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 Wednesday, February 22, 2023. Watch the full episode here or listen to the podcast on Spotify.
In the aftermath of President Biden's highly melodramatic made-for-TV train trip to Kyiv, where he yet again vowed to send another half billion dollars or so and vowed to support Ukraine until the very end – whatever that might mean – there is real fallout on multiple levels from that trip – in Russia, in China and in the U.S. – as both former President Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis weigh in on Biden's actions. We will report on all of that and examine the implications.
Plus, more than two years later, we are finally going to see the parts of the January 6 surveillance footage that the House January 6 Committee, led by Democrats Bennie Thompson, Adam Schiff and Republican Liz Cheney did not want you to see. That's because House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has quite controversially handed that footage over to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
As you might imagine, most of the corporate media is not particularly pleased about this, which is odd given how often they proclaim their love of transparency, which is exactly what we're about to get. We'll examine the implications of that decision and the very irritated and angry media reaction to it, as well.
As a reminder, each episode of System Update is now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and other major podcast platforms. The episodes are released the day following their live broadcast here on Rumble.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Monologue
Over the weekend and into Monday, President Joe Biden made a surprise, melodramatic visit to Kyiv, the kind of presidential trip that all presidents in wartime love to do. Every single president – for as long as I can remember – has made secret, mysterious, high-drama trips into theaters of war – in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest. The media goes crazy and everybody gets excited. And this is no different.
President Biden chose a highly popular reporter who used to work at the Huffington Post and The Guardian to be the secret reporter who would accompany him with secret plans that nobody knew about. She was only told that she was going to Warsaw and they traveled dark into the night at 4 a.m. Like a spy thriller. They flew all the way across the world. They landed. They flew again. They got on a train. Nobody knew that this was happening. It was so dangerous because Kyiv is such a dangerous place, such a major theater of war with bombs coming and missiles coming all the time, that the consensus immediately rose, that this was Biden's Churchill moment. It was so brave and courageous and important for our country that he went to Ukraine and met with President Zelenskyy in that olive green costume that he wears wherever he goes. It was all very exciting and all very important for some reason that I don't fully understand.
However important or not important the meeting may have been, there was certainly a lot of media excitement over it. They had all kinds of historians say that this is one of the most important presidential trips in decades. It was somehow incredibly historic, but there was also a lot of real fallout from it as well, fallout that is likely to endure with us long after the media reaction dissipates. And that's what I want to focus on, examining what the cost continues to be to this proxy war that we seem to be continuing to feel with no end in sight, with no intended end in sight, way with the benefits that are accruing to American citizens, which is supposed to be the role of our government, against the costs that continue to pile up every time we do something.
So, let's review, first of all, an article from Real Clear Politics, just to review the basics of what happened in particular when President Biden met with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv for this super-secret, dark-of-the-night trip. It was very exciting in and of itself, and it was extra exciting because an air siren went off while President Biden was there, showing how brave he was to go there and to endure these incoming missile fire and to basically risk his life in order to go. As Hillary Clinton said, he took a train to the frontlines of democracy. That's what Hillary Clinton called it: “taking a train to the frontlines of democracy.” Here, though, is something that inadvertently emerged on CNN, that you don't see on CNN very often – which is the truth –. and it was clearly something that was said without realizing what the implications are. Let's watch what CNN told us.
(Video 00:15:46)
Alex Marquardt, CNN: I've been here for the past five days. I have not heard any explosions. I have not heard any air sirens until about half an hour ago, right when President Biden was in the center of Kyiv, as…
Well, what an incredible coincidence. First of all – very bad luck for Joe Biden. Scary bad luck. For five days, Kyiv is perfectly calm, as it so often is. Nothing was going on in Kyiv, as the CNN reporter said. He didn't hear a single siren or air attack or anything else. And it was right when the president – just the moment that he stepped out into the public square, that's exactly the moment the air siren went off right in front of the cameras and all over the United States, in The New York Times and elsewhere, appeared the headline “Air Sirens Go Off While President Biden Meets Outdoors With President Zelenskiy”.
An incredibly melodramatic moment. Our president was in danger, but he didn't care because, like Winston Churchill himself, he was fighting for democracy. He's fighting for our freedom. If President Biden doesn't go to Kyiv, if he doesn't spend $100 billion or more to fuel the war in Kyiv, in six months or so, we may be speaking Russian. That's how close the Russians are to our border. And that's how much gratitude the media has for President Biden for being such a bold and selfless leader that he went on such a dangerous trip, as evidenced by that air siren that went off – which hadn't gone off for five days until the moment he got there. That's when it went off. No bombs came in, by the way. No missiles came in. Maybe it was just that they detected something. Maybe they shot it down there, who knows? But any event, right at the moment that he was there in front of all the cameras, that's when the air siren went off.
In response to that trip, a lot of things happened. President Biden went right up to the Russian border, a country that sits on the most sensitive part of the Russian border, where the Russians were twice invaded and almost destroyed by the Germans in both world wars in the 20th century. That's a reason why Ukraine is a pretty sensitive place for Russia. If, for example, the Soviet Union got anywhere near the United States, as it did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we are ready to start a nuclear war over it. For some reason, everybody seems confident that President Putin is not going to do the same – even though Joe Biden is right in the country, on that border, promising that NATO will continue to pour heavy armaments, including tanks, and potentially, next, fighter jets, right into that country – everyone's confident that Vladimir Putin won't do what John Kennedy was going to do and almost did, which is blow up the world because the Russians got too close to the American border. Everyone's calm, everyone's happy. Just keep throwing in weapons and fueling this war right on the border of Russia. It's all worth it because of the immense benefits we as Americans are getting, which we'll talk about in a moment.
But there are things happening as a result that we should take into account. One of them is that President Putin announced that Russia is officially withdrawing from the last remaining arms treaty, which is called the New START agreement as a result of what he perceives as NATO's and EU’s aggression that has been going on for many years.
There's the Reuters article and it reads,
President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that Russia was suspending its participation in the New START treaty with the United States that limits the two sides' strategic nuclear arsenals. Putin stressed that Russia was not withdrawing from the treaty, but the suspension further imperils the last remaining pillar of arms control between the United States and Russia, which between them hold nearly 90% of the world's nuclear warheads – enough to destroy the planet many, many times over. “In this regard, I am forced to announce today that Russia is suspending its participation in the Strategic Offensive Arms Treaty”, Putin told lawmakers toward the end of a major speech to parliament, nearly one year into the war in Ukraine (Reuters. Feb. 21, 2023).
Maybe you don't care much about arms treaties, but I think it's important to review the history of these arms treaties and why many people thought they were very important, beginning with President Ronald Reagan himself. The Reuters article goes on.
The New START Treaty was signed in Prague in 2010, came into force the following year, and was extended in 2021 for five years more just after U.S. President Joe Biden took office. It caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States and Russia can deploy, and the deployment of land and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them.
Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, with close to 6,000 warheads, experts say (Reuters. Feb. 21, 2023).
.
These agreements take the two countries that have so many different kinds of nuclear weapons – nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, they're all over the place – and these arms treaties and the framework of them, which, again, was begun in the 1980s between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and has been supported by people all over the world and both political parties for decades because it's a pretty serious matter to have nuclear weapons just about all over the world, with no one controlling how they're used or where they are or how many there are deployed. That's what nuclear arms agreements are for.
One of the problems, one of the costs of this proxy war that we're now in for about a year – it's about to be a year on February 24 – is that it is now completely destroying whatever remnants of diplomacy exist between the United States and Russia. Again, the countries with 90% of the nuclear stockpile on the planet. As ABC reports, “Russian lawmakers endorse suspension of nuclear pact with the U.S. Both houses of Russia's parliament have quickly endorsed President Vladimir Putin's move to suspend the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with the United States” (Feb. 22, 2023).
According to AP, what is happening, as the Russian parliament and Vladimir Putin withdraw from that arms treaty, is former Russian president and the current top national security adviser to President Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, came out once again and explicitly warned, in case you just don't believe it's true, they're trying to explicitly say that Russia will use their nuclear weapons if they begin to lose what they actually regard – whether you agree with it or not – what they regard, as an existential war. If they start to lose a war right on the Ukrainian border and perceive that NATO and the West overrunning Ukraine and deploying their military right up to the Russian border, they are telling the world in terms that the United States shall understand, since we would do the same thing if this were happening in Cuba or Mexico or Canada or even in anywhere in Latin America, that they regard it as a threat sufficient enough to them to deploy nuclear weapons,
Dmitry Medvedev, deputy head of Russia's Security Council that is chaired by Putin, emphasized Wednesday, that the suspension of Russia's participation in the pact was a signal to the U.S. that Moscow is ready to use nuclear weapons to protect itself. “If the U.S. wants Russia's defeat, we have the right to defend ourselves with any weapons, including nuclear weapons”, Medvedev said on his messaging app channel. “Let the U.S. elites who have lost touch with reality think about what they got. If the U.S. wants Russia to be defeated, we are going to stand on the verge of a global conflict”.
Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house, the State Duma [the Russian parliament] emphasized that the suspension is “reversible and can be reviewed if our Western opponents come back to reason and realize the responsibility for destroying the global security system” (ABC News. Feb. 22, 2023).
Now, maybe you're somebody who says: look, I don't care about what Russia does. I don't care if they withdraw from every single arms control agreement they have with us. I don't care if they threaten to use nuclear weapons for some reason in this country all the way on the other side of the world that has no oil reserves and no geostrategic importance to the United States, a country that President Barack Obama himself repeatedly said, when attacked by neocons in both parties for not doing enough to defend Ukraine, he would always say, “Why would I risk a war with Russia over Ukraine? Ukraine is a country that's a vital interest to Russia but is not, never has been and never will be to the United States.” I guess if you think that that country is so important, that who rules the Donbas and the eastern regions and provinces of Ukraine is so vital to your life that you're willing to risk all of these things, then okay. But let's at least hear from Ronald Reagan about, despite how a hardened cold warrior he was, despite his view that the Soviet Union – not Russia, but the Soviet Union, vastly larger than today's Russia, much, much more threatening, with a much bigger military – was a genuine existential threat to the United States, notwithstanding his view on that, he was adamant that nuclear arms agreements were vital to the security of the United States and of the world. Let's listen to just one of the times he said so, early in his presidency in 1980.
(Video 00:25:17)
Ronald Reagan, 1982: Others of a new generation must have worried about their children and about peace. And that's what I'd like to talk to you about tonight, the future of our children in a world where peace is made uneasy by the presence of nuclear weapons. I believe our strategy for peace will succeed. Never before has the United States proposed such a comprehensive program of nuclear arms control. Never in our history have we engaged in so many negotiations with the Soviets to reduce nuclear arms and to find a stable peace. What we are saying to them is this: We will modernize our military in order to keep the balance for peace but wouldn't it be better if we both simply reduced our arsenals to a much lower level? This summer, we also began negotiations on strategic arms reductions. The proposal we call a START. Here, we're talking about intercontinental missiles, the weapons with a longer range than the intermediate-range ones I was just discussing. We are negotiating on the basis of deep reductions. I proposed in May that we cut the number of warheads on these missiles to an equal number, roughly one-third below current levels. I also propose that we cut the number of missiles themselves to an equal number about half the current U.S. level. Our proposals would eliminate some 4,700 warheads and some 2,250 missiles. I think that would be quite a service to mankind.
“That would be quite a service to mankind,” said the person who ran on a platform of challenging the Soviet Union and denouncing it as the evil empire. And he was trying to get the country to understand the situation that Russia and the United States face because of these nuclear weapons – which, by the way, 40 years later are vastly more destructive and powerful than they were then when Ronald Reagan was warning about them, and way more powerful still than when the United States used them, twice, in 1945, in Japan. He was trying to get people to understand, “as much as I believe the Soviet Union is a country that needs to be challenged in every conceivable way, we are much better and safer as a country if we're able to sit down with them, despite all the rhetoric flying back and forth between us, and negotiate these Start agreements, these arms control agreements that will lead to place some degree of security”. And, as he used to say, trust but verify, verification systems on the number of nuclear warheads aimed at one another’s cities, that would just make the world a much less dangerous place. And again, Reagan was somebody willing to challenge the Soviet Union in all kinds of ways with dirty wars and covert wars and any time he thought the communists were getting too close to the United States, in the backyard that he considered Latin America to be, never mind right on the other side of the border, he was emphasizing the importance of this arms control regime that is now unraveling, unraveling almost completely and over what? War in Ukraine over whether Zelenskyy will govern the Donbas or it will be independent or will decide – as Kosovo did – it wants to be subject to the rule of Moscow – or like Crimea did. Kosovo opted for independence.
The START agreement itself, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) I, was signed on July 31st, 1991. I think it's very important to review the history of this so we don't become dismissive about the importance of these agreements. They were signed in 1991. That was when George Bush was president, by the United States and the Soviet Union.
This is the first treaty that required U.S. and Soviet/Russian reductions of strategic nuclear weapons. It was indispensable in creating a framework that ensured predictability and stability for deep reductions.
In December 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, leaving four independent states in possession of strategic nuclear weapons Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. This caused a delay in the entry into force of the treaty. On May 23, 1992, the United States and the four nuclear-capable successor states to the Soviet Union signed the Lisbon Protocol, which made all five nations party to the START I agreement.
Reductions of nuclear weapons were completed by the deadline of December 5, 2001, seven years after entry into force, and maintained for another eight years. States were verified by on-site inspections and shared missile telemetry. Both the United States and the Russian Federation continued reduction efforts even after reaching the START limits (Arms Control Association. April, 2022).
That's how successful they were. All of these countries – very different antagonisms and very different interests – not only sat down and complied but continued to voluntarily do it even further, knowing how dangerous these nuclear weapons were.
Then we get into the new START agreement, which is the one that President Putin just abandoned. That one did the following:
New START continues the bipartisan process of verifiably reducing U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear arsenals begun by former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. New START is the first verifiable U.S.-Russian nuclear arms control treaty to take effect since START I, in 1994.
The United States and Russia agreed on February 3, 2021, to extend New START by five years, as allowed by the treaty text, until February 5th, 2026 (Arms Control Association. April, 2022).
And now that's what has been put into doubt and suspended.
So, look at all the costs. You have the financial cost of $100 billion or more. You have the United States depleting its own military stockpiles and now having to buy enormous amounts from Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics and all the countries that always profit whenever wars begin. I had Matt Gaetz on my show last week and I asked him, Why is the United States so obsessed with Ukraine as it's been since at least 2013, if not before when Victoria Nuland was running that country for the Obama administration the way she now is for the Biden administration? And he told me that Goldman Sachs and all of these hedge funds and banks see Ukraine as an incredibly profitable opportunity because of how corrupt it is. So, we are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars, or $100 billion authorized thus far, tons of weapons, right exactly six months after these arms manufacturers finally lost their major market in the War on Terror when we withdrew from Afghanistan – lo and behold – there's a new war.
So, we're putting all those costs into it. We're depleting our own stockpiles. We're unraveling the nuclear arms reduction agreements that President Ronald Reagan started and himself said were indispensable to future generations living a safe and secure life on the planet. And on top of that, China is now making gestures toward getting more involved with Russia, seeing that the entire West and all of NATO is backing up the Ukrainians and believing that it's necessary to at least bring some balance – and that's causing China to seemingly get more involved in supporting Russia, either indirectly or by providing the kinds of arms that the United States is providing – though obviously the United States is now threatening China, that they better not do what the United States is already doing in this war, which is providing lethal arms.
My favorite headline that I've ever seen, was from 2007, when the United States denounced Iran for, “interfering in Iraq'', even though the U.S. was in Iraq with about 200,000 troops – a country that it had invaded just four years earlier – was warning and denouncing Iran for interfering in a country right on the other side of its border when the United States, went all the way to the other side of the world to invade that country. And now the United States is warning China, “You better stay out of Ukraine, you better stay away from Russia.'' Of course, the Chinese are now saying, you can’t dictate to us what kind of relationship we can have with Moscow? And that's raising tensions between Moscow and between Washington and Beijing. And always the overarching question is “for what?” For what? Who is benefiting from this war? If the people of the Donbas region and other provinces in eastern Ukraine are allowed to have a free and fair election that the UN supervises and they decide they want to be independent from the rule of Kyiv and are granted their independence the way Kosovo was, or they decide they want to be part of Moscow because they're Russian speaking and identify as ethnic Russians and are allowed to go and be under the rule of Moscow. What does that do to you? How does that improve your life in any way to have all of your taxpayer money transferred to Ukraine and have us fuel a war there? How is that helping your life? And conversely, how will it harm your life if the United States plays the role of trying to forge a diplomatic resolution to this war instead of preventing diplomacy and fueling the war for its own interests, for the interests of a tiny sliver of the population, namely people who work in the arms industry, who are big shareholders and executives in it, and people who work in the U.S. Security State who always see their authority and budgets balloon whenever there is a war like this?
One of the things I find very interesting is that there's no debate taking place in the Democratic Party when it comes to this question. The international left is starting to rise up in much greater force against this war. The new president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, has been pressured in all kinds of ways to lend Brazil's support to Ukraine. He absolutely refuses, saying, “Our war is not with Ukraine. Our war is with poverty and in defense of the quality of lives of our people”. Imagine a president saying our goal as a government is to improve the lives of our people, not to fund the war on the other side of the world. He also has said this “good versus evil framework is very ambiguous”, not very clear, given how many provocations there were with NATO in the EU in Ukraine.
Remember, it was 2014 when Victoria Nuland got caught on tape choosing the next president of Ukraine, of the democracy Ukraine. Why did Victoria Nuland choose the leader of Ukraine if it's such a vibrant democracy? Why is the United States having a neocon like Victoria Nuland, who was Dick Cheney's primary advisor in the Iraq war, picking the leader of Ukraine right on the other side of the Russian border? Do you think we might consider it threatening if the president of Mexico were being chosen in a meeting by the Chinese Communist Party or the Chinese ambassador to Mexico City? Probably.
But what benefits are there to the United States? There's no debate in the Democratic Party, even while people like Lula and many other international leftist leaders say this is not a war for us. I interviewed Sahra Wagenknecht who is the leader of Die Linke party, the left party in Germany, and you heard her say the lunacy of having Germany risk war with Russia – Germany and Russia, when they have antagonisms, that never ends up well for the world. And she talked about the trauma of Russians seeing German tanks going to the part of the border where Germany twice invaded Ukraine. So, you see leftist leaders, leftist populist leaders and right-wing populist leaders, including in Germany – the alternative for Deutschland, the AfD party, also supporting her and supporting that. It's the EU neoliberal, globalist order, joined at the hip with the bipartisan wing of both political parties, who is supporting this war. And what you're starting to see is increasing amounts of dissent from the right wing populist part of the Republican Party.
Donald Trump has been speaking a lot in this way for many years and is again on this war – and I’m about to show you this in a minute – but one thing that I think was really interesting was Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gave an interview on Fox News, two days ago, and we have not heard Governor DeSantis speak much on foreign policy over the last four years for a very understandable reason. He had a job, which was being the governor of Florida, that had nothing to do with foreign policy. He was focused on the policy of his state, but he did have a voting record in the House that I would describe as fairly conventionally pro-war, old school Republican establishment. With the notable exception that Governor DeSantis was actually opposed to the intervention in Syria that many people were trying to get President Obama to unleash even further than he did, including Hillary Clinton. People like Mike Pompeo were in favor of that war. As always, there's bipartisan consensus. In Munich this week, Michael Tracey, the journalist who's independent, who's often on our show, showed how members of the Republican Party, like Governor Kristi Noem, of South Dakota, were in Munich wearing shirts like “Ukraine forever” and there was Nancy Pelosi wearing a bracelet of shells from Ukrainian weapons that someone had made for her. That's a completely bipartisan war as all the disastrous wars in the United States are.
But there is starting to be dissent on the right wing of the Republican Party. Kevin McCarthy has said, “under his speakership, there is not going to be a blank check anymore for Ukraine.” I don't know how much he believes that. But I found Governor DeSantis’ interview, now that he's thinking about running for president and needs to talk about foreign policy, extremely interesting, given that he was, at best, lukewarm about whether the United States should be continuing to fuel this proxy war in Ukraine and how we should be seeing Russia. I found his comments very interesting. Let's look at those..
(Video 00:39:20)
Ron DeSantis, Fox News, Feb.20, 2023: Well, they have effectively a blank check policy with no clear strategic objective identified. And these things can escalate and I don't think it's in our interests to be getting into a proxy war, with China getting involved over things like the borderlands or over Crimea. So, I think it would behoove them to identify what this strategic objective is.
So first of all, let's just think about what he just said in that first 24 seconds. He called this what it is, which is a proxy war. It’s a war between the United States and Russia, not a war between Ukraine and Russia. It's a proxy war. The United States is involved in a proxy war using Ukraine as its proxy to weaken Russia. And that's what he's saying. He's also saying it's madness that we've opened up our coffers and given them a blank check, which is exactly what President Biden just did in Kyiv – he said, oh, whatever you need is yours until the very end of this war. And Governor DeSantis, I'm pleasantly surprised to hear – it's going to take a lot more to convince me than just this but it's a good start – is saying, first of all, why are we doing that? Why are we involved in an endless proxy war? And then let's listen to what he says about Russia.
(Video 00:40:45)
Ron DeSantis Feb.20, 2023: […] But just saying it's an open-ended blank check, that is not acceptable.
Fox News: So, Governor, what does a win look like for us in Ukraine, for Ukraine?
Ron DeSantis Feb.20, 2023: Well, I think it's important to point out, I mean, you know, the fear of Russia going into NATO countries and all that, and steamrolling, you know, that has not even come close to happening. I think they've shown themselves to be a third-rate military power. I think they've suffered tremendous, tremendous losses. I got to think that the people in Russia are probably disapproving of what's going on. I don't think they can speak up about it for obvious reasons. So, I think Russia has been really, really wounded here. And I don't think that they are the same threat to our country, even though they're hostile, I don't think they're on the same level as China, right?
I think the way he talks about Russia is unbelievably important. Sometimes war propaganda is, of all things, so demented and deranged that I look around me sometimes and I see people I regard as intelligent and rational and whom I have respect for, buying into things they're hearing. I know war propaganda is very, very effective. It's very potent. It's been perfected over centuries. You know, how do you get populations to support suffering in great numbers, having your fellow citizens or you putting your life at risk to go murder, other people, in a different country, often with no benefit? You need a propagandistic framework to convince people to do that. And even if you're not asking them to go put their lives on the line, the way is true for the United States at the moment – there are no American troops, at least in uniform, who are there. You can be sure there are intelligence officers and all other kinds of people there who are American but there are no American battalions there, no American troops engaging Russian forces directly. But even so, Americans are being sacrificed in all kinds of ways, including just enormous amounts of money, at a time when, for example, in East Palestine, in Ohio, where there was a train explosion and clearly chemical poisoning of communities, the United States government seems totally uninterested in what's happening to Americans. President Biden is not in East Palestine tonight – former President Trump is – Biden’s off in Ukraine for some reason.
So, there are always sacrifices and you have to get people to be willing to sustain this for years. Let's just keep sending weapons and killing people. Why? And so, all kinds of propaganda rings down upon you. We're fighting for democracy. We should feel good about ourselves. We don't like tyranny. We like democracy. We want freedom, for people to be free in the world. It amazes me that people believe that's why the United States fights wars when the United States is a very close ally and partner – and always has been – with the most despotic regimes on the planet, like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt and the list goes on and on.
The United States doesn’t dislike tyranny. It doesn't want to vanquish despotism. It loves tyranny and despotism, as long as it serves the interests of the United States. It's not why the United States goes to war. The United States was partners with Saddam Hussein. They were partners with Moammar Gadhafi and Bashar Assad and only started talking about their evils when it became time strategically to want to remove them. They merely say it was fine with Saddam Hussein to gas his own people. We were allies of Saddam Hussein when he was doing that.
So, I'm always amazed when people are willing to believe that and what amazes me, even more, is this idea that Putin is like a Hitler-like figure, where we’re basically in 1938, faced with this Nazi army, the likes of which the world had never seen before in terms of potency and force and acting like Russia is anywhere remotely on that level. And then if we don't stop them in Ukraine, they're going to take over Poland and Hungary and then they're going to make their way into Western Europe and conquer France and Italy and Germany and then on to Britain and then potentially to the Island States. This is the madness of the most intense kind. And that's what Governor DeSantis is saying there, is that the Russian military is a joke. It doesn't even spend 1/15 on its military what the United States spends on ours, not 1/15. We have already allocated more for that single war in Ukraine than the entire Russian military budget for the entire year, which is only $65 billion. They can't hold thousands in Ukraine. They're going to go and conquer Poland and Hungary and the Balkans and on to Western Europe. That is the insanity of the highest degree. And it's good to hear Governor DeSantis say so because that is what instantly dismantles every time neocons want you to start a war – they use the single only historical analogy they evidently learned in high school: World War II.
So, your choice is only binary and always binary. You either support their wars and you get to be Churchill. You go down in history like Churchill like Biden for going to Kyiv on that super-secret trip on the train, or you're Neville Chamberlain, the disgraced appeaser. They don't know any other historical example and, in order for that to work, the enemy has to be Hitler. You go, look, just go Google it. Every time the neocons wanted to start a new war – against Saddam Hussein, against Moammar Gadhafi, against Ahmadinejad when he was the president of Iran, remember him? The new Hitler who served two terms under the Constitution after being elected and then left and now is in retirement. The new Hitler retired after two terms.
Every new leader is Hitler and now Putin is Hitler, too, even though as Governor DeSantis says, the Russian military is a third-rate military power. Obama used to say that, too. When asked why he didn't do more to stop Russia, he would say Russia. They're at best a regional power. They have an economy smaller than Italy's. Why are you talking about Russia as some grand power?
Now let's look at what President Trump has been saying because I do think it's important to realize, even though people hate to accept this, that while President Trump did escalate a couple of the bombing campaigns he inherited, such as in Syria and Iraq against ISIS and al-Qaeda, he was the first president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war. That's like a good achievement, right? We should all be able to agree on that. I know we don't, but we should. That's a positive thing. And listen to what he's now saying about how he sees the war in Ukraine.
(Video 00:47:47)
Donald Trump: World War III has never been closer than it is right now. We need to clean house of all of the warmongers in America, the last globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Industrial Complex. One of the reasons I was the only president in generations who didn't start a war is that I was the only president who rejected the catastrophic advice of many of Washington's generals, bureaucrats and the so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflict. But they don't know how to get us out.
He's railing against the permanent war party in Washington that really doesn't have a party other than a war party. You find them in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party alike. There's no difference whatsoever when it comes to the question of the war in Ukraine between the views of Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham on the one side and Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and AOC and Joe Biden on the other, absolutely no difference. Just like the Tea Parties had almost no difference. When it came time for the war in Iraq or the war in Syria. They are in full agreement. Except for this wing of the Republican Party that Governor DeSantis is obviously trying to speak to.
You can blame Donald Trump because he put a lot of these people in his administration. He had Mike Pompeo in the position of Secretary of State and CIA director, who's absolutely a neocon of the kind he's railing against here, who is, of course, completely in favor of the war in Ukraine. He had Nikki Haley as his U.N. ambassador, who was the same way, You go down the list. You had a lot of them. He put John Bolton there, though. He said he liked that Bolton was there because Bolton was so insane, people were afraid to mess with the United States and that helped him negotiate. But who knows, maybe this time he's serious, maybe he's not. But nonetheless, the fact that you had to go to the Republican Party to hear this kind of denunciation of endless warmongers, who are neocons, and the uniparty, in Washington, is really striking. Let's listen to it a little more.
(Video 00:50:03)
Donald Trump: Such as Victoria Nuland and many others, just like her, obsessed with pushing Ukraine toward NATO, not to mention the State Department's support for uprisings in Ukraine. These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like the case in Iraq and other parts of the world. And now we're teetering on the brink of World War III. And a lot of people don't see it but I see it, and I've been right about a lot of things. They all say Trump's been right about everything […]
Everybody says Trump's been right about everything and just wanted to highlight that.
(Video 00:50:40)Donald Trump: The outrageous and horrible invasion of Ukraine one year ago, would have never happened if I was your president. Not even a little chance. But it does mean that, here in America, we need to get rid of the corrupt globalist establishment that has botched every major foreign policy decision for decades. And that includes President Biden, whose own people said he's never made a good decision when it comes to looking at other countries.
This used to be standard fare and a staple of left-wing politics: the idea that there’s a neoconservative, warmongering uniparty in Washington and a permanent power faction in Washington; Dwight Eisenhower, no leftist, the five-star general and war hero and two-term Republican president warned of exactly this on his way out. None of this has changed. And Trump saw an up close and firsthand and he sees it now.
Victoria Nuland is part of the Kagan family, just pure neoconservatism, that wants the United States to fight every single war for all kinds of motives, having everything to do with everything, except the welfare of the American people. And she stays in power no matter whom you go and votes for. The only time she's been out of government in the last 35 years was when Donald Trump was president. She was in the Clinton administration. She served as Dick Cheney's top adviser for Iraq in the War on Terror. She then slithered into the Obama administration, where she ran Iraq for the John Kerry State Department. She's now running Ukraine for the Blinken State Department. Blinken himself was a supporter of the war in Iraq. So was Joe Biden.
These are all the same people doing this over and over and over, exactly what Donald Trump is saying. And I think Ron DeSantis realizes, based on that little snippet that I showed you, that he cannot run based on standard Reagan-Bush-Cheney foreign policy of wanting to go to war all over the place, that doesn't benefit the American people. The Republican Party seems done with that and although people claim that neoconservatives joined with the Democratic Party, and remigrated back to the Democratic Party, neocons go to whatever party will host them and will serve their agenda best.
The claim was that neocons align with the Democratic Party again only because of fear of Trump. That is not true. You can find in the New York Times, I've shown it to you before, a 2014 op-ed by Jacob Hall Brown, who chronicles neocons as well as anybody and the point of this article was that Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland’s husband, from the neoconservative Kagan family, was plotting to support Hillary Clinton for president as early as 2014 when this article was published before anyone dreamed of Trump running let alone winning because he perceived that the Republican Party was becoming inhospitable to the neocon agenda of endless war and that Hillary Clinton would better serve it. Can anyone doubt that he was right about that? Hillary Clinton had Victoria Nuland in her State Department, his wife. He knew what he was saying. And that is what Donald Trump – maybe he'll be able to do more about it if he's president again, maybe he'll be too weak and undisciplined again, maybe he'll be too vulnerable to flattery again. He talked like this before and did some things about it, but not very much. Though, again, he did avoid war of the kind that Joe Biden is feeding in Ukraine. So, he at least deserves credit for that. And he's saying the right things. And tonight, by the way, he's in East Palestine to visit the actual American citizens suffering greatly, who have been forgotten by the Biden administration, which is focused, for whatever reason, on who is going to rule provinces in Eastern Ukraine.
At the very beginning of the war, I could see all of this coming like a lot of people could, although there weren't many people willing to say it. What I mean by that is that from the very beginning of the war, the media did a very effective job. War is one of the most repulsive things that humanity can do upon itself, probably the most repugnant. And if you look at war and the realities of it, you'll instinctively react. If you're a decent person with disgust and rage: who is doing it? That's the reason we never, ever see the victims of our missiles and our drones and our bombs. When was the last time you saw on ABC or CNN dead bodies caused by the American military? Or heard from the grieving relatives of people whom we blew up at wedding parties or the dreams and aspirations snuffed out by an errant drone like the one that President Biden sent into Afghanistan in the last week that we were there that killed 12 innocent people, an entire family. Those have disappeared from sites. You don't get angry about those. They're invisible, our victims. But the victims in Ukraine and there certainly are a lot of victims in Ukraine, were shown to you over and over and over and over and over again as though this was unique, as though only Vladimir Putin and the Russians do this in war - kill innocent people – even though that's what happens in every single war that is taking place on this planet right now, that the United States supports, that it involves itself in. But you just don't see those victims.
The media showed you the victims over and over in Ukraine to get you angry because people are decent and if you show them the evils of war from one side, they're going to hate the other side and get forever invested in the idea of defeating them. I could see that in the first week, reason was being overridden and people's emotions had been exploited by a media that had united, as they always do, in a very tribalistic way, on “our side”, our side is good. Our president and our leader, we unite behind him in a time of war. We cheer for him when he goes to Kyiv, we become Americans, and our political differences stop at the border. All of this stuff has been used to indoctrinate Americans for decades about the glories and beauties of war.
And this is how I was describing – this was actually the first day of the war. This was a video I recorded before we had our regular show here on Rumble and had a kind of periodic System Update, two or three videos per month, and I tried to describe what I thought was coming. This was about a year ago on the eve of the Russian invasion.
(Video 00:57:20)
G. Greenwald: Conversely, we're going to have an enormous amount of sympathy and a desire to help and protect and defend whoever we regard as the victim. It's for any normal, healthy, well-adjusted human being at a time of extremely high emotions. And I think we need to be aware of that for two reasons. The first of which is that any time we're in a state of high emotions, by definition, necessarily, our capacity to reason diminishes. If we are reacting to something with intense emotions, our ability to use rationality to react to the situation, to analyze it, is crowded out by the intensity of those emotions, even when those emotions are valid. In fact, particularly when those emotions are valid as the emotions that are pervasive now watching what's happening between Russia and Ukraine undoubtedly are. It doesn't matter whether the emotions are valid or not. The mere existence of intense emotions means that we lose our capacity, at least for the moment, to evaluate events and what our response should be, and how we should think about them with reason, with rationality.
The other, and I think a more important thing to realize about how we react to war, the intensity of the emotions it provokes is that emotions, by their very nature, are very susceptible to manipulation. All power centers know how to manipulate and control emotion. They use fear. They use anger. They use revenge. They use a sense of righteous justice to move people. Governments have been studying this for a long time.
I think that's pretty much what has happened. I mean, even if you want to look at this in the most realistic way, leave aside all the garbage propaganda – that's for the idiots at CNN and MSNBC about how we are going there to fight off authoritarianism or whatever – and you just look at it in like a geostrategic way, and you say, well, there's a benefit in separating Russia from Europe and preventing Germany and Western Europe from buying cheap natural gas from Russia in Nord Stream and buying it from us instead – and just generally weaken Russia – we've already achieved those aims. We blew up Nord Stream 2 or someone did. A big mystery. Right now, Russia is hoping that the Swedes will release their investigation while the United States, for some reason, hopes that the investigation doesn't get public. So maybe one day we'll find out what the great mystery is of who blew up Nord Stream 2.
But Nord Stream 2 does not exist. Germany won't buy gas from Russia. They won't complete Nord Stream 2. We've already achieved that end. There's a breach between Russia and Europe, between Russia and Germany, and we pushed Russia into Chinese arms. Maybe that wasn't part of the goal. In fact, for the whole Cold War, the number one goal in Washington was to prevent Russia and China from uniting against the United States. This war has managed to do that. So, congratulations to Biden and his great diplomacy. But even if you think there were benefits to this war, they've all been achieved. What more is there left?
The problem is once you work a population up to this extent and get the media so excited – and they really get excited by war. They love it. It gives them a purpose. And this whole thing about that melodramatic trip and the secrecy behind it – it gets their blood pumping, especially because they and their kids are not in danger. They just get to watch from afar. Whenever you get people hooked on this emotion, it's very hard to extricate them from it. And so having gotten Americans into this emotional state in both the Democrat and Republican Party, I think it's going to be very hard now for D.C. policymakers, even if they want to, to start justifying how we can wind down this war without things like taking back Crimea or pushing the Russians entirely out of Donbas, which is not going to happen if there's going to be a diplomatic solution.
That's the conundrum that we’ve reached. And it's always worth remembering when a new war is proposed, it's vital that we resist these instincts that we all have that are tribalistic and emotional, and that we not let people play on those, and that instead we use our critical faculties, than our tribalistic ones, to evaluate what we're hearing, lest it be too late, as is the case, I think, for this war.
So, we've certainly been covering this war from the beginning. We will continue to cover it as it goes on.
We do have another story for you tonight, though, which is about the fact that we have seen a great deal of footage from the January 6 riot at the Capitol, which was more than two years ago. We have, however, seen only a portion of that footage. The portion that we've seen is the portion that the Jan. 6 Committee chose to show us. The portion that we have not seen is the portion that the Jan. 6 Committee chose to conceal from us.
I don't think anyone here needs a reminder that the Jan. 6 Committee was completely united in their political and ideological crusade. The only Republicans on that committee were Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, both of whom were even more devoted to destroying Trump and sabotaging his movement than the Democrats on that committee were. That's why they were on that Committee. Remember, Nancy Pelosi rejected two of Kevin McCarthy's nominees to be on the Committee and that had never happened in the history of the House before, which is why he said, “I'm not going to nominate any Republicans” and so, Nancy Pelosi hand-picked her two favorites. It was a totally partisan committee that was united in every way in their single-minded effort. And they chose for you which clips you got to see and which clips you didn't. And people have been rightly wanting to see all surveillance footage of Jan. 6, so that we can know whether what has been shown to us is representative of what happened or whether what has been concealed tells another part of the story that has not yet been told.
Kevin McCarthy, the speaker of the House who was in control of this for a year now, has decided to give it to a news organization, Fox News, and specifically to Tucker Carlson. So here is the AP report on that. Before we get to the reaction, here's exactly what happened.
Thousands of hours of surveillance footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol are being made available to Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson, a stunning level of access granted by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy that Democrats swiftly condemned as a “grave” breach of security with potentially far-reaching consequences. The hard-right political commentator [Not a journalist. He's the hard-right political commentator] said his team is spending the week at the Capitol, poring through the video and preparing to reveal their findings to his viewers. But granting exclusive access to sensitive Jan. 6 security footage to such a deeply partisan figure is a highly unusual move seen by some critics as essentially outsourcing House oversight to a TV personality who has promoted conspiracy theories about the attack. “It's a shocking development that brings in both political concerns but, even more importantly, security concerns”, said Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., who was [is the heir to a billionaire family fortune who is just elected by the very liberal Democrats in Manhattan] the chief counsel during President Donald Trump's first impeachment trial. [So, you know, he's super nonpartisan and objective].
“Unfortunately, the apparent disclosure of sensitive video material is yet another example of the grave threat to the security of the American people represented by the extreme MAGA Republican majority”, Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y. [the current House minority leader] said in a letter to House colleagues. (AP News. Feb.22, 2023)
That’s from AP, that's their idea of a neutral, objective news story trying to tell you what happened. It sounds like a press release from the Democratic National Committee.
Now, what we have here is a politician, Kevin McCarthy, handpicking a journalist to provide material to, which is exactly what has already happened. As I said, the Jan. 6 Committee is already a politicized, highly partisan body that handpicked what they wanted you to see and kept the rest from you.
Tucker Carlson, who has a different perspective, is going to go into that surveillance footage and find out what was hidden from you to see if there's anything there that negates the narrative of the Jan. 6 Committee and provides new insight into what actually happened on that day. You would think the media would be happy about this because this is an opportunity for more transparency to see footage of a very important event, or at least one they think is very important, the insurrection, that we have not seen. We're about to shine a light on things that have been kept in darkness. And how does the media feel about that? We know.
Here from The Hill reminding us The Washington Post actually changed its motto. They adopted a new motto just for the Trump era. They still have it, though. It's called “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
The Washington Post has a new slogan on its homepage: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The motto, one that has been used periodically in the past by Washington Post columnist and editor, Bob Woodward, was first spotted on Friday (The Hill. Feb 22, 2017).
This must mean that the media is celebrating this huge amount of transparency we are about to get and finally seeing a bunch of footage that a partisan body kept from us as it showed us one it wanted to see. Is that correct?
Let's take a look at the video of how the media has reacted here. Let's start with what is going on MSNBC and NBC. Here is the always sober and insightful NBC host Joy Reid interviewing Congressman Jamie Raskin, who is a Democrat. He is also a member of the Jan. 6 Committee. So, remember the person you're about to see was already part of the body that hand-picked surveillance videos and showed it to you while keeping the rest. Listen to what he says in his reaction to this news.
(Video 01:07:26)
Joy Reid, MSNBC: I mean, are we in danger of not just that of people trying to twist this footage, cut little pieces of it that they think will help criminals get out of jail or get out of trouble? […] But also, I'm concerned that these are the people that the Russians listen to, including Tucker, that he can put on something that is false, not real, but that he's very useful to our enemies, including knowing where the security cameras are on Capitol Hill.
There seems to be some fish life consuming the right part of Joy Reid's body, but let's ignore that. I think one of the things I want to focus on instead is do you notice how they cannot discuss any kind of political debate without instantly invoking the Russians? Tucker's going to show the Russians where the security footage is and then the Russians are going to go and invade the Capitol. Is that what's going to happen?
We saw so much of this surveillance footage that shows where the cameras are in, shows so much of where everything else is, and instead of questioning the journalistic aspect, which I think is valid – why should one journalist get this and not have it released to the public at large, which I'll get to in a second – instead, she immediately goes to “this helps Russia.” It's a national security threat to allow Tucker Carlson, instead of Liz Cheney, to pick and choose which video footage you get to see and what you don't get to see. And here's how Jamie Raskin responded.
(Video 01:08:580)
Jamie Raskin: Well, look. Tucker Carlson is a pro-Putin, pro-war band, pro-autocrat and propagandist. So, while we've got the press in the United States over in Ukraine expressing solidarity with the forces of democratic freedom, Kevin McCarthy is releasing these tapes to one network, not making it public for everybody, not giving it to CNN and MSNBC and The New York Times but giving it to Fox News and to Tucker Carlson so he can forward his propaganda theories.
So, he at least aside from also invoking the scary boogeyman of Vladimir Putin, which is all that occupies these people's minds and I guess I should also say, I think a major reason for the Democratic Party unanimous support for the war in Ukraine is really because they want to punish Putin for the perceived role they think he played in helping Hillary Clinton lose the 2016 election to Donald Trump. That's why Russia is still at the forefront of their mind with regard to everything. But he's also voicing this journalistic critique that why should one network get this information? Why shouldn’t we all get it? That is something that we're hearing a lot of.
Here is Frank Figliuzzi, who used to be the associate director of the FBI, and like pretty much every single senior operative of the U.S. Security State, he now, for some reason, is employed by corporate media outlets. They just bring on. Here's our colleague from the CIA, your colleague from the NSA and your colleague from the FBI. And he came on to this show. It's called “The 11th Hour” by… I forgot her name. Stephanie Something. No one watches, but we're going to show it to you anyway. Stephanie Ruhle, I think, and here is them discussing the fact that Kevin McCarthy has chosen to give this material to Fox News.
(Video 01:10:46)
S. Ruhle: Frank, people could find this move on McCarthy's part unscrupulous, dangerous, disgusting, terrible but is it legal? Because he doesn't care what our opinions are?
F. Figliuzzi: Yeah, he's the speaker. He made this call all by himself, apparently, we don't know what transpired between him and Tucker Carlson, why he chose Tucker, for example. But it's done. So now we have to live with the ramifications. What are the ramifications? From where I look at this, there are legit security concerns. What are they? For example, we have seen video clips from January […]
Do you think it's weird, by the way, that a news network, when it comes time to question somebody about what media outlets should report and how journalists should report them, calls on to the television to tell you about this, the former senior official from the FBI? Do you think the FBI and its senior operatives should be opining, should be arbitrating what is and is not legitimately reported by a journalist and how journalism should be conducted? I don't.
And yet, these are the people they always bring on to opine on all of this. They are completely aligned with, completely allied with, in bed with the entire superstructure of the U.S. Security State. They don't really bring them on to talk about the FBI or the CIA or the Pentagon, things that are at least within the ambit of their arguable expertise. These are the people who shape the news. They go right from the CIA and the FBI and the NSA and the Pentagon, in the Defense Department, right into the largest media corporations in the world.
As I pointed out before, in the Cold War, they used to have to do this clandestinely. That's one of the things that was shocking and the Church Committee uncovered – it was how they were shaping and influencing the news. Now they do it out in the open.
So, now they have him saying that Tucker Carlson is reporting on what you've already seen Jan. 6 surveillance footage – hours and hours of it – as a national security threat because of what he might choose to show you that they didn't choose to show you.
F. Figliuzzi: […] where we see Nancy Pelosi being escorted off the floor of Congress and then the next shot we see, and only the next shot we see, is a video of her in a safe room. Right? We don't see her being transited through a particular pathway. We don't see the entrance to the safe room. We don't know where that is. Those are the kinds of things, code words with Capitol Police officers on strategy tactics where camera angles show hidden cameras within the Capitol building, all of that could be exposed if it's done irresponsibly without a secure review. And I think that's what we're dealing with here. That's what concerns you.
So, basically, what's going to happen is Tucker Carlson is going to get the security footage and he's going to look for the part that shows where the safe room is. And then he's going to go on air and he's going to draw a map for the Russians, for Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. He's going to show the Kremlin where the safe room is. And this is why you should be scared.
Leave aside the whole thing about Russia and the thing about how they're going to find out the security footage and all of that and the code words – it's just such idiocy, you know, for people who have the brains of 12-year-olds, all of this.
Let's look at the journalists that complained that this should be released to numerous news outlets or the public at large and not just given to one media outlet to curate, because I'm not entirely unsympathetic to that argument. I nonetheless want to review how hypocritical it is in this case.
And of course, let me just show you Adam Schiff's reaction, because, you know, that's always also very sober and reasoned. Adam Schiff said,
“Kevin McCarthy turned over Jan. 6 videos to right-wing propagandist Tucker Carlson” [..].
It's amazing, isn't it, how the most partisan Democrat in Congress, Adam Schiff, describes it exactly the way he did.
“A man who spews Kremlin talking points suggests Jan. 6 was a false flag. ‘’ And spreads the big lie”.
That itself is a lie. Tucker Carlson has never claimed the 2020 election, what they called the big lie, was fraudulent.
“Make no mistake, this isn't about transparency. It's about fueling dangerous conspiracy theories” (Feb. 20, 2023).
This critique that it's wrong for someone like Kevin McCarthy in government to take important material and give it to one news outlet only, he should instead give it to multiple ones, might be a fair critique, except for the fact that that's how journalism is done every single day and none of these people object ever. In fact, they live on that. That's how their careers are built every single day, literally every day, people inside the U.S. government – the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, the NSA, the Justice Department, the Congress – take nonpublic information and they don't release it on the Internet for everyone to see. They hand-feed it to their favorite journalist, the journalist who they know will do their bidding and tell the story as they want it told. That's how journalism works in every case. And even when there are motives that are good, that's how it works. When Daniel Ellsberg had the Pentagon Papers, he didn't just dump them on the Internet. He took it to The New York Times. He handpicked The New York Times to tell the story. No one complained about that. When Edward Snowden had the NSA archive. He chose the journalist with whom he wanted to work, myself and Laura Poitras. And there were people complaining about that, but not because they were complaining about the process. They were complaining that they weren't the ones who got it. Bob Woodward said Snowden should have come to me. But that's how journalism works all the time, is that the source has information and picks the journalist with whom they want to work.
They're not mad that this video footage has been given to one news organization. They're mad that it's been given to Fox instead of NBC or CNN or The New York Times, the ones on the other side of the narrative. And the reason they're mad about that is that they know that what Tucker is going to try and do is find the parts of the footage that have been concealed from you by the Jan. 6 Committee precisely because it negates the narrative they want to promote.
So, that's the only thing that's going on here. I would prefer that all news outlets had it so we could all go through it but this is how it's done all the time. Every single major news story is done by them feeding – we learned, for example, that 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter falsely claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, or at least it had the hallmarks of Russian disinformation, because as you see here, they called Natasha Bertrand on the phone, and she was the first one who got to publish that article, on October 18, 2020. “Hunter Biden Story is Russian disinformation. Dozens of former intel officials say”. No one complained. Why did they hand-feed this to Natasha Bertrand? The CIA has been feeding hand-picked stories to Natasha Bertrand for years, but she then goes and reports on Politico, The Atlantic, MSNBC, Business Insider and now CNN, where she works. It happens every day that they handpick her.
Do you remember when the FBI searched Donald Trump's home in Mar a Lago to look for “nuclear documents”? Only certain media outlets got that story, one of which was The Washington Post. There you see the headline. “FBI Searched Trump's Home to Look for Nuclear Documents and Other Items, Sources Say”. And the article said as the former president said on social media, that he won't oppose a Justice Department request to unseal the search warrant, The Washington Post reported,
Classified documents relating to nuclear weapons were among the items FBI agents sought in search of former President Donald Trump's Florida residence on Monday, according to people familiar with the investigation”., They went to the Washington Post office. “The people who describe some of that material that agents were seeking spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. They did not offer additional details about what type of information the agents were seeking, including whether it involved weapons belonging to the United States or some other nation. Nor did they say if such documents were recovered as part of the search (The Washington Post. August 12, 2022).
But what they wanted was the headline that they got, which was a very incriminating headline, the most incriminating one possible, despite the fact that there was no evidence for it. “FBI Searched Trump's Home to Look For Nuclear Documents”. They got the most inflammatory and sensationalized headlines they could get and they got that because they hand-picked the news outlet, The Washington Post, that they knew would do that.
Remember when Roger Stone got arrested at 6 a.m. by the FBI? And it just so happened that CNN was there and then CNN had to publish a story trying to report how it explained how this happened from January 25, 2019, how CNN captured video of the Roger Stone raid. And they claim they grouped together all these different little clues because, of course, people wanted CNN to be there. But Roger Stone got carried away in handcuffs. They didn't call Fox News. They didn't call Matt Taibbi. They didn't call The Grayzone. They called the news outlet they knew would do this in the most favorable way. This is how journalism works all the time.
So, I would love it if Kevin McCarthy would order the surveillance footage put on the Internet. The problem is, it's the same reason Edward Snowden didn't dump all the information he had on the Internet, which is he didn't want there to be security breaches. He wanted us to carefully curate the information, make sure that no one was being put in harm's way, to go to the government, give the government a chance to say, oh, don't publish that document, if you publish that document, X, Y and Z will happen and then try and persuade us not to publish it. And most of the time that didn't work because the government’s claims are very vague. We knew they just didn't want us revealing how they were spying on people but there were a couple of occasions when they convinced us that if we were to publish documents that would result in genuine harm to innocent people and we didn't publish it.
So, Frank Figliuzzi was claiming that he wants there to be a security review of this material before its release. Presumably, Fox will do that. They have responsible reporters. If you were to just throw it on the Internet or make it available to every single news organization that asked, that would exacerbate the security concerns and harms they claim they're worried about.
What they're really worried about and angry about is they know that if there is footage that the Jan. 6 Committee didn't show you because it hides some kind of narrative they don't want you to know about, some facts they don't… They know Tucker Carlson and probably he alone in the corporate media will actually show it to you. Some other people on Fox are likely as well. That's what they're so upset about. They lost the monopoly they had in which of the footage you get to see, before, it was just Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff picking it. Do you feel confident that you got to see everything you should see based on what Adam Schiff and Liz Cheney decided they wanted to show you and what they thought should be hidden? I don't. I'm really glad there are people with different politics and different perspectives going through the rest of that material so we can get the full picture of it.
If someone wants to say Kevin McCarthy should share it with multiple news organizations, I have no problem with that. As long as they don't pretend as they're pretending that that's the way it's normally done, the way it's normally done in Washington every single day, their entire careers are built on having people inside these government agencies feed information to them, knowing how obsequious and obedient they are to the source's agenda. So, ignore everything these people are saying because none of what they're saying about why they're mad is really why they're mad. What they're mad about is we're finally going to get to see the full story. Maybe we've already been shown the full story, but what they're scared of is that we haven't. And now, we're going to find out. And anyone who's actually interested in the truth and in transparency should be applauding this and not denouncing it.
So, that is our show for tonight. We are very happy to be back after a few days off. As we said, we’ve taken a few days off, recharge your batteries, and come back with what we always hope is high-quality programming. We will be back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble, at our regular time. And on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well, we have our aftershow on Locals where we take your questions and respond to your feedback. Join our Locals community as well. Click the join sign right below the video on your screen on the Rumble page and you will be part of that community and will help support our journalism as well.
Thanks, everybody for watching.
Have a great night.
We will see you back here tomorrow night.
