:39:21.000There's overwhelming evidence What the Speaker has to do to convince a caucus that the right thing to do is get this to an impeachment vote, it's hard for me to tell.
00:39:30.000It's hard for me to tell what they do every day.
00:40:12.000And I like many of them. And I think some of them are well-intentioned.
00:40:15.000But we're playing two different games.
00:40:18.000You know... Is there any hope for that or is it just not?
00:40:22.000Because, I mean, I feel like we can be 99.9% on an issue and 15 guys will be like, no, no, no, but about this little thing that no one cares about, no one will ever heard of, doesn't mean anything.
00:40:33.000Like, the Democrats are just like, hey, we're 51% there.
00:40:36.000We'll worry about the details tomorrow.
00:41:00.000The conservatives don't play, and they don't play with the modern tools that are available with them, whether it's early voting, which you can get a lot more votes in the Republican Party.
00:41:08.000The Republican Party can't get that right.
00:41:09.000Whether it's communicating in social media, they don't get that right.
00:41:13.000Whether it's just telling a simple story.
00:41:15.000Imagine how easy it is to sell this border crisis to Americans.
00:41:18.000The first thing a woman coming across the border should see when she tries to immigrate to the United States ought to be Ellis Island, not a rape tree.
00:41:25.000And their escort should be an INS agent, not a cartel member.
00:41:29.000But no Republican can actually say it that simply and get it through to the American people.
00:41:34.000It's a communication crisis right now.
00:41:36.000And I think that's why the 2024 election is so important.
00:41:39.000There's got to be an installation of people who can communicate and then get the job done.
00:41:46.000There's a lot of good leaders. Jim Jordan's out there, but the leadership slog above him prevents people like Comer and Jordan and Jason Smith from being fully successful.
00:41:55.000That's the truth of it. What do we have to learn about Biden's dealings, you think, that we don't know yet?
00:42:04.000I mean, it seems like it's so much, it's insurmountable at this point, but I imagine there's probably a lot more.
00:42:10.000Yeah, listen, I think there could be some other places where money went back and forth, and he's a beneficiary in some way.
00:42:17.000James Comer said something on the show last night, my show last night, I think it's really important.
00:42:20.000They found a new bank account that, after all their subpoenas and records, they didn't know about.
00:42:24.000It appears to be a Joe Biden bank account.
00:42:26.000And one of the witnesses, I think it's Eric Schwerin, we'll find out soon, told him, I think the grandkids were dumping money to a grandfather.
00:42:33.000Now, I don't know about you, but I've never had a grandfather or any other grandfather where the grandkids support the grandfather and put money into them when he's the president and vice president of the United States.
00:42:43.000So if Schwerin or this witness, whoever he is, is right, that's gonna be an interesting avenue that even the grandchildren are involved in moving money to the father, just like the brothers do in the loans.
00:42:52.000I also think we're gonna find out There's no paperwork for these loans.
00:43:23.000You're right. So you reported yesterday that an internal DHS email shows the agency admitted it's not even tracking illegal immigrants after they were released from federal custody and into the interior of the country.
00:43:37.000What's going on? Are they just giving up?
00:43:40.000They just don't care? I mean, how many illegals are just wandering a nation without any...
00:43:47.000If you thought Fannie Willis was evasive today in a thing, watch some of these Homeland Security officials when they're being asked, are you tracking these guys?
00:44:13.000That's what Congress has been trying to get a two-year answer to.
00:44:16.000And every time they bring one of these guys up there, they get that Mayorkas treatment, which is, trust me, everything's secure.
00:44:21.000I don't know what you're talking about.
00:44:22.000I'll get back to you. They never get back to you.
00:44:24.000Listen, there is the largest human trafficking operation in American history.
00:44:29.000And the United States government and religious charities and taxpayer-funded NGOs are the leading front.
00:44:35.000It starts with the cartels, and after they rape their women and take their money and dump them at the border, then our government and its NGOs facilitate an illicit human trafficking ring in every Community in America is paying the price for it, and Republicans can't even tell that story very well.
00:44:51.000They fumbled it, even in the Mayorkas impeachment, but that's what's going on.
00:44:55.000Yeah, they could tell the Washington Post the truth off the record, and I guess the Washington Post kept it a secret, but in congressional testimony, they obfuscate.
00:45:03.000It's no doubt. There is a human trafficking operation, and the Holman Security Department is right in the middle of it.
00:45:09.000Yeah, and I mean, you even see the Red Cross.
00:45:12.000Hey, those of you who make donations to the Red Cross, I mean, they're not doing, like, Red Cross stuff.
00:45:17.000They're literally just transitioning these people nicely into America to change the makeup of our country.
00:45:23.000There's no, like obviously, they're creating a permanent class of Democrat voters.
00:46:49.000For a serious crime under very worse and different circumstances, clearly, than what they're trying to do with my father.
00:46:55.000They want to throw my father away for 700 years because of it.
00:46:58.000We can make of the report because, I mean, the mental gymnastics it takes to say, hey, this is the case and nothing's going to happen either way, meaning he can stay president and he will not be prosecuted because he's incompetent, seems like we're literally living an episode of South Park.
00:47:17.000Now, that said, I do think that Robert Herr was trying to communicate a very important message, that I met the president, and I was shocked with what I saw.
00:47:24.000And I want you to know what I saw, even though I'm not going to charge him.
00:47:27.000I think this is a matter of public importance.
00:47:29.000And so he used the report to get that out there.
00:47:31.000And then Joe Biden gave the closing argument for Robert Herr, because he came out a couple minutes later and said, I'm totally fine.
00:47:37.000And then he got lost on the rosary beads and And he got lost on presidents.
00:47:43.000The whole week he was lost, he actually proved Robert Hurst's case.
00:47:47.000Listen, the American people are going to be the jury on this.
00:47:49.000They're going to decide who's going to be the next president.
00:47:51.000It's going to be between your dad and Joe Biden.
00:47:52.000I don't think Joe Biden is taking the ticket to Acapulco and quitting in July.
00:47:57.000I think he's sticking in. He's a stubborn son of a gun.
00:47:59.000He's going to stick in. But that said, there are two very important issues that flow from that report that aren't getting the attention they are.
00:48:26.000But that's going to be the first thing.
00:48:27.000And I think at some point the lawyers, in your dad's case, are going to have to get to that issue and get that to the Supreme Court after immunity is resolved.
00:48:35.000The second thing is, of all the documents that Joe Biden kept from Ukraine, the classified documents, he just happens to keep his notes and his speeches and his conversations with the Prime Minister of Ukraine the month The month that he fires Viktor Shokin.
00:48:51.000That's the only thing he kept from Ukraine in, oh, one energy thing, which would have been beneficial to Burisma and Hunter Biden because they were looking in the energy in Ukraine.
00:48:58.000But he keeps his records for the month he's firing the prosecutor.
00:49:01.000And as you know from the records, I got under FOIA and sued and got recently.
00:49:05.000Joe Biden did not carry out U.S. policy when he withheld the billion dollars and fired Victor Shokin.
00:49:10.000He went against the recommendations of his career staff.
00:49:14.000They said, Victor Shokin's doing a good job.
00:49:16.000In fact, they sent him a letter saying, that a boy, Shokin, you're doing a good job.
00:49:20.000The task force said, give the billion dollars, and Joe Biden didn't.
00:49:24.000And when my records came out, the Washington Post, the greatest protection racket that Joe Biden had in 19 and 20, came out and said, oh, do over.
00:49:31.000Truthwatch, man. I got to admit, Joe Biden changed policy.
00:49:34.000He called an audible That still is there, and I think those records, why he kept those personal records of his conversations with Yatsenek, that's going to seep into the impeachment inquiry pretty quickly.
00:49:45.000Yeah, I mean, so I guess I'd ask you, as a last question, because I watched it, I'm like, wait a minute.
00:49:49.000Like, letting him get on a live stage.
00:49:53.000I mean, you don't make a great case for yourself that I'm totally coherent.
00:49:56.000I'm not, in fact, brain-dead when you forget when your son died.
00:50:00.000You know, I have the rosary, and I can't remember...
00:50:28.000I would remember... I would know every detail about it, and forgetting those details to try to make the case that you haven't, in fact, lost it wasn't great.
00:50:38.000So I was wondering, like, what are your sources telling you on the Hill about how the Biden White House, his staff, whether they think he can even get through another campaign?
00:51:53.000That's why they kept him in the basement, right?
00:51:55.000Now they put him out there because they feel like, well, he's got to defend himself.
00:51:58.000He's not capable of defending himself after 5 o'clock at night.
00:52:01.000It seems really clear that. And I can't wait to watch the first presidential debate of 2024.
00:52:06.000If your dad gets the nomination and Joe Biden's on the stage, I think people are going to see just how much Joe Biden has declined from 2020, where he wasn't that good then, but he's going to be a lot worse.
00:52:15.000Listen, I think most of the people around the president have resigned that, barring a major health episode, this guy is going to That's the only thing keeping him alive as far as I'm concerned.
00:53:03.000If I can integrate something that's beyond some of the trolls in there, I'll ask it in there.
00:53:09.000Guys, now we have Matt Taibbi. Matt's been doing some incredible reporting.
00:53:15.000He's the guy that brought us the Twitter files.
00:53:18.000And he's going to be joining us now with more big, breaking news on all things Russiagate.
00:53:25.000Racket News founder, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi joins us now.
00:53:30.000So Matt, thank you so much for joining us.
00:53:32.000This is not something I would have had on my bingo card probably not all that long ago.
00:53:37.000I imagine before we all sort of perhaps got confounded about just the state of our government
00:53:45.000and the lunacy that we're seeing, we probably wouldn't have agreed on much.
00:53:48.000But I love that you're out here doing it.
00:53:51.000And I love that you've been at the center of so much of this reporting.
00:53:55.000I wish there were other people actually willing to do that.
00:54:00.000So this story goes beyond just the collusion story, but it's really the entire election meddling narrative.
00:54:07.000And the reality is, it seems based on what I've read and you're releasing now, everything they told us is actually the opposite of what was real.
00:54:15.000Can you lay out what you found and the big takeaways?
00:54:19.000Because I think this is so important for people to figure out.
00:54:22.000Sure. First of all, thank you so much for having me on.
00:54:26.000And I think you're right, you know, politics make strange bedfellows.
00:54:30.000And this has been a very strange eight years, very upsetting and disturbing eight years.
00:54:35.000And we've learned that a lot of the things that we believe to be true, in some cases for our whole lives, are completely the opposite.
00:54:44.000So maybe it isn't so strange that you and I are talking to each other, in fact, and it's kind of cool and kind of interesting.
00:54:55.000As to what these stories are, for people who follow this story, and of course you followed it closely, one of the last remaining mysteries of Russiagate was the contents of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligences.
00:55:14.000Investigation into the origins of this story.
00:55:18.000People know that there was a significant investigation conducted out of that office.
00:55:24.000Some of it got out, most famously in the form of the Nunes memo, which you remember was ridiculed by everybody at first.
00:55:33.000I mean, Nancy Pelosi went so far as to call for Devin Nunes to step down for writing a deliberately dishonest memo.
00:55:42.000He's the only one that was right about anything.
00:55:59.000I mean, the ferocity of the press corps.
00:56:02.000I mean, the people that I grew up around in descending upon Nunes.
00:56:07.000I mean, he was instantly this infamous character.
00:56:10.000And everybody was in total agreement that the memo had to be absolutely incorrect.
00:56:16.000There was a counter memo issued by the Democrats, by Adam Schiff.
00:56:20.000And then a year later, or a year and change later, the Obama-appointed Inspector General of the Justice Department, Michael Horowitz, issued a report that totally vindicated what Devin Nunes was writing.
00:56:36.000Now, this is important because this tells reporters like me and like Michael Schellenberger and like many others, that this is a credible group of investigators, that they got a lot of things right in a very difficult environment.
00:56:50.000But there were a lot of things that did not come out.
00:56:54.000And some of us have been waiting for those other shoes to drop.
00:57:04.000In the form of recollections from sources who basically agreed.
00:57:09.000The two main revelations are that there were at least 26 figures, Trump associates and aides of your fathers who were placed under surveillance in the election year of 2016.
00:57:23.000And the second really big thing is that the intelligence community assessment of January 6, 2017, that concluded that Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign specifically to denigrate Hillary Clinton and to help President-elect Trump's electoral chances was cooked intelligence, that they eliminated dissent, they downgraded reliable sources, upgraded unreliable ones, and eliminated Some information that was very valuable together.
00:57:55.000The Russians were not worried about Hillary Clinton at all.
00:57:58.000In fact, they were comfortable with the relationship.
00:58:01.000That's the quote. And they saw her as manageable and reflecting continuity, which is totally the opposite of what we were told.
00:58:09.000Oh yeah, no, she was going to be really hard on Russia despite having, you know, her and Bill taking money from every, you know, under the guise of the Clinton Foundation, etc., from every, you know, oligarch in the world, etc.
00:58:25.000Right, yeah. I mean, they had taken money from Renaissance Capital, $500,000 for a pretty short speech, which even by Clintonian standards was a pretty good day's work.
00:58:39.000You know, somehow that was completely forgotten in all the coverage of all this.
00:58:43.000But the idea that Russia, quote unquote, interfered, and by the way, the intelligence community never used the word interference.
00:58:52.000Interference has a very specific connotation in the intelligence world.
00:58:56.000It means meddling with the physical act of voting.
00:59:45.000You know, again, for me, you know, I took this one personally because I was one of, you know, honestly, I was probably, you know, the number two target, you know, if you had sort of, you know, the game board for them, like if you could, you know, get me, you know, obviously a Nunez and, you know, a couple other people, but...
01:00:45.000Because, you know, I spent, you know, up until then, probably about 38 years of my life, you know, really believing in these things and these institutions and...
01:00:54.000They're corrupted beyond all possible belief.
01:00:57.000I mean, you went through some of that.
01:00:59.000I mean, with the Twitter files, you went through, you know, the coincidentally, just magically, just by total coincidence, there was clearly no collusion or they were not trying to send a message.
01:01:09.000But, you know, the day you testified before Congress, the IRS shows up knocking on your door, you know, clearly trying to intimidate you.
01:01:18.000I mean, you know, as someone who, you know, perhaps from very different political perspective, But someone who also believed many things that we all, I think, would have agreed upon as Americans.
01:01:29.000What did that do to you, this discovery?
01:01:32.000And then watching your other friends in journalism just either disavow or just knowingly spread sort of the narrative propaganda?
01:01:43.000Yeah, this particular story, this Trump-Russia story, you know, this Russiagate phenomenon was, I hate to admit this, it's kind of embarrassing, but it was a major event in my life, both personally and professionally.
01:01:59.000Me too! I mean, I would probably still be working at Rolling Stone if it were not.
01:02:05.000For this story, there were a handful of us in mainstream journalism, just a few, by the way, you know, people like Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Monte at The Nation.
01:02:17.000A few of us made a very simple point, which was, hey, you know, the last time we did a story that was based entirely on unnamed intelligence sources, We all got in a lot of trouble, and we ended up having to apologize to readers for a decade, and that was in the WMD episode.
01:02:38.000So where's the beef? If it's true, it's not like I'm not willing to believe it, but just show it to us.
01:03:56.000I say one of the biggest sort of mistakes I made in the whole thing, and I think this is sort of by design, was when they went after General Flynn.
01:04:04.000I was like, well, I mean, again, the CIA is saying he did this.
01:04:13.000I knew him pretty well. I spent a lot of time with him on the campaign.
01:04:16.000I was like, this is not a guy that I believe to be in any way, shape, or form any of the things that he's saying.
01:04:20.000But the accusation is so strong that you're also like, well, I'm not going to go to bat because these people must know something that I don't know.
01:04:27.000So maybe I won't come out against, but I'm going to sit on the sidelines.
01:04:30.000I'm going to take myself out of the game, and whether we like it or not, I have a decent sort of soapbox to be able to be loud, to be able to fight back.
01:04:38.000I did so for myself because I knew, but for someone else, I don't know, there's got to be something there.
01:04:45.000It's a truly sad wake-up call, but I think a lot of Americans have experienced that now, and I think that's being reflected in sort of their approval of Congress as well as sort of in their trust and faith in traditional mainstream media these days.
01:05:02.000And then some. Understatement of the century, yes.
01:05:06.000Yeah, exactly. We're looking up at Congress, which is pretty pathetic.
01:05:10.000But, you know, I think you make a very interesting point, and it's something that I've only started to understand recently, which is that I think even within your father's administration, There was a hesitation.
01:05:26.000There was a sense of maybe somebody somewhere had a meeting with somebody and we don't know about it.
01:05:36.000And meanwhile, you know, they were just going on offense and hitting, you know, from all angles and, you know, undermining the administration.
01:05:47.000Somebody who had been through these kinds of wars many more times, right?
01:05:51.000Or, you know, J. Edgar Hoover in 1958 or whatever it was, they would have recognized this for what it was.
01:05:58.000But this, in modern times, this is unprecedented.
01:06:01.000No one had ever seen this kind of thing before.
01:06:03.000And so it's totally understandable that one would be overwhelmed by what happened.
01:06:09.000Yeah, no, by the way, I think, you know, whether by design or whether, you know, sort of a convenient, you know, after effect, I'm sure it had some sort of implications on my father and the way he, I mean, hey, are you not supposed to trust your generals?
01:06:24.000Well, it turns out you probably shouldn't.
01:06:26.000You know, they were, you know, knowingly lying to him or he'd give them a very explicit order and they would knowingly downplay it or drag it out or try to prevent it.
01:06:36.000And, you know, these are people that are really subverting sort of, you know, the notion of civilian leadership in our country.
01:06:41.000And I think, you know, that happened numerous times.
01:06:42.000I think it's, you know, as I've often said, it's probably one of the One of the only, perhaps, disadvantages of coming in from the outside is it does take time to figure out who those guys are, who they are real.
01:06:54.000Everyone will tell you everything you want to hear in Washington, D.C. The currency is not like business.
01:07:00.000You understand where everyone's goals are in business.
01:07:02.000You understand kind of what they want to do, and you also understand the downside of that.
01:07:05.000In D.C., they'll snake you because they're worried about getting into the next administration.
01:07:14.000Yeah, no, DC's like Hollywood with less money, right?
01:07:20.000I mean, basically everybody- And much uglier people, in all fairness.
01:07:24.000We're not allowed to say that, because that doesn't matter, but it's true.
01:07:27.000So, you know, another one of the big findings you had was that, you know, the CIA and foreign intelligence agencies literally targeted 26 Trump associates.
01:07:36.000I mean- I mean, I can imagine who some of them are.
01:07:57.000I imagine every single one of those people had to know exactly what was happening and why.
01:08:03.000Or did they just kind of go along because everyone's just working together that way at this point and it's about that hegemony of power.
01:08:13.000So we don't know the identities of everybody on that list.
01:08:17.000We have it separated into definites, and there's a list of about eight people who we can say absolutely for sure were targets because they're in, for instance, FBI reports about confidential human source contacts and that sort of thing.
01:08:38.000That's all the people who are in the FBI's crossfire hurricane probes, so Flynn, Manafort, you know, Waleed Faris, Carter Page, Papadopoulos.
01:10:13.000We learned in the Horowitz report that there was an attorney in the National Security Division of the FBI named Stu Evans who did not want to go forward with the FISA. Surveillance on Carter Page because of who was paying for the key intelligence.
01:10:30.000There's an incredibly interesting 302 report involving an interview with a special agent named William Barnett, who was there from the very beginning.
01:10:42.000He was in Crossfire Hurricane And also was part of Mueller's probe.
01:10:47.000And he is talking about how there was, you know, poor predication.
01:10:52.000It was that the case was based on supposition after supposition.
01:11:48.000They slowed down the will of the people for four years.
01:11:51.000They cost the American public hundreds of millions of dollars all in.
01:11:54.000I'm not just talking about Mueller, but just everything with the hysteria, And our ability to function on a world stage.
01:11:59.000And they got everything that they wanted.
01:12:02.000Like, make no mistake, we're catching it now, but because there's no accountability, they got literally 100%.
01:12:07.000Let's call it 99%, because maybe they got caught, but it won't matter because nothing's going to happen to them.
01:12:13.000Right. I mean, I would even characterize it as probably worse than that, because I think many of those figures were committing probably pretty serious crimes.
01:12:23.000You know, the leaking of signals intelligence to journalists.
01:12:26.000There are even a couple of cases where the journalists are liable.
01:12:32.000There was that infamous meeting where, you know, Admiral Rogers, James Comey, John Brennan, and I'm sorry, who's the, and James Clapper, briefed your father on January 5th of 2017 about the contents of this intelligence community assessment.
01:12:55.000And then there was that separate meeting where Comey kind of Took him aside and allegedly told him all the stuff that was in the Steele dossier that was salacious.
01:13:07.000Now, he promised to keep that stuff close held or close hold, but it leaked out.
01:13:50.000Like, there would be days where if I look like maybe I maybe had a cold, like, he'd be like, just wave from a distance, like, not shake my hand.
01:13:58.000Like, no way it happened, but it didn't matter.
01:14:01.000Like, and Devin, actually, you brought up Devin Unions earlier.
01:14:03.000Like, he's one of the guys that actually, he came on this show when this sort of stuff, when I first started doing it, he was like, no, no, we actually think that the Steele dossier was actually Hunter Biden information.
01:14:15.000Yeah. For the Hillary camp that she didn't need when Joe didn't run, that they just basically repackaged and repurposed to go after Trump.
01:14:22.000Because that actually is totally fitting.
01:14:27.000No, but think about it. It's actually perfect and like, I don't know, I see that as much more plausible than anything else that I can think of.
01:14:35.000Yeah, because they had to come up with some pretty weird explanations for where that came from, and none of them are terribly satisfactory, so I'm not sure that I believe, you know, I certainly don't believe their version of the story.
01:14:51.000It's just as good as any version right now, so it's got to be somewhere out there.
01:14:56.000Yeah, but that episode where they're scheming, basically, these are the heads of the intelligence agencies.
01:15:07.000You have a president-elect who's coming into office and they're already basically defying this president.
01:15:16.000And worse than that, there were leaks to other countries that were reported all over the world.
01:15:22.000It was in Haaretz in Israel that Israel should not share intelligence with the United States because Russia has leverages of pressure on the new president.
01:16:04.000Talk about where the whole Russia hysteria really starts.
01:16:08.000I mean, why was there such hysteria around using Russia as the basis for all these false narratives?
01:16:13.000I remember, you know, the 1980s called and want their foreign policy back.
01:16:17.000And, you know, I'm a product of sort of the Cold War era.
01:16:21.000And, you know, I had my biases and my mom's Czech and I spent my summers in the Czech Republic, what was then communist Czechoslovakia.
01:16:27.000And like, you know, we were no fans of the Russians, but...
01:16:31.000Why were they chosen to be sort of the big bad boogeyman in all of these things instead of, you know, I don't know, a far more credible threat like a China or otherwise?
01:16:42.000I mean, I spent nearly 10 years of my life, actually over 10 years of my life, living in the former Soviet Union.
01:16:47.000I speak Russian. And I was there when Putin took power.
01:16:53.000Putin actually shut down my old newspaper in Moscow.
01:16:57.000Yeah. And I'm not apologizing for him, but just saying...
01:17:00.000Yeah, no, but I think there's an archaic thing left over in sort of the organism of the intelligence agencies that still kind of reflexively views Russia as the same thing as the Soviet Union.
01:17:18.000They continually mix up the two countries as though they're the same.
01:17:23.000There was that famous quote from Donna Brazile Yeah.
01:17:43.000Yeah, exactly. So I think they were playing on archaic fears that are still in there in the American population about the big bad Russian bear and how they're out to get us.
01:18:13.000I think this started in the summer of 2016.
01:18:18.000If you remember, there was an intercept where the CIA heard that the Russians had heard that The Hillary Clinton campaign was planning on making Russia a centerpiece of their argument against Donald Trump.
01:18:34.000We don't know what the genesis of that was, but I think they just kind of invented it out of whole cloth, and journalists ran with it, which is, I guess, not surprising.
01:18:47.000I was surprised at the time, but now nothing that reporters do surprises me anymore.
01:18:53.000Yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear your opinion.
01:18:55.000You know, talking about sort of the parallels between, you know, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russiagate, as we know it, you know, Iraq and the WMDs, and just how often, like, the American people have become victimized by this really manipulated intelligence.
01:19:19.000Like, magically! It just happens to be, Matt, you know, about seven minutes before...
01:19:25.000Sending another $60 billion in unaccounted-for funds for a war that I have yet to hear anyone articulate what victory looks like or what reasonable peace will be that will send more young men to their death for no reason other than maybe to make the deep state and big war some money.
01:19:44.000I mean, I feel like it's playing out again.
01:19:52.000We saw it with Russiagate. And now, magically...
01:19:54.000You know, simultaneously Russia's the boogeyman again the second we need 60 billion in something that's become very unpopular outside of the DC Beltway.
01:20:03.000In the DC Beltway, it's still the most popular with the exception of two or three people, you know, in there.
01:20:41.000If you were a doctor and you said the Wuhan lab leak theory was obviously true, you lost your funding, you lost your tenure, you were thrown out of medicine, you were discredited.
01:20:52.000Of course it came from the lab in the place where the virus origin that studied the exact virus in question, and not from...
01:21:00.000Like, of course it did, but that doesn't matter.
01:21:02.000And I do feel that people are catching on, but, you know, there are those who still, you know, they're busy just trying to feed their families.
01:21:09.000They're not paying attention to the details.
01:21:10.000I've sort of, you know, this has become my thing.
01:21:13.000I scream about this stuff all day long, but, like, of course it is, but it doesn't matter.
01:21:18.000And they still think you're dumb enough to fall for it that even Republicans will go out there, no, this is obviously what's going on.
01:21:23.000Like, of course it's not. Right, right.
01:21:26.000And I think that's what they're counting on.
01:21:30.000They're counting on the fact that, you know, most people are working multiple jobs, they've got kids, every single second of their day is accounted for, you know, they're either You know, changing a diaper while doing something else.
01:21:45.000I mean, you know, they're struggling to put food in the table, all these things.
01:21:50.000They don't have time to obsess over details of intelligence controversies, so it's either a shrugging yes or perhaps a faint objection, but they don't have time to get worked up about it, and they count on that.
01:22:06.000With these intelligence controversies, the pattern is Is that they will come out with a strong statement, and then it will only later leak out that there was some other point of view about the whole thing.
01:22:22.000This is very, very similar to what happened here, very similar to what happened with the Iraq story.
01:22:27.000The only difference was they used a different tool.
01:22:30.000With Iraq, they used the National Intelligence Estimate, which is a formal, a big product that involves all the intelligence agencies.
01:22:41.000And there, they didn't Remove all of the dissenting information, but they just kept it classified.
01:22:50.000So when it first came out, we were told that the key line was Saddam is still intent on making nuclear weapons.
01:23:00.000And oh my god, that's amazing, that's horrifying, let's go to war, right?
01:23:04.000It wasn't until 12 years later, it was 2015, that they declassified that document and we find out that there's there are lines in there like there is no operational tie between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.
01:23:19.000Now would we have gone to war if we had heard that first version?
01:23:22.000Of course not. But the delay is what matters, and it's the same with this.
01:23:27.000The only difference with this is they didn't have to put the dissent in this kind of report.
01:23:32.000An intelligence community assessment is a different kind of animal.
01:23:35.000They could just keep the analysts out of it entirely.
01:23:39.000They knew, for instance, that the State Department didn't agree with their point of view, so no State Department analysts.
01:23:48.000But even so, Brennan, in his own book, Wrote that he had to overrule two of his Russia experts in order to come up with the conclusion that he came up with.
01:25:03.000I mean, are they just... Content doing sort of the propaganda of the regime as long as that's for the Democrat Party?
01:25:10.000Because it does feel like, you know, for me, as a conservative, being out there and doing, like, I am not just combating, you know, the ideas of today's Democrat Party versus mine.
01:25:20.000I'm doing that being suppressed by big tech while they're artificially boosted.
01:25:26.000Being, you know, lied to by the mainstream media.
01:25:29.000These are multi-trillion dollar institutions, you know, that you're up against.
01:25:34.000It's sort of, I mean, I guess that should be scary to them and perhaps why they continue to do it.
01:25:39.000But why do you think? Well, I think it's a mixture, right?
01:25:44.000I mean, this idea that journalists, you know, are happy to be on the front lines of any movement to stop Donald Trump from being president.
01:25:54.000I covered your father's campaign in 2016.
01:25:57.000I was on the bus with all those journalists.
01:26:00.000I remember the discussions that people had once it became clear that he was going to become the nominee.
01:26:05.000There were a lot of journalists who felt guilty because they thought they had given him free coverage.
01:26:13.000Well, what are we going to do? Well, we can't cover him less because we're going to lose money on ratings because they got such great ratings out of Trump coverage.
01:26:21.000So let's just do the same stuff, but add a ton of negativity to it.
01:26:27.000And they justified this to themselves by saying, oh, we're doing a public service, blah, blah, blah.
01:26:32.000But this goes against everything real journalists are taught, which is we're not supposed to care about the outcome.
01:26:40.000The focus for us is supposed to be, let's get it right.
01:26:43.000In the case of a political movement, a presidential campaign, the job for me is Donald Trump is winning the primary.
01:26:54.000He's incredibly popular despite the predictions.
01:26:58.000Well, why is that? I mean, it's just a job.
01:27:01.000We're supposed to figure out what the answer is.
01:27:04.000Now, with this thing, there's an additional problem, though, however, which is that with WMDs, They could at least point to a couple of guilty journalists and say, well, it was their fault, and we can scale that back.
01:27:18.000With Russiagate, you'd have to run a retraction for five or ten years worth of coverage.
01:27:24.000People won Pulitzer Prizes, and they still have them for what is literally known as 100% false reporting.
01:27:31.000It's like, well, we like the writing style.
01:27:33.000I'm like, I don't think that's what the Pulitzer was, but what do I know?
01:27:48.000Then you've got to go through, you know, thousands of newspapers and, you know, fix all of those stories and add editor's notes to each and every one of them.
01:27:59.000And there are errors throughout all the coverage.
01:28:03.000Then that's not even including cable TV, which was...
01:28:09.000So logistically, it's almost an impossible problem.
01:28:12.000You would have to go on TV and say, we got 10 years of stuff completely wrong.
01:28:18.000We're going to start over and we're going to have to fire a whole bunch of people and try again.
01:28:24.000That's the only way they can do it, and they're never going to do that.
01:28:29.000Yeah, it's brutal. How has that worked with you now that you're doing some of these things?
01:28:33.000I know, I mean, again, I'm sure many of them were your friends at some other point in time.
01:28:39.000Yeah. When you broke the Twitter files, people were going after you that I imagine were probably close friends of you for just pointing out that these things actually happened.
01:28:53.000I knew that I was being suppressed because I went from one day magically getting 5,000 to 8,000 retweets opposed to We're good to go.
01:29:17.000Right, yeah. And people who would tell you that you're imagining things, I mean, what are you supposed to think about that?
01:29:25.000It's obvious. When the numbers go from X to X minus 10,000 or 20,000, you're not looking at an anomaly.
01:29:37.000But what was so weird about the Twitter files was the same reporters who were gung-ho for stories like, You know, the Snowden revelations, you know, stories about excesses of the intelligence community.
01:29:54.000What we were writing about was really very similar.
01:29:58.000We were saying the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Global Engagement Center, the State Department, they're violating their charters and getting involved in domestic Intelligence operations in ways that they're not allowed to.
01:30:17.000They're getting involved in speech regulation, which they're not allowed to do.
01:30:22.000And I could not for the life of me understand why reporters would not be interested in that story, except as it turns out, they believe that this is necessary.
01:30:34.000Just the press. You know, you can guess, right?
01:30:38.000Populous political movements of a certain type.
01:30:42.000So they've completely changed what their belief system is.
01:30:47.000And again, I just don't understand that because that's not how reporters used to think once upon a time.
01:30:56.000I thought, you know, I looked at this and I thought this is great.
01:30:59.000This is a story of a lifetime. Who wouldn't want to work on this?
01:31:02.000And all the older reporters I talked to agreed with me.
01:31:06.000It's this other, it's this new generation that's come in that has a different value system that, you know, is going to take some getting used to.
01:31:16.000Yeah, I mean, it certainly feels like it's become, you know, a lot more activism.
01:31:21.000You know, and again, I saw it just in the reaction to, you know, hey, when the IRS knocked on your door, the same day as your congressional testimony, like...
01:31:30.000I mean, that seems totally, totally normal.
01:31:33.000I know you've also said you've seen sort of your ex account take a hit following the Twitter files reporting, which is sort of interesting because I mean, I think, you know, whether it was Elon Musk or they sort of opened the kimono for you to go look into these things.
01:31:47.000You know, what more can you tell us about that?
01:31:49.000Because that's sort of interesting. And I've seen sort of the changes between Twitter 1.0 and even 2.0.
01:31:56.000It was actually the best time I thought for Twitter was like the in-between where everyone was just afraid.
01:32:00.000They weren't sure what was going to happen.
01:32:01.000So they just sort of took all the restrictions off.
01:32:04.000That's the only time I've actually seen real growth in the last few years.
01:32:07.000So I'm curious to see what your thoughts were on that one.
01:32:11.000Yeah, that was a really bizarre episode.
01:32:13.000Elon was having a dispute with Substack, which is the platform that I use for my business.
01:32:20.000And I woke up one morning and Twitter had Instituted some reforms that made it very difficult to open links for my site, and I made, I guess, a snarky comment about it somewhere, and next thing I knew, I had a comprehensive search ban on my site.
01:32:41.000Some of my own Twitter files reports were taken down, and Elon and I had an exchange on Signal that he published, which was really strange.
01:32:53.000And the really bizarre thing about this whole thing is I think he wanted me to go to Twitter subs, which is sort of something like Substack.
01:33:02.000And I said to him, We can't do that because then people will say we have a financial relationship and that will discredit the Twitter files reporting and that's really all I care about.
01:34:18.000I mean, I don't remember America being like that growing up.
01:34:23.000This is a new thing to have to get used to, this idea that Somebody is cheating at almost every level of the system now, and you just have to find a way to navigate it.
01:34:59.000We're going to make it as hard as possible and force you back into the places that we ultimately control, and then also when we disagree with you, we'll shut you off.
01:35:09.000I'd say honestly, candidly, and I'm on the platform, but Rumble is one of the few places that does not seem to do that.
01:35:16.000If a country tells them, hey, we won't have you on here if you don't do it this way, okay, then don't have us on, but we're not going to sort of bastardize the notion of free speech to accommodate.
01:35:27.000But yes, there's not many that do it objectively or honestly if we're going to have a true conversation about that.
01:35:34.000Yeah, and all credit to them for continuing to do that.
01:35:39.000Substack has also kind of refused to give in to boycotts and pressure and throw authors overboard.
01:35:49.000But these are relatively small spaces.
01:36:30.000I mean, I had somebody who used to work there describe it as, like, there's no machine that you could make that would be able to generate cash fast enough to emulate the actual profit rate of the company.
01:36:45.000So they're making money hand over fist and having this inordinate impact on the world.
01:36:52.000Just to bring it back to something that's kind of real and significant, what we found on the Twitter files, this whole idea of anti-disinformation and turning the internet into a tool of social control, something that can be leveraged, it started with the Arab Spring, Occupy, the Tea Party, but the really big thing, frankly, was your father's presidential campaign when he proved that one person with a Twitter account Can ignore the entire press corps and still win an election.
01:37:24.000I think that was the thing that sent alarm bells through the system and started this big move towards censorship.
01:37:33.000We saw hints of that in the documents, but we were never able to prove it out.
01:37:37.000But I feel pretty confident that that's the thesis underlying all of this.
01:37:41.000100%. You said it. You know, Google can change the algorithm a little bit and sway public opinion.
01:37:45.000There's no question in my mind that that's exactly what they've been doing.
01:37:48.000And to your point about, you know, really the people in power want to change the status
01:38:17.000Where are any of the civil liberties, like, you know, institutions?
01:38:21.000Despite all of the spying abuses, despite all the lies before judges, before Congress, what has your reporting revealed about the FISA process and why there's still such a push to protect what seems to be as broken a system as perhaps the FBI itself?
01:38:47.000Just in the story that we just did, the abuses with FISA are significant because there are just so many holes in the procedural checks and balances that you would hope would be there.
01:39:04.000So on the front end, In terms of requests, you know, you can have somebody who's at the CIA informally ask, you know, another foreign ally, hey, could you put person X, Y, or Z under signals intelligence or signal surveillance?
01:39:24.000And, you know, they will generate transcripts, they will generate, you know, some kind of a report, and that's done without sufficient predication.
01:39:35.000So that's like Getting a search warrant without probable cause.
01:39:40.000And then on the other end, when the transcripts arrive in the United States, the unmasking procedures have been basically debilitated to the point where they're non-existent.
01:39:53.000You have officials writing emails saying, yeah, I just need to know this for some report I'm writing.
01:40:00.000There's no national security reason whatsoever, and they're unmasking people willy-nilly.
01:40:06.000So FISA and 702 and the related programs of our allies have turned into basically a gigantic warrantless surveillance program, which is exactly what we've tried to avoid across at least the last century of jurisprudence about You know, surveillance, police powers, that sort of thing.
01:40:34.000And you're right, I'm very disappointed in Republicans because I remember when this scandal first came out about Russiagate talking to members of Congress in the Republican Congress who seemed to have this big come-to-Jesus moment about, oh my God, this is a mess. We've got to fix this.
01:40:51.000Well, you know, suddenly now they're canceling the debate about it.
01:40:57.000Yeah, well, by the way, many of them, and I like to call balls and strikes, like, you know, many of them are the same way with big tech.
01:41:03.000Oh, they're really, you know, they're really against big tech, but we're not going to actually do anything about it.
01:41:07.000You know, they cash their, you know, $4,000 check, whatever it is, from Google every time, and, you know, they talk big on Twitter, but don't actually do anything.
01:41:17.000Something across the board with us down there.
01:41:20.000But I mean, that the American people can be spied on like this, that no one's up in arms about it.
01:41:25.000Again, the same people that are supposed to be doing this, journalists, they seem very happy just to allow this to go on when it's a flagrant violation of our basic rights.
01:41:34.000It's shocking, but I guess not surprising anymore.
01:41:39.000I remember early in the Bush years, there was a leak about how DARPA, which is that office in the Pentagon, which does exotic research for new products, projects, they had this thing called total information awareness, which was this plan that would It would grab information from everywhere.
01:42:01.000It would be health records, it would be financial records, it would be signals intelligence.
01:42:06.000They would put it all in one place and the Pentagon would be able to access instantaneously A kind of a singular picture of almost any individual.
01:42:17.000And there was a huge uproar in the kind of left liberal advocacy space.
01:43:05.000American independence is weird because once upon a time, you couldn't tell an American, oh, yeah, I'm going to listen to all your stuff and get your health records and you're going to be cool with that.
01:43:46.000I still see people driving in cars with masks on today.
01:43:49.000Like, you know, and I'm like, what is going on?
01:43:52.000And so, you know, I guess, you know, they're playing to that crowd or, you know, they're guilty of creating that crowd.
01:43:59.000Just, you know, an inane sense of fear that doesn't actually make sense.
01:44:04.000But I guess I'd get as a last question for you, Matt, what are some of the other big stories that are out there right now that legacy media is missing or perhaps just choosing to flagrantly ignore?
01:44:18.000Can you tease any other big investigations that we can see from you in Racket News?
01:44:25.000Sure. I mean, I think one story that I believe is going to turn into something really significant.
01:44:32.000There was a little hint of it when Jim Jordan and the weaponization of government subcommittee got a little hint of new forms of financial surveillance where essentially one bank was doing searches on terms like um bass pro shops yeah yeah right there were the religious texts that uh all kinds of things and they were uh basically what they were doing is they were scoring people like if you if they were using mcc code trans uh codes for transactions and saying like if over 50 of your transactions uh counted as things that we didn't like Then you were a candidate to be, you know, generate a suspicious activity report, which is something that happens in the money laundering world.
01:45:28.000This is also going to sound like gibberish, but basically this is...
01:45:32.000I mean, they're implementing it without our knowledge or perhaps with our knowledge.
01:45:36.000But yeah, there's no question that we just got to make enough people aware of it.
01:45:40.000Right. If you add this, if you graph that on to the mechanisms that they've already developed for speech control and add the algorithms that they're already using for things like Analyzing threats and put that into the private financial monitoring system, then you have something that we've never seen before.
01:46:10.000It's an end run around almost anything.
01:46:14.000For instance, if they're going to debank people for buying handguns, then what do you need gun control laws for?
01:46:22.000People are just not going to buy them anyway.
01:46:24.000They want to be extra sure that people can't protect themselves.
01:46:27.000With the open borders and the crime that's coming through there, those people will be fine.
01:46:32.000I say it a lot, and maybe it's a conservative soundbite, but I do feel like Americans now are second-class citizens in their own country.
01:46:40.000We are treated with fewer rights than those who are either here illegally or those who aren't actually citizens.
01:46:50.000There maybe was a time where that would be the case, but it feels like that's the case in the actions.
01:46:55.000If I beat the hell out of cops in the streets of New York, I'd be in jail for a really long time, not released without bail a few moments later, only to become a repeat offender within 15 minutes.
01:47:06.000It's not the same for everyone in this country right now, and that's scary.
01:47:11.000No, and the degradation of rights is this huge, huge thing that's happened in American society.
01:47:21.000The importance of the Bill of Rights is exactly that we don't end up with second-class citizens.
01:47:27.000Everybody has the same right to speak.
01:47:30.000Everybody has the same right to due process.
01:47:32.000You can't just grab somebody off the street and throw them in a Navy brig and you need an arrest warrant.
01:47:37.000When George Bush did that in the early 2000s once, it was a huge news story.
01:47:44.000Well, you know, we're starting to violate all kinds of rights, you know, 5th Amendment, 4th Amendment, 14th Amendment, you know, 1st Amendment especially.
01:47:56.000And that does turn into a situation where bureaucracies have power and people increasingly don't, because the one thing we did have was the legal ability to protest.
01:48:07.000And if we don't have that anymore, then we are second-class citizens.
01:48:19.000I'd be curious to hear your, you know.
01:48:22.000Yeah, well, listen, I try to, you know, I try to do it with everything.
01:48:25.000I mean, you know, like I said, I talk about it on the show all the time.
01:48:28.000you know, helped, you know, take a company public, public square to allow sort of like-minded people
01:48:33.000to find and support businesses that aren't just sort of woke corporate interests that, you know,
01:48:39.000that would put you in the gulags in two seconds and are pushing stuff that you may not believe in.
01:48:43.000Like find the small business that aligns with your values.
01:48:45.000And, you know, a lot of this to me, it is about the money, right?
01:48:48.000If they can control the money and all of that aspect, and so you pull some of that away, it makes it harder.
01:48:53.000I've tried, you know, like I took this seriously.
01:48:55.000I was a business guy before I got thrown into politics.
01:48:58.000Our business is very different now, but I spend a lot of my time now trying to create these businesses that they said, build your own.
01:49:05.000I've done it with a publishing company because a lot of the traditional publishing houses basically weren't publishing other conservative writers.
01:49:12.000Or they'd say, hey, we'll give you your upfront, but you can't say this, you can't say this.
01:49:17.000I mean, these are congressmen and senators.
01:49:20.000You know, writing mainstream conservative thoughts, and that was too much, and they were going to censor it that way.
01:49:25.000You know, I've done this sort of across the board, a news app.
01:49:28.000You know, this one, we were debanked, actually.
01:49:30.000I started MXM News to just aggregate the stuff that's out there.
01:49:34.000You know, you can see the New York Times version, but you'll also see the Breitbart version, and you can see it in an interesting place, and compare and contrast will give you everything.
01:49:42.000Because I actually think that if you actually saw everything, my side probably prevails, so I'm not willing to hide it from you.
01:49:49.000This was like CPAC last year, I guess.
01:49:51.000The morning, my partner in the deal calls me.
01:49:53.000He's like, hey, our operating account is at zero.
01:50:03.000Call the bank. Oh, it was PNC Bank, like a big bank out of Pittsburgh.
01:50:07.000This is not a small little bank that...
01:50:09.000Oh, yeah, wait, sorry, we forgot to call you.
01:50:12.000Like, we don't want to do business with you.
01:50:13.000I was like, well, we're not creating fake, we're literally just putting stuff that's out there in the ether and just making it easy for people to find, to your point about Google.
01:50:20.000It's, you know, you can get these 700 versions of CNN before you get to, you know, the Matt Taibbi take on page, you know, 476.
01:50:29.000You may be the right take, but no one's ever going to scroll far enough to get there.
01:50:53.000We're on the phone talking with you guys.
01:50:55.000It's only an error because I have a big enough platform to actually fight back.
01:50:59.000So, you know, I spend a lot of my time doing this because I believe the money component, you know, I bitch a lot, but, like, you got to do more than bitch.
01:51:07.000You got to actually act. And so it's been creating sort of this parallel economy or doing my best I can with that.
01:51:13.000You know, again, Public Square, MXM News, you know, winning team publishing.
01:51:17.000Like, these are businesses I had no...
01:51:20.000No plan on doing when I was just a real estate developer, but I understand the threat.
01:51:24.000And so now it's become a huge focus for me because I think that's a huge component of it that perhaps I'm blessed to have the platform to help create and push that stuff into the ether.
01:51:35.000That's fascinating, but how terrifying is it that you can't even rely on Americans to chase a profit motive anymore?
01:51:46.000When do the class action—this is the thing we've got to start next, because God knows they've weaponized lawfare against me and my family for long enough.
01:51:54.000When do the shareholders of Disney say, hey man— It's pretty clear that the trans propaganda that you're putting out there on a daily basis is not good for shareholder value, and therefore you're violating your fiduciary responsibility, because that's clearly happening in corporate America.
01:52:10.000I have a friend who's a corporate recruiter for Fortune 500 companies, and she's like, Fortune 500 companies?
01:52:16.000Well, tell her, no straight white males.
01:52:20.000And preferably no white males, period.
01:52:22.000But what if it's an industry that's like 95%?
01:52:25.000It doesn't matter. CEO's got to be, you know, we need to check some boxes.
01:52:29.000I mean, they're violating just basic rules and laws, and they're doing it so flagrantly.
01:52:34.000You know, when do the people have enough of that?
01:52:37.000Hopefully enough of that's coming out.
01:52:38.000We see it with a lot of the DEI stuff.
01:52:51.000And once they step on the gas on that one, I think you change the narrative quickly.
01:52:55.000But... Man, again, we're not working, you know, hey, you know, the guy that's buying the ticket is not the same as the, you know, the trans CEO of United or whatever craziness I saw, you know, two weeks ago online.
01:53:07.000But those are the people that are getting in charge, and those are the people who have taken over the military.
01:53:11.000And, you know, they've done a good job that sort of that radical Marxist group of people that I think have taken over the vast majority of the institutions of this country, from academia to the military to the FBI, from going from the ground up.
01:53:23.000And, you know, the conservative, no, we're busy building a business and we're doing this.
01:53:27.000It's like, guess what, folks? None of that matters anymore.
01:53:29.000Like, run for your school board or you're going to have a serious problem.
01:53:33.000I'm just trying to combat it as best I can.
01:53:35.000It's probably why I do this instead of taking the easy way out of, hey, I could have just been a building guy in New York and been invited to the cool person party and shut the fuck up about politics.
01:53:44.000And, you know, maybe they'd have left me alone, probably not because of my dad, but we all could have done that.
01:53:49.000My dad knew that he could have done that, and he chose not to because he actually believes in this stuff.
01:54:13.000How can everyone who's watching, how do they find you?
01:54:16.000I know you're on Substack. You mentioned you got a good Twitter game.
01:54:18.000Just tell us where they can find you so you can check it out.
01:54:21.000Because again, for me, it's like, I'm happy to get all of this out there in the ether.
01:54:25.000I want everyone to see all the sides and I love what you're doing and I love that you're taking them on and coming from a very different perspective than I ever would, but I'm happy to be in the fight with you because I believe in this stuff.
01:57:43.000So get a free 30-day supply on all bundles and an extra 15% off your order by going to GetSuperBeats.com G-E-T-S-U-P-E-R-B-E-E-T-S, because it's the vegetable,.com And enjoy using promo code TRIGGERED to get that extra 15% off.
01:58:07.000And for those of you who are on Locals, I'm going to head over now, even though we've been going for almost two hours, I'm going to go head over.
01:58:14.000I'm going to go do the Locals thing, so I'll do the AMA there right now.
01:58:18.000If you're a subscriber on Locals, check that out.
01:58:34.000You know the drill. We can't do this without you guys, but you guys are all part of this movement, and I just appreciate you being in there with me.