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 Tuesday, January 31, 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 #32 Here on Rumble.
In this episode, a devastating autopsy on the serial lies and recklessness by the corporate media that for more than three years drowned this country in what we can and should now call the Russiagate Hoax. That the media lies on behalf of the CIA and FBI repeatedly to push these deranged conspiracy theories that Trump was controlled by Putin, that Trump officials helped the Kremlin hack into democratic email inboxes is hardly a surprise. But the reason this new report is so worth examining is in part because of how comprehensive and well-documented it is.
It's a four-part series full of substantiation and shoe-leather investigative reporting, documenting each media falsehood and how it happened, but also because it comes from within their own home. This series is published by the Columbia Journalism Review, as mainstream as it gets, and was reported by Jeff Gerth, who wrote for the New York Times for 30 years, winning a Pulitzer at the paper.
Nonetheless – and needless to say – these media outlets are ignoring this new report and will continue to ignore the remarkable findings in it, just as they steadfastly ignore all reporting that proves their lies. That's because their function is to deceive the public and spread disinformation on behalf of American power centers. Why would you apologize when you fulfill your real function? But that's precisely why it's so imperative to highlight and examine the key findings of this new report and what it reveals about the broader corruption of our corporate media culture. And that's exactly what we will do tonight, in-depth and in detail, because the story that emerges is one of great clarity and great importance.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Monologue
We finally have what we should have had at least four years ago: a comprehensive accounting from the mainstream media review of the lies, deceit and recklessness that drove the corporate media's Russiagate hoax.
On Monday, the Columbia Journalism Review – it doesn't get more mainstream, too – published a four-part investigative series entitled “The Press versus the President”. One scathing paragraph after the next, it details the sort of incompetence and complete lack of journalistic integrity that drove most of the corporate media's coverage of Russiagate, the fake scandal that dominated and drowned our politics from mid-2016 – when the Clinton campaign first launched its innuendo about sinister, hidden ties between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin – through April of 2019, more than three years later, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller finally closed his 18-month-long investigation by concluding that there was insufficient evidence to establish the two core deranged conspiracy theories pushed by the Democratic Party, the U.S. Security State and the corporate media, and seemingly copied from the crusty, decades-old scripts buried in the lowest level dungeons of the CIA. First, Donald Trump and the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to hack into the email inboxes of the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign manager, John Podesta; and two, Russian President Vladimir Putin had effectively seized control of the levers of American power through various forms of blackmail control over Trump.
One now often sees many liberals and media figures embarrassed that they actually endorse that blackmail theory, first invented by the Steele Dossier, which was also reported first by the media – by CNN, and by BuzzFeed. Liberals now like to claim that this is something that was endorsed only by the most marginalized fringes of resistance politics, not by any influential or mainstream Democratic Party leaders – that, put simply, is a lie. That Donald Trump was a puppet of the Kremlin, that Putin had effectively taken over the United States by infiltrating its most sacred halls of power was gospel to American liberalism at the highest levels for years. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as this one example, repeatedly spread it as illustrated by this very predictably viral January 2919 tweet, “What does Putin have on Donald Trump politically, personally, or financially?”
When Trump met Putin for a summit in Helsinki, in 2018, Democratic Party leaders, CIA operatives and their corporate media allies actually began to resort to body language analysis, something less credible than astrology, to insist that they finally had the proof because of how Trump was standing and how Putin was standing that Trump was owned by Putin.
