Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Adam Schiff's Endless Petulance Over Removal from House Intel. Committee
Plus: Matt Stoller on DOJ v. Google
January 27, 2023
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Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Thursday, January 26, 2023. Going forward, every new transcript will be sent out by email and posted to our Locals page, where you'll find the transcripts for previous shows. 


Watch System Update Episode #29 Here on Rumble.

Good evening. It's Thursday, January 26. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

Tonight, Adam Schiff is by a good distance the most casual and destructive pathological liar in Congress – and that is not an easy title to win given the intense competition. Often overlooked, though, by those who focus on his compulsive lying is that he's also almost certainly the most authoritarian member of Congress as well, seeking to censor his critics, smear journalists who question him, and various other cases of abuses of power. The decision of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to remove him from his perch on the House Intelligence Committee, where he abused his power in multiple ways, is long overdue. It would require a multi-series Netflix show to document all of Schiff's lies and authoritarian conduct, but we will highlight some of the worst in order to examine the implications of removing him from that committee and to take account of all of the damage he has genuinely done. 

For our interview segment, we'll speak to Matt Stoller, one of the country's most knowledgeable antitrust experts, about the lawsuit we reported on last night filed by the Biden DOJ against Google to break up parts of Google on antitrust grounds, one similar to the lawsuit filed against Google in 2020 by the Trump DOJ. We'll talk to Stoller about the political dynamic in Washington, as well as what it portends for the ability of the virtually unlimited power of Big Tech to finally be reined in. 


Monologue:

So before delving into our topics of the night, I just want to share with you something we did today that I'm really genuinely excited by. Earlier this afternoon, I spent an hour interviewing the German politician and member of the German parliament, Sahra Wagenknecht. She's a fascinating figure, easily one of the four or five most famous politicians in that country. She was long regarded as the heroine of the German left, its best chance to take power one day. But then something rather odd and interesting and increasingly common began to happen to her. Over the last several years her popularity began to skyrocket among many on the German right, many of those who have been voting for German right-wing political parties, especially the alternative for Deutschland, that Western media outlets are fond of calling a far-right populist or even fascist party. 

There are many reasons for Wagenknecht’s growing popularity with the German right, even as she remains popular among many on the German left. She has become one of the nation's most vocal and convincing opponents of growing involvement by Germany in the war in Ukraine, warning that when Germany and Russia find themselves in an antagonistic position over war, nothing good generally happens. Beyond that, she opposed COVID vaccine mandates; she opposes mass immigration on the longstanding left-wing ground that it's a plot by neoliberal international institutions to drive down wages for German workers; and she is particularly critical, scathingly so, of how the left has abandoned ordinary Germans and German workers in favor of becoming a party largely composed of highly educated cosmopolitan elites. It’s a problem she blames in part on the left's abandonment of class politics in favor of elite cultural agendas that are either irrelevant or hostile to the lives and value systems of ordinary Germans, especially those who are religious. 

I found this interview one of the most interesting I've ever conducted in all the years I've been doing journalism. The political dynamics she describes are clearly present in all Western democracies, including the U.S. The crossroads at which she sets is one of the primary focal points of this show and my journalism. Her analysis of the German-Russian relationship and Germany's relationship double needle in the war in Ukraine is extremely thoughtful and well-informed. This interview was conducted with a German translator and will be ready early next week. I believe you will find the interview as compelling and illuminating as I did, so please watch for it either on Monday or Tuesday, right here on our show. 

Now for tonight's topic. As a journalist, it is sometimes important, even while doing one's best to do reporting as stoically and neutrally as possible, to be honest about one's emotions. After all, journalists are people too, at least most, or some of us are. In that spirit, I want to start with a confession. I have really not been sleeping well at night over the last couple of weeks. My guess is that this is a sensation all of you have had at various points in your life and for those who have, you'll know that it is often difficult to know exactly what the source of your sleep problem is. And that was true for me. 

I've been struggling to understand what was causing this, and only within the last 24 hours, by a stroke of luck, was I able to identify the day that my sleep disturbances began. It was the day that I learned that Congressman Adam Schiff, the California Democrat, would no longer be a member of the House Intelligence Committee, the oversight body over which he has presided since 2019. For the four years prior to that, the last time Republicans were in the majority, Schiff was the ranking member of that committee, which meant he was part of the glorious Gang of Eight, the special members of Congress who received the most sensitive classified briefings from the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community.  Yet, now, the new House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has announced that he is not only removing Adam Schiff from his leadership position on that committee but stripping him of his membership entirely. And that means that Schiff's access to classified information and, with it, his ability to keep our nation safe, no longer exists. 

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Hi Glenn-- I had lost all confidence in Gabbard's integrity long before yesterday's final, decisive, shameless capitulation to Trump & the warmongering uniparty deepstate.

That said, the fact that she chose personal ambition over principle -- with the highest possible stakes on the line -- is no less disappointing for being so unsurprising.

So I'm not here to criticize you for having held out hope that she might stand up when it counted. I trust you implicitly and I trust your rationale for believing this might have gone differently.

But as always I am eager to hear more of your thoughts about this!

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QUICK: Ask Questions for Today's Mailbag!

Glenn will be discussing the Israel-Iran conflict and a Trump Administration official who is in an awkward political predicament, so questions on other topics are more likely to be chosen.

Listened to Tucker Carlson's podcast with Sen. Ted Cruz. It is truly stunning! Cruz proved that individuals like himself should never, ever be elected to positions of consequence in the U.S. Government. One extremely disheartening takeaway from this exchange is that the pompousness and irrationality exhibited by Cruz is prototypical of nearly all elected representatives in the U.S. Congress, imho. He's a sleazy huckster posing as a United States Senator.
Worthy of a listening, for as long as one can tolerate it.

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Trump Declares the War in Iran to Be His Own; Journalist Ken Klippenstein on Trump's War Plans, DC Dems, and More
System Update #470

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Ever since the Israelis attacked Iran on Thursday night, many of Donald Trump's most passionate supporters have raised questions about the extent to which Trump knew or was involved in this new war. In one sense, that concern is understandable. Many of them believe Trump's repeated promises for years to keep the U.S. out of new wars, especially new wars in the Middle East, and they did not want to believe that he had violated that promise so radically and so quickly, less than five months in office by sanctioning and involving the United States in a new war with Iran. 

But those denials have grown increasingly implausible every day as Trump has now boasted of his involvement and repeatedly made clear the central role that he and the United States played in the planning, launching and coordinating of this war. Whatever remaining doubts still lingered about whether Trump's role was as significant as he claimed were completely crushed by Trump himself today, as the President issued a series of tweets – one more unhinged and war-drunk than the next – proclaiming that we – "we" meaning the United States – now dominate and control the skies over Tehran. He also ordered the Iranians to accept the deal that he told them to sign, threatening them with serious devastation if they refused. 

We’ll also talk to the independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who breaks many stories, genuinely breaking stories on his Substack, where he went after wisely deciding to quit the Intercept last year. He receives many leaks from sources inside the intelligence community – not the official and authorized leaks: those are for Barack Ravid at Axios – but he gets the unauthorized ones from mid-level or even low-level employees of the U.S. Government. 

Ken has a new story out tonight about war plans of Trump for Iran that were leaked to him, regarding the Israelis and the Americans' designs on Iran. We’ll discuss that as well as a variety of other issues concerning this brand-new war, various happenings in Washington, and more. 

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U.S. and Israel vs Iran: Repeating War on Iraq Scripts; Overwhelming Bipartisan Consensus for Israel's Wars
System Update #469

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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The war initiated by Israel against Iran last Thursday was dangerous from the start and has each day only become more dangerous. President Trump has boasted of his pre-war coordination with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's already been using U.S. military assets to protect Israel. He's now even re-deploying aircraft carriers in the Pacific, where we're told they are guarding against America's greatest enemy – China – now to the Middle East, where Israel has demanded they go to support its war. 

Just a few minutes ago, President Trump ordered the 16 million people who live in Tehran to immediately evacuate a city where it's now 2 a.m. 

With Israel, as always, demanding more. Now, they want the U.S. planes and bombs to destroy Iran's underground nuclear facilities for them. The former Israeli defense minister went on CNN just an hour ago and told President Trump in the U.S. that it's our obligation to fight this war with them. And for them, President Trump has repeatedly opened the possibility of even greater U.S. involvement in the war. 

There are so many aspects of this new conflict worth covering and dissecting –and we will do so throughout the week – but tonight we want to focus on the amazing ease the U.S. government has in convincing its population to support whatever new war is presented to it. Over four years ago, intense war propaganda from the U.S. political class and media persuaded Americans to want to fund and arm the war in Ukraine – a war that is still dragging on with no favorable end in sight – and overnight huge numbers of people in the United States have suddenly become convinced without having ever said so previously that war with Iran is some sort of moral imperative as well as a strategic necessity for the survival of American citizens of the United States. 

No matter how debunked, discredited and disgraced that Iraq war narrative has become, as long as one just waits 20 or 25 years, then, apparently, that same script just works like magic all over again. You just haul it out, fearmongering, and huge numbers of people respond by saying, "Yes, let's go to war, let' kill people." 

We'll examine all of that, as well as the standard bipartisan unity in support of new American wars and especially wars involving Israel, you hear Democrats almost unanimously, either staying quiet or praising President Trump, with just a few exceptions from both parties. And we'll look at that as well. 

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If you're an American citizen as an adult, you have seen the United States repeatedly go to war. Anyone 18 or over has seen the United States involved in all sorts of wars and that's after the Iraq war, which is now 22 years ago. Essentially, if you're American, it means forever, for a long, long time, for many decades, that you are a citizen of a country that's always at war. 

After World War II, there was a very visible and clear pattern, which is that the U.S. government convinces its citizens, enough of them, to support the war at the beginning. They deluge them with war propaganda, which is extremely strong, primal, tribal and enough Americans initially support the war to let the U.S. government politically go and drop bombs or finance some other country to go drop bombs for it. Then, after six months, a year, or two years, or four years, polls show that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the war that they were convinced to support. Going back to the war in Vietnam, throughout the 1980s’ wars, the War on Terror in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, in Libya, the financing of the war in Ukraine, Israel's destruction of Gaza, bombing Yemin and now this new war that the United States is becoming increasingly involved in, in lots of different ways and we're only on the fifth day.

You just see so many Americans on a dime the minute a new war is presented to them, with whatever pretext can be conjured, even if they're exactly the same pretext that most Americans lived through watching proved to be complete lies the last time it was used in 2003, even though it's exactly the same script, exactly the same pretext, coming from exactly the same people. You can get enough Americans to immediately stand up and start cheering for death and destruction and bombing. Not all, a very substantial minority oppose it, I think if the U.S. overtly gets even more involved in the war in Iran, obviously anything resembling ground troops entering Iran, but even perhaps prolonged bombing of Iran as well through U.S. jets and bombs, as President Trump has indicated and Israel has demanded, maybe some of that will erode, that support will erode. But all that's needed is enough support at the beginning of the war to let the government start it. And once the U.S. government enters the war, it doesn't matter anymore whether the people continue to support it; then it's just already done. All the normal arguments are assembled about why we can't stop, why we can't cut and run, why that would be appeasement, etc., etc. All the same scripts all the time, used over and over, and even though they get proven to be discredited, or unpersuasive, or full of lies, you just use the same ones each time. And that's how the United States stays as a country at war.

We've been hearing a lot of people saying, “Look, I'm happy that Israel is bombing Iran, as long as the U.S. has no involvement in the war, we don't enter it, we don't have to pay for it. As long as it's not our war, I'm fine with it.” But, of course, the entire Israeli military is funded by American taxpayers. Every time Israel has a new war, the weapons that it uses come from the United States, transferred to Israel. We pay for their wars, we arm their wars, we support diplomatically those wars and we use our military assets every single time and our intelligence apparatus to support and enable the war, as the United States is already doing. We already have multiple new U.S. military assets ordered to the region by President Trump. They're already active in protecting Israel from retaliation. President Trump openly said that he is considering the possibility of involving the U.S. even more directly in this war with Iran: "We're not involved in it. It's possible we could get involved. But we are not at this moment involved," the president said. (ABC News. June 15, 2025.)

That all depends on what you mean by ‘involved.’ We're paying for the war, we're arming the war, we've deployed military assets that are actively now trying to shoot down missiles coming from Iran as retaliation for the Israelis launching a completely unprovoked attack on Iran, based on the claim that Iran was about to get nuclear weapons, just weeks away, something they've been saying for 30 years, as we've shown you many times, same thing that was said in 2002. 

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U.S. Involvement in Israel's Iran Attack; the View from Tehran: Iranian Professor on Reactions to Strikes; CATO Analysts on Dangers and War Escalations

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Today's most important news is obvious: Israel last night launched a major military assault on Iran, targeting residential buildings in Tehran, where military commanders and nuclear physicists live with their families, as well as bombing multiple nuclear facilities throughout the country. 

Triumphalist rhetoric flooded American and Israeli discourse almost immediately, until just a little bit ago, when a barrage of Iran's ballistic and hypersonic missiles began hitting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and other major population centers. Escalation seems virtually inevitable at this point. The level of escalation – always the most dangerous question when a new war has started – is most certainly yet to be determined. 

Then there's the question of the role of the United States and President Trump in all of this. News reports from both the U.S. and Israeli media suggested this morning that Trump was working hand-in-hand with the Israelis to pretend that he was still optimistic about a diplomatic resolution with Tehran, but did so only as a ruse to convince the Iranians that Trump intended to restrain Israel and thus lure Iran into a false sense of security when, in fact, Trump was not only green-lighting the attack but actively working with the Israelis to launch it. President Trump's own statements today proudly boasting of the success of the attack, along with his own concrete actions such as ordering U.S. military assets into position to yet again defend Israel, strongly bolster those reports and clearly indicate a direct U.S. involvement in this war between Israel and Iran, a U.S. involvement that already exists and will almost certainly continue to grow over the next few days and perhaps few weeks and even months. 

We’ll speak to Professor Mohammad Marandi, who is in Tehran and has heard and witnessed a lot of what happened but also has some unique analysis from his role as an American Iranian scholar of foreign policy and to scholars Justin Logan and Jon Hoffman, from the Cato Institute, one of the very few think tanks in the United States, which has long counselled restraint and non-interventionism in U.S. foreign policy. 

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