Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Multiple US Banks Suddenly Collapse—Are “Bailouts” Needed to Avoid Catastrophe? Ft. Matt Stoller
Video Transcript: System Update #54
March 16, 2023
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The U.S. government took very aggressive action over the weekend to save the vast wealth of depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. That 40-year-old institution had become rather unstable of late as a result of rising interest rates that they failed to anticipate and invest in the kind of long-term, high-risk/high-reward vehicles responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, such as mortgage-backed securities.

Late last week, the bank's depositors, composed of bold, wealthy tech investors, as well as startup companies with substantial venture capital, began getting somewhat nervous about the bank’s ability to cover deposits above the $250,000 level, the amount which the FDIC insures for every account and that worry very quickly – in a matter of fewer than two days – turned into full-blown panic and then a bank run that prevented the bank from even coming close to finding the liquidity to cover the mountain of withdraws and transfer requests that poured in from very panicky depositors.

Over the weekend, at the urging of some of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the Biden Treasury Department announced that the U.S. government would ensure that all depositors would be made whole, no matter how much in excess of the $250,000 limit their balance was. 

That move, surprisingly, has provoked a very vitriolic debate between people like, on the one hand, our guest tonight, Matt Stoller, of the American Economics Liberties Project, who insist that this is quite similar, if not in scope, then in kind, to the 2008 Wall Street bailout under the Bush and Obama administrations in which the U.S. government first acted to save the country's richest people who caused the crisis while the middle class and working class were about to suffer. And then on the other side, we have tomorrow night's guest, venture capitalist David Sacks, the first CEO of PayPal and a prominent venture capitalist who has been insisting that the problems at Silicon Valley Bank are not unique to that institution, but instead reflective of a systemic problem, and that without U.S. government intervention, not only Silicon Valley Bank but countless other regional banks would have failed quickly due to contagion, panic and other similar bank runs. We'll examine that debate by speaking first to Matt Stoller tonight and then to David Sachs tomorrow. 

Plus, last night at the Oscars, Hollywood liberals did what Hollywood liberals and liberals generally love to do. They heaped praise on a film, “Navalny,” with the Academy Award for Best Documentary. 

Now, Navalny, as you probably know, is the dissident – an opponent of Vladimir Putin currently imprisoned in Russia for that dissidence – and, in the process, these Hollywood liberals bravely denounced the abuse of a dissident by a faraway government who was an official U.S. enemy, i.e., Russia. In the meantime, these same people, as usual, ignore, if not outright support, their own government's ongoing years-long imprisonment of our own dissident: the journalist Julian Assange. 

This is about far more than who wins some glitzy and increasingly pointless awards but it does say a great deal about how governments are able to get their own citizens – not just our government, but all governments – to constantly focus on the abuses of governments on the other side of the world, over which they exert no control. All of that means forgetting how their own government is doing the same, and often worse. 

As a reminder, System Update is now available in podcast form. We are available on Spotify, Apple and most other major podcasting platforms. The episodes are published in podcast form 12 hours after we first air here, live, on Rumble. If that's your interest, look for that and follow System Update on those platforms.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.


Monologue

 

 So, in order to understand the debate that has been provoked by the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen's announcement that the U.S. government would step in - as leading Silicon Valley venture capital has spent the last several days demanding that it do - and protect 100% - every penny - of all depositor’s funds in the now collapsing Silicon Valley Bank, as well as at least one other bank, that is also collapsing rapidly, – on which Barney Frank, ironically, the longtime Democratic congressman who, along with Senator Chris Dodd, authored the legislation after the 2008 financial crisis that was designed to prevent exactly this from happening again – as it turns out, Barney Frank happens to sit on the board of the bank that is the second bank to fail as part of this bank grab, meaning his legislation did not evidently fulfill its promise of preventing a systemic contamination and essentially threat of a financial collapse from happening again as it happened right under his own nose at his own bank. 

Now, in order to understand the debate and it's a complex debate and one that requires expertise – which I am the first to acknowledge I do not possess, which is why we're going to have a guest on tonight who does, who has one view and a guest tomorrow night who also does who has the other – it's very important to remember and understand the 2008 financial crisis and the context of that debate, and that I do feel very comfortable speaking up because I covered it extensively at the time as a journalist involved not only with complex financial instruments, but also the political dynamics that shape our country. 

That financial crisis was a long time in the making. It was something that people were able to predict and actually did predict. Increasingly, Wall Street was able to invest in very, very complex and opaque economic instruments that were highly risky and like all risky instruments, had a high amount of profit. They were able to invest in that because of the rollback, various financial protections that came in the wake of the Great Depression, in the early 1930s, that were designed to keep separate commercial banking activities – that are generally more conservative and risk-averse from investment activities that tend to be riskier. And the idea was to prevent a systemic collapse in the commercial banking sector that led to the Great Depression in the first place. And over the years, especially the Clinton administration and their genius economists like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, right from Goldman Sachs, decided that these protections from the FDR era were obsolete and banks could be unchained in order to start to become much riskier. And they were heavily rewarded because the Wall Street sector and the banking sector began investing heavily in and funding heavily the Democratic Party as a result of its servitude to the banking industry. They had a lot of Republican support as well during the Clinton administration with all of these rollbacks, and that led to the ability of all kinds of banks with your money, depositor money, to be able to engage in much riskier types of investments. One of the investment schemes that they particularly liked was called mortgage-backed securities, which was when banks would offer loans to people to buy houses and would keep the houses as collateral. And the value, the very high value of the real estate market ensured that those mortgage-backed securities, which were all grouped together, had a great deal of value and could be traded as commodities. Unfortunately, when the real estate market and the real estate bubble collapsed, the value of those mortgage-backed securities collapsed with them. And that led to an unraveling, a very rapid unraveling, of almost all of Wall Street, starting in September and October of 2008. So, during the last several months of the Bush administration, when the Treasury secretary still was Hank Paulson, who before joining the Bush administration as Treasury secretary, had been the CEO of Goldman Sachs, very much of a Wall Street background and his argument was that we need to act immediately to save the financial markets with a gigantic infusion of credit and cash in order to protect the credit markets from collapsing. 

What a lot of people don't remember is that the very first proposal that was negotiated between the Bush White House, as the 2008 presidential action and John McCain, was approaching with congressional leaders, including John Boehner, the then House speaker, and Nancy Pelosi, the then House minority leader and the head of the Democratic Party. Both of them were on board. The establishment wings of both parties were on board with Hank Paulson's plan to give a gigantic infusion of $800 billion into the Wall Street sector to prevent it from collapsing. The warnings were just as grave, in fact, way graver than the ones we're hearing now, that if the government doesn't immediately act to save these Wall Street institutions, the entire system will collapse. There will be bank runs, nobody will trust these institutions any longer, everyone will try and take their money out of the system and not just the U.S. financial system, but the global financial system will collapse. 

That crisis was much greater in scale than the current one, at least so far, but the arguments are very similar. Obviously, there was a lot of resentment that the U.S. government was going to bail out the titans of capitalism after all. The whole idea of capitalism is the reason that you get rich is that you make bets, risky bets. And if you're right, you get rich. But that only works if you also then lose everything when you're wrong. And yet what happened here was they all made very risky bets. They got rich when they were right and then when they were wrong, instead of losing, which is the other side of capitalism, which has to be the other side of capitalism, instead, the U.S. government intervened, stepped in and said, “Oh, don't worry, we're going to back you up. We're going to give you a gigantic infusion of cash to prevent this system from collapsing”. 

Even though it generated a lot of anger – why should the richest people in the world, who caused the crisis in the first place with their recklessness, be protected with taxpayer-funded money? – it nonetheless happened because the argument prevailed that if we didn't protect the richest people on the planet who caused the financial collapse, all of us would suffer because the entire financial system would collapse. And there was an infusion of $700 billion or $800 billion that was nowhere near enough to calm the markets. And then once President Obama was in office, he selected Timothy Geithner as his treasury secretary, who was most known for being an incredibly loyal servant to Wall Street. They infused a lot more money into Wall Street, and Wall Street and its casino went on. Dodd-Frank was the promise of the American people to say, we're going to reform everything so this never happens again. The argument was, look, these institutions are too big to fail. We cannot allow them to fail. We're allowed to watch them succeed and get rich when they're right. But when they're wrong, we can't let them fail. And that created a lot of resentment, political resentment. That first bill sponsored by Hank Paulson, was negotiated with John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, the first time it came up for a vote in the House it actually failed, despite warnings that its failure would cause the implosion of the global economic system. And it failed because a majority of Republicans on the right voted no, as did I believe, up to 90 Democrats, most of whom were from the left wing of the party. And on the day the U.S. government refused, through the vote in the House, to intervene in the markets, the U.S. stock market lost something like 8% of its value; other stock markets around the world lost 10% of its value and there was real panic, which is why they finally ended up coercing members of both political parties to change their vote to yes and to start infusing huge amounts of money into that system.

It did end up saving Wall Street. But the funds that were set aside to help homeowners and working-class people and middle-class people were basically ignored. Huge numbers of them were evicted from their homes and lost their homes in foreclosure and people to this very day are drowning in debt, generational debt, because of that financial crisis. That is absolutely the context for this debate. Namely, is this a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis? Not necessarily yet to the extent that it's of that magnitude, but that the political dynamic is the same, namely all of these libertarian “keep the government out of our lives” anti-socialist tech billionaires in Silicon Valley –  who hate socialism, who hate the idea that the government steps in and helps people who are poor – “Those poor people should be self-sufficient”; “They don't need government help.” The minute their bank and their money are at risk, they start pounding the table. All to be saved. And then, the government comes in and saves them. 

Let me just show you a couple of videos that set the stage for what this debate is and then we're going to go talk to Matt Stoller and see what he thinks and question him on his views. 

First, let me show you the Democratic Congressman, Ro Khanna, whose views on this question are significant for two reasons: one is he absolutely holds himself out as a progressive; he ran on the view that the main problem of the United States is that there's economic inequality – the government far too often acts in favor of the rich and ignores the middle class and the working class and the poor. But he also happens to be the congressman from Silicon Valley. He represents Silicon Valley. And as you can imagine, in order to win that seat, you need the financial support and political support of the very same Silicon Valley tycoons who spent the weekend demanding a bailout for their bank. So, he went on “Face the Nation” on Sunday when he was still in doubt about whether or not the government would act. They had just interviewed Janet Yellen, who gave very mixed signals about whether she intended to do so and this is what Ro Khanna said: 

 

(Video: March 12, 2023)

 

“Face the Nation”: I wonder what you make of the Treasury secretary's remarks. I know you've been in contact with the White House, with Treasury and with FDIC. 

 

Rep. Ro Khanna: I have great respect for Secretary Yellen, but I think we need to have more clarity and greater strength in what the Treasury is saying. First, the principle needs to be that all depositors will be protected and have full access to their accounts Monday morning. 

 

“Face the Nation”: Depositors, meaning those with accounts bigger than $250,000, which is the cutoff for insurance right. 

 

Rep. Ro Khanna: Yes, all of them. There's precedent for this. Chair Powell when he was at Treasury, in 1991, the Bank of New England collapsed. And Chair Powell said the Treasury, coordinated with FDIC and with the Fed, and they insured every depositor. And why did they do it? They didn't want a regional run on the banks. Here's what I'm hearing from people in my constituency. They are getting nodes to pull out of regional banks, and all of this will be consolidated in the top four banks. We don't want that as a nation, especially if you're a progressive. The other thing is the payroll companies that are involved. Some of them have 400,000 folks. They're not going to be able to meet payroll if they don't have access to direct deposit. 

 

 

That is the argument being made. I mean, it's amazing. I think, you know, one of the things I've noticed, as I get older, I'm not yet old, but I'm just saying as I'm getting older, is that I think one of the reasons why history repeats itself so often is because people who are young didn't live through the history and, therefore, don't know about it and other people forget it. 

It's amazing how identical that sounds to the arguments made to bail out Wall Street. It was like nobody wants to help the rich. That's not what this is about. The problem is if we let AIG go under if we let other Wall Street firms go under the way we are, Lehman Brothers go under, the middle class, are going to lose their 401k, they're going to lose their retirement accounts and everybody is going to suffer. 

So, yes, we're going to help the rich but work for progressives. Obama was very much in on that and he said we're not doing it to help the rich. That's just an unfortunate, incidental byproduct. The people who funded my campaigns are, of course, going to get what they want. But that's not why we're doing it. We're doing it to prevent further panic, and further runs on the bank, which would prevent people from having their retirement accounts protected or even having their jobs. Everybody would lose their jobs or there would be no money to pay them etc. 

So, just because it resonates with the arguments made in the 2008 financial crisis doesn't mean it's invalid. I'm just putting in place all bear to note for a minute that if you find that persuasive, that was very similar to the arguments made in the 2008 financial crisis. 

 

In 2018, there was a rollback of bank regulations that a lot of people, beginning where people like Senator Elizabeth Warren in today's New York Times and I'm sure Matt will be on board with their view as well. I saw AOC making this view. Lots of Democrats make this view that part of what Dodd-Frank was designed to do was to make sure that banks got a lot more regulatory scrutiny than they had previously received prior to the 2008 financial crisis. And it was a very complex regulatory scheme that was put into place. And what midsize banks like Silicon Valley Bank began to do was to make the argument through lobbyists, through paid lobbyists, that, look, these regulations are too onerous for us. They make sense for Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan and Bank of America, the kind of big four banking institutions. They can sustain this level of regulatory scrutiny. They need it, but we're not anywhere remotely in the same level of danger in terms of the risks that we're taking and especially the impact that would be caused if we do fail. And they wanted the size of the bank that is subject to this added regulatory scrutiny of Dodd-Frank to be increased from $50 billion, which is where Dodd-Frank put it to $250 billion. In other words, any institution with a total amount of deposits or assets under $250 billion would no longer be subject to this heightened scrutiny and that included Silicon Valley Bank, which was one of the banks whose CEO aggressively and actively lobbied. It wasn't like they were just a beneficiary, incidentally. They actually lobbied to change this regulation and to make it laxer, they were able to put together a majority in the first and then in the Trump administration, in 2018, most Republicans joined with a good chunk of Democrats to create a majority in favor of making those changes so that banks like Silicon Valley Bank got much less regulatory scrutiny. And here is President Trump upon signing that legislation explaining his argument for doing so. 

(Video. May 24, 2018)

Pres. D. Trump: The legislation I'm signing today rolls back the crippling Dodd-Frank regulations that are crushing community banks and credit unions nationwide. They were in such trouble. One size fits all. Those rules just don't work. And community banks and credit unions should be regulated the same way and you have to really look at this. They should be regulated the same way with a proviso for safety as in the past when they were vibrant and strong. But they shouldn't be regulated the same way as the large, complex financial institutions. And that's what happened. And they were being put out of business one by one and they weren't lending. Since its passage in 2010, Dodd-Frank has dealt a huge blow to community banking. As a candidate, I pledged that we would rescue these community banks from Dodd-Frank, the disaster of Dodd-Frank. And now we are keeping that commitment and all of the people with me are keeping it. That commitment. 

 

 

So, when I first begin hearing that this is all Trump's fault, that it was due to the 2018 changes to the banking regulation scheme, I was very skeptical because of the obsession, the addiction on the part of the media to blame everything on Trump. And one does have to note that President Biden is the current president. He has been the president for more than two years now, for the first two years of his presidency up until about two months ago his party, the Democratic Party, controlled both houses of Congress. There was never a time during President Trump's presidency when the Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress. Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats controlled the House during this time and yet somehow everything that happened under the Trump presidency gets blamed on Trump, whereas nothing that happened under the Biden administration gets blamed on President Biden. But with that caveat, it does seem clear, having looked at this a lot more, and beginning with that skepticism that you can draw at least something, if not a very clear and direct one between the rollback of this regulation that the Silicon Valley banks demanded, among other banks, and the fact that this bank was allowed to get very rickety, leading to a bank run, although there are still a lot of questions about. 

There you see the Senate roll call vote on the screen. It was 67 to 31. As most of you know, the Senate has been very evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, very 50-50. So you only get a 67 to 31 vote if it's a very bipartisan bill. And that's exactly what happened here. So when you're trying to pick villains or whatever, that's certainly a critical question, as is the question of whether or not this added regulation would have really prevented this from happening. There are a lot of people who believe that what really happened was that the bank was nowhere near as fundamentally unstable as was suggested, that instead, because of an in-artfully worded press release and an attempt to sell off some of these assets to fix their balance sheet, a lot of people in Silicon Valley who follow these things very closely to talk to one another all the time talked themselves into a kind of panic that led to all of them trying to pull out their massive wealth from this bank that caused the bank run to happen, and that the failure of these other banks is not a reflection of systemic problems or even any sort of similar problems, that it was just contagion, that once you see one bank failing and you have your money in a regional bank, you start thinking, “Wow, I want to take my money out of my community bank, a regional bank, and put it in a much safer place like Bank of America or Wells Fargo”. And if that's the case, it's questionable whether or not added regulatory scrutiny would have solved the problem, because maybe there were really problems in this bank that should have caused it to collapse in the first place. I consider that to be one of the unanswered questions that we have to explore. But whatever else is true, the U.S. government has very quickly, very, very quickly responded to the calls of the richest people in our country, as they so often do. And the question is are they acting cautiously and wisely for the good of all of us, rather than acting corruptly to serve the needs of the people who fund both political parties? 


The interview: Matt Stoller

 

So, to help us answer that question for our interview segment tonight, I'm going to speak to one of the most knowledgeable scholars in the country on Big Tech, on Silicon Valley. We've had him on the show many times before. He spent a lot of years working on the political capture of Washington and Congress by big in interest. He's the author of “Goliath: The 100-Year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy”. He's also the director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project. He is Matt Stoller, and we're really delighted to speak to him. 

 

M. Stoller:  Hey, thanks for having me. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Okay, So first of all, that was not yet your time to say thanks for having me. I need to first welcome you to the show. Say hello, Matt. Good evening. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. And now you can go ahead and say that. 

 

M. Stoller:  Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah. 

 

G. Greenwald:  I'm happy to have you. You know, you're a veteran in the show. I expect you to know the timing a little bit better. 

But let's get into the substance of the matter. I can scold you for that later. I want to start at the most basic level for people who do not follow these issues obsessively, who are trying to grapple with them and think about their kind of from the first principle, and that includes myself. So, let's just begin with the most basic way of thinking about this which is what is the best way to think about the relationship between a depositor of a bank and the bank itself. Is the person who's depositing money, nothing more than a creditor whose investment the government has decided partially to insure up to $250,000? Or is that kind of an archaic way of thinking about it and there's a different relationship now between bankers and depositors? 

 

M. Stoller:  No, technically that's exactly accurate. And, you know, it's not just that the government decided in the 1930s we had bank runs all the time that was similar to Silicon Valley Bank, except it was everywhere and people would lose everything. And so, the government and banks kind of cut a deal, right? And democratically. And what they said is we are going to make insurance so that if a bank goes under your deposits up to a certain level – the ordinary people don't have more than $250,000 in an account – you're going to be insured, so you're fine. You don't need to worry about your bank unless you are really rich or your business has a lot of cash. 

Then the banks get really cheap funding, so they get to borrow really low cost and then they lend at a higher cost and they essentially get free profit. But in return for essentially being able to use the government's full faith and credit – the government credit card – they have to accept supervision and regulation so that they're not gambling too much with the government's money. And that was kind of the deal and it prevented bank runs, which are horrible, pretty much until – I mean, you could go the seventies, eighties, nineties in various ways – but you know essentially they still prevent bank runs and your bank account up to $250,000 is still safe. 

There's also a variety of other institutions like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Home Loan Bank program which create what is known as the safety net for the banking system. So really, the banking system is a public system. I mean, people think about banks as private institutions and bankers as businesspeople, but really they kind of have a public obligation as well, because they draw so much support from the safety net. But there are good reasons to have a safety net here. 

Now, I have a lot of rage over the situation, but I'm just trying to give you an analysis of why we have FDIC insurance, why your money is probably safe in the bank account unless you have more than 250,000 and setting up for some context to discuss not just Silicon Valley Bank, but the Fed and FDIC also quietly resolved a different bank signature bank in New York, which is only $107 billion of assets and that's a crypto bank and they kind of snuck that one in as well. 

 

G. Greenwald:  That's Barney Frank's bank, right? the bank where he's a director…

 

M. Stoller:  That's right.

 

G. Greenwald: So, I'm going to absolutely, deliberately, provoke your rage as I love to do. It's actually not that hard. But before we get to that, I just want to spend a couple of more minutes on kind of the foundational understanding. So, we have the culture of the basics to work with. 

If this model is correct that you just described – or that I describe and you kind of accept it and then added to – which is, so, I'm someone who grows and I have a lot of money, I want to put my money in a bank and maybe I have a lot of money, not because I'm rich, but because I have a startup company that people just invested in. Someone gave me $50 million because I need startup cash for my company to develop a new technology – to pay the people who are going to develop it for me. I need a place to stick my money. I stick it in Silicon Valley Bank because it's a 40-year institution, it's well-regarded, and it's something that seems profitable. And then let's assume that the people who run the bank do all kinds of bad and reckless things. They lobby the government for less regulatory scrutiny. They make really terrible decisions. They make bad bets. I think everybody understands that those people who make bad bets and who are reckless should lose whatever gains they would have had. And should basically lose everything, especially if the government has to come in and save them. 

Why, though – the depositors who didn't do anything wrong or who didn't bet wrong, they're just putting their money in a bank that has a well-regarded reputation – why should they lose their money? About $250,000. Just because the executives of this bank acted irresponsibly? 

 

M. Stoller:  Well, there are two reasons. First of all, it's uninsured. It's not a secret that the FDIC limit is $250,000. It's plastered everywhere. So, if you're a treasurer of a corporation or a municipality, you know the score and you're choosing to ignore the rules. And that's just capitalism: sometimes you take a loss if you make a bad decision. And the other reason is, first of all, let's just be clear, uninsured depositors are not going to be wiped out. In fact, they'll probably get 80 to 100 cents on the dollar […] 

 

G. Greenwald: Because the government intervened. But had the government not intervened, they would have been wiped out. 

 

M. Stoller:  No, no, no. The government comes in and sells off the assets of the bank and then pays back the uninsured depositors with whatever they get for that. And Silicon Valley Bank, though, it lost money on bonds – those bonds are still high quality, they just dropped in value somewhat. So, what would have happened is the FDIC would have come in and taken those bonds, sold them off and then, today, people would have gotten between 30% and 60% of their uninsured deposits back. Then, over the next 2 to 6 months, they would have gotten whatever remained from the FDIC selling whatever they could for whatever they could get. And it's likely that people would have gotten 80 to 100 cents on the dollar of uninsured deposits back. 

So, there was no way that people were going to be wiped out by this. What might have been some problems getting access to all of their funding immediately? They would have gotten access to some of it immediately, but not all of it. So really, like the panic here and it was panic, it was, I think, kind of silly the idea that you need to backstop so people get 100% of their deposits immediately was just regulators panicking. And that's all this was. 

 

G. Greenwald:  But their argument was, look, even if down the line we get a good amount back, in the meantime, we can't pay our payroll, our businesses are going to go out of business. They're going to lose tons of start-up in them. And the technology they would develop that would drive the future gross domestic product to the United States. That was the argument. 

 

M. Stoller:  No, no, I know. And you've been feeding it to me all day to get me angrier and angrier. So, I appreciate that. 

 

G. Greenwald: (laughs). But what's the answer to that argument? 

 

M. Stoller: Well, these are not innocent people, right? These are rich people. These are powerful people. They know there's a $250,000 limit. So why have they been violating that when in a lot of cases you have treasuries that don't do that? There are services that you can get at banks called cash sweeps, which let you chop up your $10 million into 40 different $250,000 FDIC-insured accounts. Why didn't they use that? 

Well, the answer is because Silicon Valley Bank was not just an innocent bank. What they were doing is they were saying, if you leave the money from your firm or from – if you're a venture capitalist – the firms that you fund, if you leave them as uninsured deposits with us so that we can gamble with them, we will give you what's called “white collar banking services”, which is to say below cost personal lines of credit, below cost mortgages – essentially the kinds of things that politicians are criticized for because it's essentially bribery.  

The Silicon Valley Bank was essentially giving stakeholders in Silicon Valley bribes to keep their money as uninsured deposits so that they could gamble with it. And that's why these guys took a risk. They were also getting much higher interest rates on their uninsured deposits – they were getting more for taking more risks. So, they should bear the costs of that. And not just that but Silicon Valley Bank was also a co-investor in a lot of these firms. So, Silicon Valley Bank had stakes in over 3000 different tech companies and as a condition of those stakes, it was saying you have to have that firm deposit its cash with us in uninsured. So, there were a lot of elements here where there was self-dealing, there was a bad regulatory system, and then there was the Silicon Valley Bank bribing the people who were in charge of other people's money. So, this is a nasty situation. These people do deserve to have a minor haircut off of their deposits. And it would be – it is – completely crazy what the administration has done – and I blame Janet Yellen for this and I blame the Federal Reserve and I blame Joe Biden and I blame Donald Trump – It is absolutely outrageous that they have made these guys whole. All this was just panic and corruption and greed. And it was totally outrageous and disgusting and I am disgusted by it. 

 

G. Greenwald:  So, let me ask you, Matt, if you talk to the people in Silicon Valley who wanted this, this is their argument. Their argument is this: look, there is nothing special about Silicon Valley Bank. The reality is there are a ton of regional banks and community banks in the United States that are suffering in large part because the Fed raised interest rates. So, I don't really get that argument since the Fed always telegraphs, and especially in this case, telegraphed it very loudly they were going to do that. But their argument is we're not any different. And if you don't back this up and if you don't protect depositors, the thing that's going to happen in the next 48 hours, which seems kind of reasonable to me as a prediction, is everyone's going to get spooked towards their money – you heard Roe O'Connor. This is his argument – in a regional bank or in a community bank. And they're all going to say, you know what, I'm getting my money out of there as quickly as I possibly can. I'm going to put it in one of the big four and every regional bank in the United States is going to collapse. And the only thing that's going to prevent that is if Janet Yellen comes in and says, don't worry, we're here to ensure every penny of your deposits. 

Why isn't that a valid argument? 

 

M. Stoller: It's not a valid argument because we have a system that's set up to address that problem. One question that we have to ask is why didn't Silicon Valley Bank have the cash to give to depositors. Well, one reason is that they weren't keeping enough cash on hand because of the deregulatory choices and bad regulatory decisions by the San Francisco Federal Reserve. 

Another reason is that they just didn't have the assets they needed, right? The Federal Reserve is a bank of banks, and if you need a bunch of cash, you can just go to the Federal Reserve and say, I have a bunch of Treasury bonds or loans or mortgage-backed securities or whatever I need to borrow from you. I'll give you these as collateral. You give me the cash and I'll give it to my depositors, when things blow over, they'll come back and redeposited the money. And we have a system that's set up to deal with large demands for cash. 

The reason Silicon Valley Bank couldn't take advantage of that system is they didn't have the necessary collateral because they were insolvent. Most of these regional banks are not insolvent. And also, most of these regional banks are funded by insured deposits, so, people with less than $250,000 who have no reason to move their money. Silicon Valley Bank was funded 97% with uninsured deposits. Signature Bank, which is the other one – that was Barney Frank's bank and Ivanka Trump was on the board of that one before Barney Frank was – that was 90% uninsured deposits. The next most likely bank to fail,  called First Republic, which has about 67% uninsured deposits. And from there, it goes way down. So, we're really not dealing with a system that is – I mean, there's some trouble because the Fed keeps raising rates – but, as you put it, the Fed has telegraphed this. These guys just chose not to hedge because it would – actually their own employees were telling them, you got to hedge. This is really dangerous as interest rates rise. And the bankers were like, yeah, we don't want to, we won't make as much money. They were making these choices, they were remitting some of the extra profits to the uninsured depositors in the form of – what I've said before, these quasi-bribes. And they're pretty unusual bank. Most regional banks are not like this. So, you might have an initial panic. You might take down one or two or three other banks, but it'll blow over and then you will have re-imposed market discipline. Instead, what we did is we said everyone's going to be made whole; Silicon Valley bank depositors who took these massive risks, they're going to be made whole; all banks except for Silicon Valley Bank and Signature, their funding costs are going to go down and we're going to hand them all the full faith and credit of the United States that they can go off and gamble with. And there we go. Problem solved. Like that's what we did. Instead, this is just like a panic. And instead of dealing with banking panics the way that we should, which is to just use sort of like take out the bad banks that are insolvent, you let them go insolvent and everybody else –you lend them to tide over the panic. They freaked out and did a giant bank bailout and I think the reason this is different from 2008 is there are losses [...] 

 

G. Greenwald:  Oh, hold on. I'll probably get there before we get there. I just want to address my audience for one second because people are telling me in my ear that they’re treating you and cheering for you like you're some kind of Huey Long populist and wondering why I've suddenly transformed into Tim Geithner performing Propagandistic Services on behalf of Silicon Valley oligarchs. So, I just want to be very clear that the format of the show, on purpose, and I thought I said this at the beginning, was I was going to have Matt on – whom I know for certain, and somebody very vigorously opposed, in fact, angrily opposed to what the Treasury Department is doing – and I'm presenting him the arguments in favor of this bailout, not because I share those arguments or believe in those arguments, but because I think the best way to  have this show be the most informative, is to allow you to hear Matt responding to the arguments of the people defending this, which are not necessarily my arguments just because they're coming out of my mouth. 

So, let me ask you, Matt, now that I've taken off my Tim Geithner costume – although I'm going to put it back on, the proviso that I'm wearing it on purpose, what about 2008? Because that obviously is the thing that I think a lot of people are thinking about. I've seen lots of debates. Is this a 2008-style bailout? Is this something different? Obviously, the magnitude is a completely different universe but, in terms of the mentality, it seems like what this is, is the government stepping in and defending and protecting the assets of rich people as they did in 2008, because that's whom they serve, because that's who funds them. Is that one of the right ways to think about what's happening here? 

 

M. Stoller:  Yeah, there's a couple of differences between 2018 and then some similarities. I feel like this is like a high school essay. There are similarities and differences. So, the difference is that, in 2008, people were freaking out because the banks had invested in a bunch of crappy mortgages and nobody knew what anything was worth. So it wasn't that there were losses, it was that nobody knew how big the losses were or whether anybody was solvent. So, it was a panic, but it was a panic that was like – it was a very rational reason to panic because you didn't actually know what anything was worth and you didn't know if any institution was worth anything. And neither did any regulators. And it took a while to sort that out.  

In this situation, there are losses, but we know what those losses are. It's pretty open and it's not like we're going to be that surprised. The Fed has been telegraphing that it's raising rates. Everybody knew that Silicon Valley Bank had losses on the books. And then, there’s these other regional banks. We know what they've lost. So, this is not that big a deal. There is some panic in the markets, it's a serious situation but it's not a crisis situation. 

But in terms of the similarities, I think what you see is exactly the same attitude of 2008, in 2023. I mean, one of the differences is, in this case, the stockholders and the bondholders are not getting bailed out, but the uninsured depositors are. So, in that sense, it's, I guess, a little bit better than 2008, because, in 2008, they bailed out the stockholders and the bondholders and then the executives got bonuses. This time, at least they have to give the bonuses before the bailout. But yeah, the attitude is similar. And that is why I'm angry because we've seen this movie before. And in this case, they didn't need to do it. In 2008, I think that they needed to do something, there needed to be capital injections – the way they did it was problematic – but in this case, they didn't actually need to do it. And that was pretty obvious. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Okay, so that's one point. The next thing I want to ask you about, is, as I said, there does seem to be an addiction on the part of the political class to blame anything and everything that happens instantly on Donald Trump and only on him. It absolutely is true that there were rollbacks of Dodd-Frank, in 2018. We played the bill signing where Trump announced the rationale that led him to sign this. It definitely ended up excluding Silicon Valley Bank because, by raising the threshold to $250 billion, from $50 billion, they would have been subject to this scrutiny. And with this change, they ended up excluded. 

What I'm wondering is this: what it seemed to me like in real time – and I've read the accounts of some of these people who are extremely wealthy individuals who tried to take their money out of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday to find that they couldn't do so – but it seemed to me what happened was panic – as you said, in 2008, it was kind of rational, you looked at the markets and there is reason to think these institutions might be insolvent or at least have no idea whether or not they were – in the case of Silicon Valley Bank, they definitely had losses on their balance sheet, but it doesn't seem to me that they had the kind of losses that warranted a panic or a bank run. 

What instead happened is that you have this very incestuous group in Silicon Valley that started whispering to each other “you better take your money out”, “you better take your money out”. That spread very rapidly. It proliferated and everybody took their money out. Of course, Silicon Valley Bank didn't have the liquidity to cover that. If that's true, or some version of that is true, what I'm wondering is let's assume that there hadn't been this rollback of the Dodd-Frank regulations in 2018, that you had the regulators subjecting Silicon Valley Bank to the same stress test that it would have gotten before the rollback in 2018. Is it really that clear that the federal regulators would have blown the whistle on Silicon Valley Bank said its balance sheet is way too risky or way too far away from what is safe or would they have looked at it and said, you probably should do what they ended up doing, selling off some mortgage-backed securities, doing some stuff that you talked about with the Fed in order to bring in more liquidity, unload some longer-term assets – which is what they did, that, in turn, further fueled the fear. I'm just wondering, is it really that clear that if regulators had taken a look at it under the hood, they would have freaked out the way that these depositors did? 

 

M. Stoller: I don't know that it's clear. Yeah, sure, they engineered a bank run, but I don't put it on the depositors – they freaked out for a rational reason which is that the bank might be insolvent and probably what they did was smart. If you think that the bank is not going to have your money and your money's not insured, you should pull it out and get it out before everybody else. That's what causes a bank run. 

So, it was sitting there like it was kindling waiting to go up in flames. And, you know, it just so happened that it was a group of people, I don't know, slack or whatever, or signal, that lit the flames, but that was going to go. I don't know that you can definitively claim that bank or bank regulators would have forced Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank to have more liquidity on hand and to not have made so many egregious bets. I just don't think you could say that definitively. But I do think you can say that it's more likely they would have definitively. However, the other point here is I think there's a sort of 1, 2 problem here because – I worked on Dodd-Frank – and so, first of all, you're welcome. We fixed everything as everybody […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  Including Barney Frank’s bank. 

 

M. Stoller: The dirty secret of Barney Frank is he didn't actually know anything about banking, which was, like, kind of hilarious. But […] 

 

G. Greenwald:  But he had a lot of friends in banking. 

 

M. Stoller:  Right. Well, we could go into a whole thing on Barney Frank. 

But in 2009 and 2010, what we effectively did is we institutionalize too-big-to-fail banks. So, the four or five big banks that are too big to fail, we said we're going to make it too big to fail, and maybe we're going to regulate it a little bit more aggressively. And then there's them and then there's everybody else. 

Then, you move forward and the regional banks, who are very large but not as large as the big banks, they say, well, we want to be able to gamble a little bit more aggressively and then they convince the Republicans to go along. The Republicans never like bank regulators or banks – there was like a really interesting rethinking of significant parts of the Republican orthodoxy agenda like trade and antitrust. But one thing that the rethinking didn't get to, the realignment didn't get to, was banking rules, although I will note that on March 3, a bunch of Senate Republicans sent a letter to the Federal Reserve being like, you better not regulate more aggressively. We passed a bill in 2018 to make sure you don't. And J.D. Vance was not on that letter. There is some reason to think that some of the younger Republicans are changing their thinking. But it is certainly true that, in terms of bank regulation, this is still George W Bush's party, right? It didn't change. 

But I think that this was kind of like a twofer. Like we created the too-big-to-fail problem in the 1990s and 2000 and we institutionalized it with Dodd-Frank and then, we allowed these regional banks to go crazy, in 2018, and created this situation, in 2023, when these regional banks had gambled with other people's money and kind of had this collusive arrangement with these uninsured depositors. 

There was an argument, ‘oh, everybody's going to just go to move their money to JPMorgan because it's essentially a government bank’. It's a somewhat reasonable argument. I think it's overstated. I just don't think there was panic in most places in this country – this was a very online sort of echo chamber. But it's not an unreasonable argument. I think what we have to do now is look at the banking system and say, banks unless you're really small – In which case we can just kick you around because you have no political power – unless you're really small, you are effectively a government bank. And we need to just treat you like you are a government employee. You're a GS-15. You don't get to gamble with taxpayer money and pay yourself large amounts of money in bonuses or share buybacks or whatever. That's kind of where we are and if we want to move away from what is effectively a socialized system, which I think we should, then we should do that but right now, we are at a kind of socialized system, and it is the Democrats under Obama, it was the Republicans under Trump. And then, it's also the Democrats under Biden and Yellen. Although I'll say this, some of the things that Biden was trying to do, like he was trying to put this bank regular name, Saule Omarova, who opposed the 2018 bank deregulation, and she got blocked by essentially the same coalition of people who passed the 2018 bills, which is all the Republicans and then some Democrats. So, it's not totally clear here but what is 100% clear is that, broadly speaking, the political class, entirely in the Republican Party and then some of the Democrats and certainly at Treasury and the Federal Reserve are wholly in favor of bank bailouts for the wealthy and the powerful. You can argue about when they're necessary and when they're not. There were certainly some innocent people who were going to get hurt here but broadly speaking, what just happened was very bad and is an indictment of our regulators and our political class. 

 

G. Greenwald:  In terms of the last question, I mean, I think if you're listening to that and you're Republican, first of all, there's probably a lot of Republicans who want the party to move more in the direction of the J. D. Vance of the world and get away from the Mitch McConnell and the kind of where we're serving the lobbyist class, right? But, nonetheless, even going back to 2008 – with Hank Paulson and George Bush's bailout that both McCain and Obama and Canada had signed on to – the reason it failed at first was that a lot of Republicans voted no. Not a good number, Democrats and Republicans. And their attitude was exactly that, which is like, ‘No, we don't want the banking system nationalized’. We don't want it socialized; we don't want it federalized. But what we also don't want is, when it does fail, you look to the government and we come in and save you. Too bad, you're not getting our help. 

Is that a viable alternative to saying to the banks you're now under federal control? Or will it always be the case that at the end of the day the government's going to have to come in and save the banks because if they don't, the harm is going to be too widespread? 

 

M. Stoller:  Banking is always a public business, right? I mean, that's just that the bankers like to pretend that banking is private and bankers are running private businesses. But the reality is that when you get a bank charter, it's a government license and you get access to a whole social safety net. That is the thousand Federal Home Loan Banks, the FDIC, and all bankers take advantage of it. They want to take advantage of it. And they just bristle at the oversighted regulations because they can't gamble as much. So, it is a public system. But within that context, they have to do or they should do risk management.

 And the question is, how do they get penalized when they don't do adequate risk management? And the way we used to penalize them is their shareholders, their bondholders, uninsured depositors and bankers themselves got penalized. And today, it seems like where we've moved to is that if you're rich and powerful, you get profits, but no losses. Those are just fundamentally different systems, even though both of them are public systems. This last one, I think the one where we've socialized all the losses, I think, it's far more of a step towards kind of a nationalized system. It's just a very terrible nationalized system versus the kind of earlier, hybrid one where they did take losses sometimes. So, I think what we need to just acknowledge is that this is a public-private system and that we have to impose some form of market discipline, but also allow for stability. So, allow for insured deposits, but make sure that if, you're not insured, that you have to do risk management. And then, I would also say that a lot of business people just want a place to put their money that is safe. That's all they want. And why should we force them to be effective what is a government bank like J. P. Morgan or something like that? They should just be able to get an account at the Federal Reserve, right? If they're going to have a government bank, it's either going to have an implicit backstop or it's just going to be explicit. And why not just like it's a public service? So, let's just have it go through the government itself versus what we have now, which is, you know, we're having government banks. It's just we're paying the people, running them way too much and they get to gamble with our money. So, I don't know if I answered your questions, like there are inherently public characteristics of a banking system, but it doesn't have to be sort of a totally nationalizing of the downside, which is what we've been doing over the last 10 or 15 years or so. 

 

G. Greenwald:  But in this case, just to conclude, if you were the Treasury secretary or if you're the president, what would have happened is you would have let Silicon Valley Bank be on its own, have the FDIC come in and take it over, sell off its assets, give the depositors as much as possible over the amount of time and hope that you're right, that it would have only been a couple of banks that would have gone down in the resulting panic but in the system in large, the banking system is fundamentally sound. That's your view. 

 

M. Stoller:  Yeah. And look, if there had been like a broader crisis and, all of a sudden, there was this massive solvency problem – like then you come in and you go to Congress and you say there is going to be a serious banking crisis and we need capital injections and we're going to attach really serious strings to that – but you don't just start with the 16th largest bank in the country, that's just $200 billion of assets and a bunch of venture capitalists. And Larry Summers starts to say, “oh, you have to make my buddies whole”. You don't just respond to that. You have to have real evidence that there is a systemic crisis. Otherwise, it's illegal, right? I mean, the logic is clear. So, that's just where you have to have some ability to stand up to panic. And that's like what these guys don't have, they're just like, you would say boo and they they're like, Oh, where do I write the check? 

 

G. Greenwald:  So, I said in my introduction, that one of the things you study is the capture of government by finance. Is it your view and I know it's hard sometimes to kind of talk about people as a monolith and to know people's motives. But Janet Yellen's been around for a long time, as you can see. If you listen to her, watch her, she obviously is aware of both sides of this argument. 

Is it your view that she wasn't willing to let this panic spread out of fear that it was more systemic and she thought it would be better to capture it, just stop it when it first started? Or do you have the more cynical view that these rich people have tons of power inside the office of these decision-makers – which, of course, they do –  and that's why they ended up getting their way? 

 

M. Stoller:  Well, I don't think those two stories are mutually exclusive. I don't think that any of these actors were acting in bad faith. It would be easier if they were, right? If they were just scheming corruption and they were just like, “aha, I'm going to bail out my rich friends”. It's much worse than that. It's like they actually believe they're their rich friends when they say everything is going to collapse. That's what actually is going on here. They were like, “oh, my gosh, if Larry Summers says that everything's going to collapse, I better act”, right?  They believe, they get spooked easily, and the people that don't are the people that get blocked from being put into office. They bring up Saule Omarova. She would not have stood for this if the Senate had confirmed her at the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, she would have been like, no, this is bullshit. And so, I think that part of the problem here is that the people that you – Janet Yellen has been terrible for a really long time. And, you know, she got bipartisan confirmation and the rest of it ends like you can go back to the the Trump administration and you'd find the same thing. It's the people who are actually really courageous and willing to stand up to the financial power that have a tough time getting confirmed. And so that's kind of, you know, they intentionally select people who are weak, right?, for these positions. 

 

G. Greenwald:  Yeah. All right, Matt. Well, unless there's anything else you feel I need to get off your chest and, you know, you'll always have a welcome spot here to do it. It's like a massage therapy spot. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. It was super enlightening. Gave me a lot of arms to talk to David Sachs tomorrow when I do, about his side of the story. So, if you don't have anything else, let me say goodnight and thank you again for taking the time. 

 

M. Stoller:  All right. Thanks so much, Tim Geithner. 

 

G. Greenwald:  All right. (laughs).


Monologue

 

So last night was the Academy Awards, if you're like most people these days, actually, in America, you did not watch it, even though it used to be one of the events that brought all of Americans together. Increasingly, the ratings are collapsing for all sorts of reasons that we can go into. At some other point, I bet the number of people who could actually name the film that won best film in the 2022 Oscar ceremony is under 4% or 5%. I actually read it this morning and I've already forgotten it. I was about to tell you I'm proud of myself for having done that research, and yet it's already out of my brain. I didn't see that film. I don't think I saw any of the nominees. That's increasingly true for a lot of people. 

So clearly the Oscars have lost a lot of cultural impacts and I nonetheless want to talk about it for a very specific reason. And I'm going to just spend a little bit of time on it because that's all I really deserve. And I'm much less interested in the issue of the Oscars itself than the broader issue that I think it highlights. So just to give you the setup and the issue that I want to talk about is the category of best documentary. And I do have a personal stake in this somewhat, which is that my friend Laura Poitras – who directed Citizenfour, which was the film, a documentary about the work that I did with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong that won the best Documentary Oscar in 2015, was nominated for a film about the opioid crisis that I actually expected was going to win. I haven't seen any of these films other than hers, including the film talk about, so I want to put that card on the table as well. That film that Laura did, which would have been her second Oscar win, ended up not winning. I honestly don't care. Laura has won every award there is in this world, basically, and she didn't need a second Oscar. 

Anyway, the film that did win is a film called Navalny, which is a documentary about the Russian dissident who is currently imprisoned because he is an opponent of the government of Vladimir Putin and you can imagine how popular he is, even though he has said things his whole life that should make him completely anathema to liberal America. He has said some of the most vicious and bigoted denunciations of the Muslims of the world. He was taken off the list of a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty because of some of his most recent statements that he refused to recant. But that doesn't matter. Just like liberals are eager to arm actual neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine. All that it takes these days to be a hero is to either be opposed to Donald Trump or be opposed to Vladimir Putin, and everything else is completely irrelevant. And that's the reason they gave this Oscar for this film about Navalny. And I just want to show you what happened in the two and a half minutes that resulted in them winning (Video). 

 

Presenter: And the Oscar goes to… Navalny. […]Diane Becker, Melanie Miller, Shane Boris…

 

OFF: Director Daniel Roher and his team filmed Alexei Navalny while he was in hiding from the Russian government at a remote location in Germany. 

 

Daniel Roher: Thank you to the Academy. We are humbled to be in the company of such an extraordinary crop of documentary filmmakers. These films redefine what it is to make a documentary. To everyone who helped make our film, you know who you are, your bravery and courage made this film possible. We owe so much to our Bulgarian nerd with his laptop, Christo Grozev. Christo, you risked everything to tell this story, and it's investigative journalists like you and Maria Pevichikh that empower our work. To the Navalny family. Yulia, Dasha and Zakhar, thank you for your courage. The world is with you. 

And there's one person who couldn't be with us here tonight. Alexei Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, remains in solitary confinement for what he calls – I want to make sure we get his words exactly right – Vladimir Putin's unjust war of aggression in Ukraine. I would like to dedicate this award to Navalny, to all political prisoners around the world. Alexei, the world has not forgotten your vital message to us all. We cannot, we must not be afraid to oppose dictators and authoritarianism wherever rears its head. I want to invite Yulia to say a few quick remarks. Yulia. 

 

Yulia Navalnaya: Thank you, Daniel. And thank you to everybody. The everybody here. My husband is in prison just for telling the truth. My husband is in prison just for defending democracy. Alexei, I am dreaming the day when you will be free and our country will be free. Stay strong, my love. Thank you. 

 

 

Okay. All incredibly moving, and emotional and obviously, I'm sure people in that room, the people who voted for this film, felt very good about themselves. They were taking a stand against Russia, against the Russian dictatorship. They all were cheering. The person who directed the film that won the Oscar said, “We need to stand up to dictatorship wherever it rears its head”. 

I think one of the things that makes us so notable is that during the Cold War, the idea of whataboutism was often denounced by the U.S. government, and the way they define that was that they would always claim that any time you criticized the Soviet Union and its abridgment of basic liberties and rights, the Soviet government would try and distract attention away from that critique by saying, “well, what about your problem over there in the United States with how you treat black people? Or what about the internment of Japanese Americans?” So, they would kind of distract their own citizens’ attention away from the critiques of their human rights abuses by pointing way over to the other side of the world, the United States. And they would always say, what about this? What about that? What about this? 

Now, the idea that some sort of Soviet practice that they invented is lunacy. Humans have been doing that from the time that they could speak. You say, well, you have this fault and they say, no, what about my neighbor? My neighbor has it far worse. There's a very human practice. The Soviets did not invent theirs, but that was always the framework. That was the idea was the governments do, in fact, use this tactic to distract attention away from their own abuses. 

It's not just the Soviet Union that does that or the Russian government that does that, it's also the United States that does that, we're experts at it. We love to say things like we will stand up for democracy, despotism and tyranny wherever we find it. We will stand up to Navalny, to this person over here in China who's imprisoned unjustly, or this person here in Iran. And, of course, the United States has always had and still does have its own dissidents in prison and one of the leading ones, for example, is Julian Assange. 

And so, it seems very strange to me, very strange, to have a room full of people cheering not just the film, but themselves, for very – it's a very empty and cowardly thing to do, to denounce the government on the other side of the world over which you have absolutely no influence. Denouncing Vladimir Putin or President Xi or the Iranian mullah is really doesn't do anything to change those governments. You have no influence there. It's not a brave thing to do. You're not in danger there. You don't live in those countries. It's always been the case that foreign countries that are enemies of one another criticize each other. That's all this is.

What makes a lot more bravery and that's a lot more consequential, is criticizing the human rights abuses of your own government. And if you don’t ever do that, if instead you're constantly focused on the human rights abuses of other governments, it actually empowers your own government to engage in the same human rights abuses because you're constantly reaffirming its narrative that it's only those bad countries over there that imprison political dissidents and political opponents. We absolutely do the same. Julian Assange is in prison, in part because he exposed the crimes of the United States government, but also because – and I think this is really the bigger part – is, in 2016, he published documents that helped Donald Trump win the election and Hillary Clinton lose the election. Because before that, many Democrats and people on the liberal left are very much in support of Julian Assange and now it's almost impossible to find anyone on the liberal left willing to stand up in defense of Julian Assange. And the only thing that changed was that he did journalism that helped defeat Hillary Clinton. That is the classic case of being a political prisoner. The Biden administration is doing everything possible to keep him in prison for as long as possible, despite never having been convicted of a crime. And it is unimaginable that these same Hollywood liberals would give an award to a dissident like Julian Assange. 

Now, when I said this earlier today, people pointed out that the same Hollywood liberals who vote did, in fact, give an award, the Oscar, to the best documentary that Laura Poitras produced about my work with Edward Snowden. I went up on the Oscars stage. We collected the Oscars, but they were for Laura and for the two producers of that film. But I think especially in the wake of Donald Trump, everything changed in terms of how American liberals think. They've become much more jingoistic and they never like to believe their own government engages in the kinds of abuses that the Russian government engages in. And not only is it just a vapid and cowardly thing to do – spend so much time focused on the bad acts of a government far away from you over which you have no control or you can't change it while ignoring the abuses of your own government – it actually makes it even more difficult to do anything about the abuses of those foreign governments, because if you try, other governments will look at you like you're crazy – like, who are you to lecture us on the rights of dissidents when you imprison your own dissidents yourself? Why would we possibly listen to your lectures? 

There was an incredibly powerful example of this when President Ilham Aliyev, of the above Azerbaijan, who for sure is a savage authoritarian, was confronted by a reporter from the BBC about Azerbaijan's imprisonment and other abuses towards dissidents. And you'll see how he used that argument. Listen to what he said: 

 

(Video. Nov. 9, 2020) 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Why do you think the people question do not have free media and opposition? 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Because this is what I'm told by independent sources in this country. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Which independence sources?  

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Many independent sources. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Tell me, which. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  I certainly couldn't name sources. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: If you could name that means you are just inventing this story. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  So, you're saying the media is not under state control? 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Not at all. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  I mean NGOs are the subject of a crackdown. Journalists are the subject of a crackdown. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Not at all. 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  Critics are in jail. 

 

President Ilham Aliyev: No, no, 

 

Orla Guerin, BBC:  none of this is true?  

 

President Ilham Aliyev: Absolutely fake. Absolutely. We have free media. We have free Internet. And the number of Internet users in Azerbaijan is more than 80%. Can you imagine the restriction of media in a country where the Internet is free, there is no censorship and 80% of Internet users? This is, again, a biased approach. This is an attempt to create a perception in Western audiences about Azerbaijan. We have opposition, we have NGOs, we have free political activity, we are free media, and we have freedom of speech. But if you raise this question, can I ask you also, how do you assess what's happened to Mr. Assange? Is it a reflection of free media in your country? Let's talk about Assange, how many years he spent in the Ecuadorian embassy and for what? And where is he now? For journalistic activity you kept that person hostage, actually killing him, morally and physically. You did it, not us. And now he's in prison. So, you have no moral right to talk about free media when you do these things. 

 

 

No, no. It seems like a good argument to me. You do, in fact, lose your moral right to criticize the people for conduct in which you yourself engage. That seems basic. And if you are somebody who likes to spend a lot of time talking about the abuses of foreign governments while being indifferent to or even supportive of very similar abuses by your own – and it's absolutely a similar abuse to imprison Alexei Navalny and Julian Assange. I can make arguments just why they're different in favor of the Russian government but I won’t, let's assume that they're very similar. If you're somebody who does very little about that abuse or other abuses by the U.S. government, including cracking down on whistleblowers, putting January 6 defendants, including nonviolent ones in prison and in solitary confinement for months, even though most of them are not accused of using violence at all; keeping Edward Snowden in exile or refusing to let him come back to the country or step foot outside of Russia upon pain of imprisoning him for his courageous work and showing his fellow citizens how our own government was spying on us without warrants illegally and unconstitutionally, as federal courts in our country have ruled, then I think that argument is very valid that not only do you have no moral credibility, but your attempt to solve those problems elsewhere is severely diminished. 

So, as all of those Hollywood liberals clap for themselves, not for Navalny over the filmmakers, but for themselves, for having been so courageous in giving him that award, I think it's very worth thinking about why their focus is so intensely on the bad acts of another government all the way around the other side of the world that our own government tells us to hate, and so rarely on the abuses of our own government. 

 

So that concludes our show for this evening. Remember that we have System Update now available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and other major platforms published 12 hours after we appear, live, here on Rumble. 

Remember as well that every Tuesday and Thursday we have our live aftershow on Locals where we take your questions, respond to your feedback, listen to your ideas and suggestions about who we should interview and what topics we should cover. To join our Locals community, where you also get free access to all of our journalism, just sign up the join button underneath the video on the Rumble page and that will take you to our Locals community, which we are in the process of building even further. 

As I said, tomorrow night we will have at 7 p.m. EST, our normal time, David Sachs, who's one of those venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, who was urging and who vehemently defends what the U.S. government did in protecting every penny of the depositors of Silicon Valley. So, you'll get to hear me ask the sort of anti-bailout questions to him to kind of complete the debate that we started tonight with Matt Stoller. 

Thank you, as always, for watching. We hope to see you back tomorrow night here and every night at 7 p.m. EST. 

Have a great evening, everybody. 

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Many of you have been asking about the impact of Trump's tariffs, and Glenn addressed how we are covering the issue during our mail bag segment yesterday. As always, we are grateful for your thought-provoking questions! Thank you, and keep the questions coming!

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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

REN’s Latest song.
Just about Sum’s up the UK for me right now. 🤣👍💯🙏👏….

VINCENT’S TALE - REN….

US special forces vet, who assisted with food distribution in Gaza, relates story of a little boy who thanked him for the food, and was then shot dead by IDF troops:

"And he sets his food down and he places his hands on my face on the side of my face on my cheeks. These frail skeleton emaciated hands, dirty. And he puts them on my face and he kissed me. He kissed me and he said, 'Thank you' in English. Thank you. And he collected his items and he walked back to the group and then he was shot at with pepper spray and tear gas and stun grenades and bullets shot at his feet and in the air and he runs away scared."

https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/us-veteran-alleges-gazan-child-who-thanked-him-for-food-was-shot-dead-moments-later-by-idf/

Glenn, I think this may be up your street. I know that you like to talk about the goings-on in Brazil, but it's worth remembering that Australia seemed to be a testing ground for authoritarianism during COVID, so what happens in Australia could quickly make its way to the US. Now, we do not have a first amendment here, so this is truly terrifying. I'm not even sure that the claimed antisemitism is real, since at least a few of the incidents have been demonstrated to be hoaxes, but it IS being used as a pre-text to crush pro-Palestine protests.

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on Tulsi's Russiagate Revelations, Columbia's $200M Settlement, and More
System Update #492

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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Once a week, we devote the show to a Q&A session. We take questions submitted throughout the week by members of our Locals community and answer as many as we can. As is typically the case, the questions tonight are wide-ranging and very provocative on a diverse range of news stories. 

 Our “Mailbag” is not intended to be just a sort of yes or no, but instead to give my viewpoint, my analysis, my perspective, my commentary on whatever it is that interests you. A lot of times, it ends up being topics that we might have wanted to cover anyway, that we just haven't had a chance to yet. Other times, they are topics that, on our own, we may not have covered. It's usually that kind of perfect mix that always makes me excited to do. So, let's get right into them to make sure we cover as many as possible. 

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The first is from @ChristianaK, and the question is very straightforward: 

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There's actually a second question here and let me get to it now, because it was going to be part of what I was about to say. It’s from @kevin328:

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I actually think Tulsi Gabbard's revelations on their own are substantive, meritorious, important and deserve a lot of attention but I do think, at this point, anything that the Trump administration is doing is intended to feed their base that is still very confused, upset and angry, for the most part, by this increasingly bizarre posture that they've taken on the Epstein revelations, namely not to make any, led not by Pam Bondi, Kash Patel or Dan Bongino, but by Donald Trump. 

Anything that they're suddenly unveiling is presumptively an attempt to distract people from that anger, that confusion and that growing suspicion about what they did with Epstein. The problem for them is the suspicions that have emerged – that I don't even think were that present before – that Donald Trump fears that his name is in the files and therefore wants to make sure they're not released, and even if his name isn't in the file in any way particularly incriminating. 

I've always thought the Epstein case has important questions to answer and I still think the Epstein case has important questions to be answered, including the ones I've outlined at length, such as whether he worked with or for any foreign or domestic intelligence agencies, and what was the source of his massive wealth, and why were these mysterious billionaires embedded in the military-industrial complex so eager on just seemingly handing him over huge amounts of wealth in exchange for services that seem very amorphous at best. I think there are a lot of unanswered questions that are important to say nothing of whether there's evidence that very powerful and important people participated in the more sinister aspects of what it was that he was doing and whether any blackmail arose from that. Of course, Donald Trump's name is going to be in some of these files for so many reasons. He was a very good friend of Jeffrey Epstein at one point. They spent a lot of time together. It seems like most or all of that time took place before the conviction of Jeffrey Epstein in 2007, which has its own very odd set of questions around why he got such an incredibly lenient deal for crimes that most people are sent to prison for a very long time. 

There's actually an excellent discussion on all of this that if you haven't seen I want to recommend which is Darryl Cooper's discussion on Tucker Carlson's show about the Epstein case, Darryl spent huge amounts of time putting together the entire history of Jeffrey Epstein, where he came from, how he emerged on the scene, who his key contacts were, where his wealth came from, the questions that have arisen, the way in which they've been buried. Despite what people have tried to depict about Darryl Cooper, in large part because of his unconventional views on World War II, but more so his harsh criticism of Israel, that he's some deranged, unhinged fabulist, who doesn't understand history, he's actually one of the most scrupulous and meticulous commentators and analysts I've seen, by which I mean, he really does only very strongly-cling to facts and has no problem admitting, which he often does, that there are certain things he doesn't know, that there are holes in his understanding, holes in the information, and there's zero conspiratorial thinking or even speculative thinking in this discussion or very little. It's all just a chronicle of facts laid out in a way not just to understand the Epstein case, but the reason why it's captured so much attention about the behavior of our elite class. 

So, I do think Donald Trump's name appears in these files the way The Wall Street Journal has reported it did. Trump was explicitly asked outside the White House by a reporter, just like two weeks ago: Did Pam Bondi give you a briefing in May in which she indicated to you that the Epstein files contain your name?” And to that, he explicitly said “No.” And that's exactly what The Wall Street Journal is now reporting had happened. Most journalists know that that happened. There were leaks inside the Justice Department and the White House that this is what happened. And again, I would be shocked if Donald Trump's name did not appear at some point in the Epstein files in some capacity, because of his close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein; they were in the same West Palm Beach social circles, which is a very small set of very rich people who compose that society. The U.S. attorney who ended up being appointed, who oversaw Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal, ended up being appointed by Donald Trump as Secretary of Labor. He has positive feelings for Ghislaine Maxwell in that notorious interview. He said, “I wish her well,” something that Donald Trump doesn't say about most criminals, let alone ones imprisoned on charges that they trafficked underage girls. 

But the climate that has been created – in large part by his closest followers, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino and his personal attorney, who is now the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, at least for a little bit longer, and some of the leading and most influential MAGA influencers – is that if your name is even remotely associated with Jeffrey Epstein, your entire life and your integrity and your character are instantly cast into doubt. One of the first times I really noticed this was when The Wall Street Journal reported on a series of contacts between people that no one knew had known Jeffrey Epstein, one of whom was Noam Chomsky. And the reason that happened was because Jeffrey Epstein had a very specific and passionate interest in academic institutions in Boston, especially the two most prestigious, Harvard and MIT. He funded various research projects. He gave $125,000, for example, to Bill Ackman's wife in order for her to have some sort of research project. And he had two or three dinners with Noam Chomsky. And Chomsky was very contemptuous of the questions in the Wall Street Journal. I guess that's what happens when you're 92. You don't take any kind of smear campaign seriously. You don't really care. And he just said, “Yeah, I had dinners with Jeffrey Epstein. He was a very well-connected and wealthy person.” 

Now, oddly, Jeffrey Epstein was very close friends with the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who obviously knew Chomsky would have a great deal of animus towards, and Jeffrey Epstein was very connected to the Israeli government in all sorts of ways, including through his primary benefactor, the multi-billionaire Les Wexner, who handed over to Epstein billions of dollars, it seems, and assets. It is an odd person for Chomsky to know, but at the same time, if you're one of the most intellectually heralded professors and scholars in the Boston area at one of the most prestigious schools in the world, MIT, where Chomsky spent almost his entire life as a professor of linguistics, that is the kind of person that Jeffrey Epstein tried to target and befriend to make himself feel important, to make him feel intellectually relevant. And yet, you would have thought that that revelation by itself proved that Chomsky had gone to that island multiple times and had sex with underage girls and was a pedophile. So, there has been a lot of speculative guilt by association and hysteria that has surrounded this story, such that anyone whose name appears in those files is likely to have suspicion and doubt cast on them for the rest of their life, even if the connections were innocuous. 

I'm sure part of what Trump wants to avoid is any indication that his name appears in those files because of that climate that will spill over him, including by many of his own followers. Then there are likely things in there that might, one of the reasons why investigations are typically kept secret, including grand jury proceedings, is because there are a lot of unverified accusations, but if they're published, they may seem like they have credibility. That was part of what we had to deal with the NSA, with the Snowden documents. A lot of the archives contain documents where they wanted to spy on certain people and they would speculate that those people might have ties to terrorist groups, or al-Qaeda, or Islamic extremism, or engage in other kinds of crimes unrelated to terrorism, but they were never charged with that. There was no evidence for it. It was just speculation about why the NSA thought they should spy on these people and had we published those documents with their names, we would have destroyed their reputations forever, based on accusations that were completely unvetted and just appeared in these documents. 

Clearly, Trump panicked when he learned that his name was in there. Not only did he order no more disclosures, the investigation closed, but, out of nowhere, he began asserting that the Epstein files are all a fake, are all fabricated, or at least much of them are fabricated and claimed that they were the same kind of hoax that Obama, Hillary, Biden, Jim Comey and John Brennan manufactured for Russiagate and the Steele Dossier. All of a sudden, the Epstein files went from the most pressing and significant matter, the disclosure of which would be the key ingredient to deciphering the sinister globalist elite that runs the world, to a hoax, a bunch of fake documents that never should see the light of day.

 Obviously, the only reason why Trump would suddenly concoct that excuse was because he was fearful that it would harm his reputation or the reputation of people very close to him and whom he cares about. and so he said, “No, this should never see the light of day; this is just another Democratic Party hoax that you idiots are falling for.” And that behavior obviously fuels suspicions even more, as has the subsequent reporting from The Wall Street Journal about that birthday greeting that Trump sent to Epstein, which he denies, but The Wall Street Journal reported, and then the subsequent reporting that Pam Bondi briefed him that his name appears in these documents. 

So, anytime anyone thinks about the Epstein documents for even one second, that kind of loss of faith and trust in Trump is something that, once it breaks, is very difficult to put together again, and they are desperate. I mean, the day after the Epstein files, they said, “Hey, here's the Martin Luther King files.” It's like, I guess it's good to see the Martin Luther King files, kind of like the JFK files, in that these are documents that should have been released a long time ago.” There's zero reason for secrecy. It was one of the most consequential historical events of the last 70 years in the United States. We should be able to understand what our government knows about that event. But it wasn't like anybody was so eager, anyone thought that that was the key to deciphering much of anything. It was an important historical event. From all appearances, nothing particularly surprising, shocking, or informative about any of those documents that was clearly a way of saying, “Here's a new shiny toy that you can go look at and try to forget about Epstein. 

The revelation by Tulsi Gabbard, especially in the time frame in which it occurred, most definitely, unfortunately, because as I said, they're consequential, is being contaminated by this perception that anything that the government is now throwing at you as disclosures are designed to distract you from the big whale that they've been covering up that they themselves made into the most pressing matter – JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr. as well – but also the idea that they want to regain your trust by showing you that they're redirecting your attention somewhere else. So, yes, unfortunately, it does have the stench of that, but at the same time, let's talk about these documents because they are extremely revealing. 

I know Aaron Maté spent a good amount of time yesterday – he was one of the very, very few people who weren't a MAGA journalist or pundit, weren't a Trump supporter, who, from the very beginning, said, “This whole story seems journalistically dubious at best.” There were very few of us at the time doing that. Jimmy Dore was another person who did that. Matt Taibbi was another one. There were very, very few of us and we all got called fascists and Trump supporters and Russian agents for having questioned these sensationalistic conspiracy theories about the relationship between Donald Trump and Russia or the role Russia played in the 2016 election that never had evidence for them, that were all fueled by very familiar anonymous leaks from the CIA and the FBI and the rest of the national security state that hated Trump, to the papers to whom they always leak when they want to manipulate the public, which is The Washington Post and The New York Times, which then gave themselves Pulitzers for having done so. But of all those people, I think Aaron has the most granular, detailed knowledge of every document, of every form of testimony. It's something I haven't looked at in several years. We haven't spent a lot of time on Russiagate was basically debunked when Robert Mueller closed the investigation while arresting nobody on the core conspiracy that they criminally conspired with the Russians, saying they couldn't find any evidence for it. Of course, there's been no accountability; those very same people lied in 2020 when they said that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, exactly in the same way. No accountability for any of that. But I haven't spent that much time engrossed in Russian documents, like I used to do all the time when I was reporting on it. But Aaron has a very still-trap memory, especially for this particular story. So, I was very glad to let him come on and talk about it in my absence. That's one of the reasons why we asked him to guest-host last night. 

So, I know he did a lot in this, but I do want to say that what was so obvious from the very beginning was that this was a very coordinated, politicized theme that emerged out of nowhere in the middle of 2016, something that the Hillary Clinton campaign, out of desperation, invented out of whole cloth. I will never forget the day when it was sort of circulating in the air. You had people like David Korn trying to insert the Steele Dossier reporting before his disclosure. “Oh, there's a document out there that everyone in Washington knows about that contains shocking revelations of Trump and Russia.” And that was all part of the effort to try to lay the foundation for this. But the Hillary Clinton campaign released this ad with this very sinister baritone, this very dark music and these very grainy photos saying, “What are Donald Trump and the Kremlin doing in secret? What is this relationship that they have?” 

I was just so amazed because not only was there no evidence for it – zero, none – it never even made sense on its own terms. Why, if the Russians wanted to hack the Podesta and the DNC emails, would they have needed the assistance of the Trump campaign? How would the Trump campaign have helped in any way in that hacking? Why would they need to do that? Why would they collaborate with Trump's campaign that way? There was never really even any evidence that Putin actually wanted Trump to win that race. If anything, a lot of people assumed that Hillary was the overwhelming favorite to win, was almost certainly going to win it. No one wanted to get on her bad side, and no one thought Donald Trump could win. The idea that the Russians would go so heavy never made much sense, but even more so there was never any evidence for it that it came from Putin, that even if the Russians had been mucking around in the election, that it came from Putin, that was sort of a big master plan that had any effect on the election; there was never any evidence for this. 

The intelligence community went all in because they were petrified of Trump. They hated Trump. They saw, correctly, that Hillary Clinton would be a very safe guardian and continuation of the status quo, which is what they saw in Biden and Kamala Harris as well. Trump, for whatever else is true about him, is very unpredictable. Sometimes, he will go to bat for the military-industrial complex and the intelligence community more aggressively than anyone else, as he's done many times, but he's also unpredictable and they want predictability, continuity, stability. The Democrats represented that, and Trump didn't. That was why they were so eager to destroy him, both in the campaign and then, sabotaging his presidency once he was inaugurated, and that's exactly what they proceeded to do with this fake story that ended up getting completely debunked and everybody just walked away from it as though it never happened. 

What these documents reveal is what we assumed at the time, which was that the Obama administration, obviously, was desperate to help Hillary. It was the CIA under John Brennan, an extremely politicized, corrupt, and dishonest actor whom Obama first had as his national security advisor and then installed as CIA chief, that led the way in concocting evidence. They had James Clapper there, too, with a history of lying. Those are the people running the national security state. And they were open, partisan. Remember, these are the same people who ended up among the 51 intelligence officials in 2020 who lied with that letter, blaming the Russians for the Hunter Biden laptop and calling into question its authenticity right before the election because they were petrified it would help Trump win and Biden lose. Their politicized motives are beyond question. 

Same with James Comey at the FBI; his hatred for Donald Trump has become legend. These were the people who took the best assessment of the U.S. Intelligence community, the analysts and the spies who were saying there's very low confidence that Russia really did anything here. We're not sure that they were the ones who did the hacking. There's no evidence that Putin even has a preference, let alone that he's pursuing some master plan to implement that preference. 

Obama basically ordered Brennan and Clapper to go back and take another look, meaning to revise what their own intelligence professionals were telling them. Exactly what happened, by the way, with the Iraq war, when there were all sorts of analysts inside the CIA telling Dick Cheney and the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz, that they did not believe that Saddam Hussein had an active WMD program. You may remember the very bizarre story in Pat Leahy's memoir, where he says he was jogging on the street with his wife or walking on the street with this wife and these two guys who he didn't recognize came up to them as joggers and kind of whispered in Pat Lahey's ear like, hey, take a look at file number 14 in the CIA briefing that you have in the Senate.

He went and looked at it. It was filled with documents raising serious doubts about the WMD claims. And then they did it again, a few days later, and they said, “Have you taken a look at file 6?” He went there and found even more convincing evidence. He did end up voting against it but never revealed to the public that those documents were there, let alone that any of that happened, because he was too much of a coward. But he did write about it in his books. 

So, there were parts of the intelligence community, the parts that were the actual professional analysts, who resisted the idea that they were weapons of obstruction. That's when they got George Tenet, the CIA director, to say, “Oh, it's a slam dunk.” They created their own intelligence teams who were ideologically driven, who would give them what they wanted. They had Colin Powell go to the U.N. and use his credibility, squander his credibility to represent that fake evidence, that fake intelligence. 

This is exactly what happened here: the intelligence professionals with no real stake in the game, career intelligence officials, were saying, “There's really not much here, not very much at all, that we could actually provide you to bolster these conclusions.” And they just went back and found whatever they wanted and concluded whatever they wanted and started leaking it to The Washington Post and The New York Times and it became something that was considered not just possible, but basically proven truth. 

The idea that Trump and Russia were in bed together, that Putin had blackmail leverage over Trump, became the leading narrative of the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency for the first 18 months through the Mueller investigation, drowning out all of our other politics in utter and complete fraud and hoax. We now see the actual details of what happened, which, for me, at the time, were extremely obvious, extremely visible, but the rest of the media – other than the few exceptions I named, there were a few others, some right-wing reporters were doing excellent work, Molly Hemingway and Chuck Ross doing real day-to-day reporting, a couple of others as well – but most of the media just didn't tolerate any kind of questioning of the Russiagate narrative. There was no place other than Fox News to go and question it or criticize it, not in the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, or The New York Times, or The Washington Post, not in any of the other cable shows, and anyone questioning the Russiagate narrative was expelled from left liberal precincts. It became some sort of heresy to even question it when the whole thing was a scam and a fraud from the start. 

I do not think there will be any accountability for this, in large part because, let's remember that that Supreme Court immunity case that liberals raised hell over and said was some kind of newly invented precedent to immunize Donald Trump to allow him to commit crimes in office, as I pointed out at the time, was neither new nor radical. But what it also did was immunize every other president besides Trump, past, present and future, from crimes they committed in office as well, as long as it's in the exercise of their Article II powers. That means Biden got immunized. It means George Bush got immunized. It means Barack Obama got immunized. It means whoever follows Trump got immunized. 

Whatever else is true, clearly, everything that Barack Obama is accused of having been doing was in the exercise of his Article II powers, namely, overseeing and directing the intelligence agency. Even if he did it corruptly, even if he did it criminally, the scope of the immunity from the Supreme Court was so broad that even manipulating intelligence is not subject to criminal prosecution because that would be a violation of the separation of powers by having the judiciary punish presidents for the exercise of their Article II powers. That's what the Supreme Court decision was. 

Theoretically, John Brennan or others in the intelligence community, James Clapper, people inside the Obama White House could theoretically be prosecuted, but the history of the expanded Article II powers that long predated this immunity decision that led to it, as I pointed out at the time, as they documented at great length, despite it being picked up as some brand new, radical new idea just to protect Trump, in fact, it was the logical conclusion of the expansion of executive power. The immunity provided to them makes it extremely unlikely that any of these people is going to be held criminally responsible. There are questions of Statute of Limitations, even if they could be held criminally liable, for example, for perjury, we're talking now about nine years ago, events from nine, eight, seven years ago, a lot of the Statute of Limitations have already elapsed. 

But at the very least, this should be considered a nail in the coffin, not just of the fact that this was a fraud perpetrated on the American people for a long time, using the abuses of the intelligence community to do so, but that it was very deliberate, it was very knowing, it was very conscious, by the people at the highest levels of our government. It's just yet another case where the most damaging and the most extreme abrasive hoaxes happen when the intelligence community, the White House and their media partners unite to disseminate lies to the American public day after day, week after week, month after month, that they constantly reinforce. 

And yeah, some of them are trying to draw this distinction between “having Russia hack the election” in terms of whether they hacked the voting systems and altered the results versus whether they hacked the election metaphorically by hacking the DNC and Podesta's emails and then changing the course of the election. But at the time, that distinction was never drawn. There was a reason they repeated over and over and over; there are montages people have made, of every major media outlet, of every major figure of politicians in the Democratic Party, over and over, obviously through a coordinated script, saying the Russians hacked our election. And the message got to the American people: 70% of Americans two years later in polling believed that Hillary Clinton was the rightful winner of the 2016 election, but that the Russians had hacked into our electoral system and changed the voting outcome. 

You may recall the very notorious incident at The Intercept: a person inside the government named Reality Winner leaked to The Intercept a document and The Intercept handled it extremely carelessly. They allowed people to believe that I was the one who did it and oversaw it and, in fact, I hated this story from the beginning. I didn't even believe it should be worked on because the document was so unreliable. But they mishandled it to such an extent because they were so eager to get it published, to show the media that, despite my constant skepticism, vocal, vehement, constant skepticism about Russiagate, that they were going to join the real part of the media, and impress The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NBC News, by showing that they were willing to do a major story, bolstering the Russiagate, fraud.  

The whole point of that document was a very speculative memo that had been written, suggesting that the Russians had succeeded in tests on how to tap into our electoral system to basically bolster the idea that the Russians succeeded in changing vote totals to help Donald Trump win the 2016 election. That was what the big, huge, important disclosure from Reality Winner was, that The Intercept fell lock, stock and barrel because they wanted to. 

But even on the question not the weather they hacked the election in terms of the electoral system and changing vote totals, but in the metaphoric way, they're now trying to mean that they intended it to be, namely, that the Russians played a key role in that election, that it was Vladimir Putin's determination to help Trump win, that they hacked the DNC and Podesta emails to help that Kremlin goal that there was very little to no evidence for that either, and the intelligence community was extremely reluctant and dubious to endorse it, basically were forced to, when Obama ordered them to go back and make sure that they had released something before his leaving that allowed the media to believe that this was the overwhelming consensus of the intelligence committee. 

That is a gigantic scandal. It's not surprising. Something I believed for a long time is exactly what happened. It seemed so obvious at the time. Probably, other than the Snowden story, maybe the big investigation we did here in Brazil in 2019 and 2020 that resulted in Lula being freed from prison, I can't recall any story, any reporting I did that generated more contempt and hatred and pushback because it was a religion to the mainstream media and the Democratic Party. And not just the partisans of the Democratic Party, but most of the liberal left part of the party, though they deny it now, bought into this Russiagate story as well. And I do think it's so refreshing anytime you get disclosures of classified documents that are concealing, not information that might harm the American public or the national security of the United States, that they're disclosed, but that will harm the reputation of people in charge because it shows corruption that they abused the secrecy powers to conceal. 

Unfortunately, there is this skepticism that it's being done to distract from Epstein and partially it probably is. And there's going to be very little coverage of this because the media outlets that would cover it, that should cover it, are the ones who are the leading perpetrators of it. How can they without admitting massive guilt? They're never going to do it, they still haven't done it to this day, despite being caught lying repeatedly that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a much more straightforward lie that they got caught disseminating over and over before the election. So, I don't expect this to do much. 

You can see the only people who are talking about this are the people who were skeptical of the Russiagate story from the start. A lot of vindication is definitely deserved. People should claim it. It's an important story to explain to the public. But the people who really deserve accountability for this probably aren't going to get any and that's one of the major problems of our system. And until about a month ago, that's what the MAGA movement was saying was so important about the Epstein files as well, that people engaged in wrongdoing will face no accountability because these documents have been hidden. It seems like these documents are going to remain hidden, even more so because of the new determination by President Trump, for whatever his reasons, to keep them hidden and even to disparage their reliability or authenticity, even if they did get released. 

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All right, Columbia University and the White House announced a major new deal with the Trump Administration to restore their funding. The Trump White House cut off all research funding for Columbia, threatened to punish it in all sorts of other ways based on alleged claims that they tolerate antisemitism, that they allow Jewish students to be harassed, all those claims that the Trump administration has been making gain greater control of the curriculum at colleges, speech codes at colleges, faculty hiring at colleges. Columbia capitulated as it was clear they were going to do and they made this big announcement today.

@samsonite about that deal asked this: 

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God, you must be very well-spoken, very polite if you have to apologize for “what the hell is going on here” and say, “pardon my language.” For a lot of people, that is actually very elevated language, so congratulations on that. 

And then, there's a related issue that I'll get to with this next question, but the Columbia deal basically doesn't make sense on its own, because the idea is it's a deal to restore financing of the U.S. government to Colombia, even though part of the deal is that Colombia has to pay $200 million to the Trump administration, kind of as a punishment or a fee, they're accepting that they'll lose $200 million for all that naughty and bad things that they did in allowing too much criticism of Israel, and allowing protests to get out of control in the view of the Trump administration – in general, just allowing too much antisemitic thoughts and ideas and expression to the point that Jewish students are being endangered. There are also lawsuits brought by Jewish students against Columbia that Columbia is now agreeing to pay millions of dollars in order to settle. 

So, congratulations to the very put-upon, marginalized and oppressed Jewish students at Columbia who are now going to get major payoffs for all the hardship and the harassment and the oppression and marginalization they had to endure from seeing protests that made them uncomfortable. 

You can believe that Columbia University allowed the protest to get out of hand if you want. We've gone over this many times before. The history of student protests in this country has been an iconic part of the college experience. The protest against the Vietnam War in the ‘60s were infinitely more disruptive and radical than the protests throughout 2023, mostly into 2024, at most campuses where the resistance was largely symbolic. The campus protests at almost every school, including Columbia, were filled with Jewish students themselves, despite all the speech about how these protests were dangerous and harassing for Jewish students; huge numbers of Jews composed these protests and these encampments. We interviewed several of them to the point that every Friday night, inside the Columbia encampments, supposedly the most antisemitic one, the most dangerous one, with a history at the school of antisemitism, there were Shabbat dinners for all the protesters where Muslim, Christian and Jewish students, as part of these protests, would all get together for Shabbat dinner. They celebrated Muslim holidays and Christian holidays together. 

So, there was a huge exaggeration, which there always is, of any threat anytime the government wants to seize power over our private institutions or academic institutions. There's also a lot of misconception about the funding that comes from the U.S. government to these universities. The government doesn’t fund universities and just say, here's $500 million for you to use how you want. They task these universities who can attract the greatest minds from all over the world to pay for research facilities and labs, to research cures and treatments, to research all sorts of technology, including military technology. That's where a lot of military technology comes from. It's not a charity. It's being done to keep the United States competitive. A lot of the research ends up being done in our elite universities and never before has this money come with attachments about what views can be heard on campus or what kinds of professors can teach certain things and how they have to be approved by the government. 

So, two of the things that Columbia University has done that jeopardize free speech rights and academic freedom, not for foreign students and not in ways that pertain to the right to protest, it has nothing to do with the protest, it has nothing do with foreign students, it's purely about the expression of ideas, the peaceful expression of ideas in a classroom, in a student newspaper or what can be taught in schools. Part of it is that the curriculum for certain departments, obviously beginning with the Middle East Studies Department, which is the one of greatest interest to the government because that's where Israel can be criticized and discussed, now has to be subject to the review of the federal government. And on top of that, and even worse, the Trump administration demanded that Columbia adopt what Harvard has already adopted under government pressure and other universities as well, which is a radically expanded hate speech code that outlaws and bans ideas that have always been permissible to express at our leading universities under the First Amendment and the basic notions of academic freedom, but that are not outlawed. 

You're not allowed, for example, to call Israel a racist endeavor, even though you're allowed to call the United States a racist endeavor, even though you're allowed call any other country a racist endeavor, just not Israel. You're not allowed to say that Jews played a role in killing Jesus, even though Christians have believed this for centuries: not allowed to say. It's not like you can say it and then other people get to debate it. That's now deemed antisemitic. You can't subject Israel to criticism that you can't prove you subject other countries equally to the exact same criticism. So, like if you criticize Israel for engaging in a genocide, but you haven't said the same thing about some faction in the Sudan that does the same things, you can be guilty of antisemitism. Even you may not talk about the Sudan because your government has no role in it, while your government funds and arms what's happening and what's being done in Gaza. 

Suddenly, you have this burden of proof when you criticize Israel to show that you criticize other countries in exactly the same way. You don't have that burden to prove for any other country. You can criticize China without having to prove that you criticized other countries in the same ways. The burden is only for Israel. You're not allowed to say that certain Jewish individuals seem to have more loyalty to Israel than they do to the United States, even though it's so clearly true. People like Ben Shapiro and Bari Weiss and so many others, you are not allowed to say that anymore, not allowed to express that. If you do, you're now in violation of the expanded hate speech code. And the whole point of this is to severely chill what can be said to young people about Israel, what young people can say about Israel on college campuses, about risking punishment. 

I want you to think about that for a minute. How unbelievably severe that is, how seriously grave an assault on free speech that is, not in defense of marginalized American groups, which is bad enough, but in defense of a foreign country and its interests and those who are loyal to it. Remember, the Trump movement spent a decade viciously mocking the idea that marginalized groups, minority groups and college campuses were intended to feel safe by banning ideas that make them uncomfortable. Now, that's exactly what the Trump administration required Columbia to do in exchange for having its research funding restored – and Harvard as well. 

What's happening is everybody sees the same polling data that we've shown you, that huge numbers of people in the United States have dramatically revised toward the negative side, their views of Israel and the U.S. relationship to Israel. And there's panic over that among Israel and its loyalists in the United States, who are reacting to that by trying to squash and destroy any place that allows criticism of Israel. Remember, the reason why the TikTok ban passed was not because of the China issue, which never got enough votes or near enough. It only got enough votes after October 7, when enough Democrats got convinced that one of the reasons why so many young people had turned against Israel and were against the war in Gaza was because TikTok was allowing too much anti-Israel pro-Palestinian sentiment to be expressed and they wanted to either force TikTok to close because of that or to force it to be transferred to a corporation that would be much more aggressive about censoring material that the government wanted suppressed. 

Right now, there's this amazing thing happening where Paramount is involved in a major merger. That's the parent company of CBS News and other networks, as well, and the idea of the merger, basically, is that Larry Ellison's son – Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle who's worth $30, $35 billion – his son, the heir to the Ellison fortune and the Ellinson family are fanatical supporters of Israel, are buying CBS News, with “60 Minutes” being one of the examples and “60 Minutes” has been widely criticized for having broadcast a lot of reports that are very pro-Israel, but also some that were critical. And not only is he now taking control of CBS, but he's negotiating with Bari Weiss to buy her Israeli government state outlet, the Free Press, for something like $200 million. And not only will the Free Press then become part of CBS News, but she will have some sort of ombudsman role or even a correspondent role at “60 Minutes.” 

So, you see this change in public opinion about Israel, and then you see the response, which is attacking all of our major institutions, imposing censorship on them, and using billionaire wealth to buy up these media outlets, and then installing within them people who are going to ensure that the content is completely pro-Israel. I hear all the time, they ask, like, “Why do you talk about Israel so much? Why are you so obsessed with Israel?” Obsessed with Israel? These are the people who are passing laws and bills and doing things every single day on behalf of Israel. The people inside government, in the largest corporations, and now in our academic institutions. 

Of course, I'm going to report on it. I'm going to focus on it a lot more when our government is paying for what I think is the greatest atrocity in humanitarian crime of the 21st century, which is the genocide and mass starvation in Gaza. But beyond that, it has all kinds of repercussions here at home. And they never stop. And here's just one more example. 

This is from someone called @YourLastUberDriver trying to think of what the implications of that might be. But I guess it's inspiring in the sense that if you're afraid there's a disappearance of Uber drivers, this person who asked this question will be there toward the end. They're going to be your last Uber driver. And they seem very wise, very reliable, so perhaps that's good. 

@YourLastUberDriver says this: 

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Yes, there is bipartisan legislation designed to impose greater censorship powers over the internet, over Big Tech, which we all agreed, I thought, was a terrible thing. It has bipartisan support. It's led by Congressman Josh Gottheimer of New, who's a fanatical supporter of Israel, he's a Democrat from New Jersey, as well as Don Bacon, who is a Republican from Nebraska, who is also a fanatical Israel supporter. And it comes from the ADL, whose job is to censor American discourse on behalf of Israel. 

Here's Congressman Gottheimer and Congressman Don Bacon at a George Newt conference, heralding their censorship legislation to force Big Tech to censor what they regard as antisemitic. 

Video. Josh Gottheimer, Don Bacon, AD. July 24, 2025.

I want to just emphasize that last point. He's talking about his legislation and then he says what he's particularly proud of. Wow, that's something to be so proud of. You're introducing a censorship law for American citizens, and you have the approval and background of a group with a long, aggressive tradition of demanding that people be fired or censored if they become critical of Israel. Congratulations. 

The Republican Congressman Bacon is a member of Congress who receives massive funding from AIPAC, needless to say, people are offended by his views. He's a public figure and he gets criticized on Twitter, and he sees it. People are calling him a Zionist, someone who's too loyal to Israel. He doesn't like it. And now he wants to enact a bill drafted by the ADL to force Big Tech to censor what he considers antisemitism. We don't think there's anti-black racism all over Twitter. Go look at Ilhan Omar's tweets and things that people say to her in response, or Jasmine Crockett. Go look at what Pete Buttigieg gets. You don't think there are all sorts of very anti-gay animus directed at him. Every single person in public life, no matter who you are, deals with that. Most of us are adults. We understand that it's actually healthier to allow free speech. I mean, if we hear things we really dislike, that are really ugly, it's in our bloodstream as Americans to kind of believe that about free speech, that yes, you get insults and all sorts of vituperative comments about things about you and who you are. But most of us don't have the impulse to go and censor that. And it's especially important to allow the public to express criticisms of political figures, elected officials in Washington, who are doing something like financing and arming a war. You're allowed to speak aggressively toward them, even if they don't like it. He's not even Jewish. Josh Gottheimer is Jewish. Congressman Bacon is not even Jewish. He's like, “I'm getting so much antisemitism in my Twitter feed.” Who cares? Stop reading it if it really bothers you. But passing a bill to force Big Tech to censor the stuff that you think is unpleasant!

Why is antisemitic speech more disturbing to you than anti-Black speech or anti-Muslim speech or anti-LGBT speech or anti-immigrant speech, which is also all over the place? My view on all of it is the same, which is that it's not the role of the government nor Big Tech to censor any of it. But this is what's happening throughout the democratic world. It's particularly happening in the EU, Canada, and, worst of all, in Brazil. 

We have a First Amendment that makes it more difficult, and that's why they're trying to outsource it to Big Tech. This is exactly what I thought we were all so angry about: what the Biden administration did when they forced Big Tech to censor dissent on COVID, on the 2020 election and on Ukraine. And that's what I mean. I'm the one obsessed with Israel when you have everyday members of Congress like this standing up and introducing new bills on behalf of a foreign government that attack our free speech rights as Americans. Yeah, I'm going to talk about that a lot. 

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All right, here is @AntiWarism who says: 

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Yes, this was the idea of “cancel culture” and the objections to it. It wasn't about government attacks on free speech, which is a violation of the First Amendment. It was the ideal that if you express views that are disliked by mainstream thought, that now you get fired, you get canceled, and it happens not just to people in prominent positions, but also to people on lower-level positions. 

So, here's the example. Honestly, I hate this whole format that has become popular, this Jubilee format. I can't stand how Mehdi Hassan debates. He wrote a book saying, “I'm the greatest debater” and really all he does is just filibuster and talk over people. Maybe you get out four or five words until he starts speaking over you and he thinks that's somehow an effective way of debating. 

But here's the person who basically self-identified as a fascist when Mehdi accused him of being one; he then lost his job. I think it's like a 21-year-old kid, all these people at this place were quite young and here's what happened. 

Video. Mehdi Hassan, Connor Estelle, Jubilee. July 30, 2025.

Can I understand why an employer would want to disassociate themselves from that person, saying that in that manner? Yes, I can understand that.  But I also think that if we have this climate where people cannot say what they believe unless it's completely acceptable to power factions or mainstream forces, that even though we have a First Amendment that restricts what the government can do in theory, oftentimes, cultural repression and social ostracization are much more potent and effective tools for controlling ideas – in fact, George Orwell has wrote a preface to Animal Farm, where he basically said that although the Soviet Union has very overt forms of repression and censorship, if you criticize Stalin, the KGB shows up at your house and takes you away and sends you to a gulag, in Siberia or whatever, that actually the British form of censorship is much more effective. It's basically diluting people into thinking that they're free, but making sure they get fired, they're unemployable, they don't get heard in the media, if they express any opinions outside the very narrow range of accepted opinions. Ironically, his preface couldn't be published because it was too sensitive. It seemed like almost too pro-Russian at a time when the West was entering the Cold War. His preface was censored, but it's now available; you can go read it online. I think it's absolutely right. 

There were all these examples in the Black Lives Matter movement, or Me Too, when low-level workers got fired for any kind of questioning or deviation from the right language. They had a truck driver who supposedly made the okay sign at a traffic stop, which was interpreted as a white supremacist message, and he got fired. Media outlets were doxing people for comments they were leaving to get them fired. That climate is incredibly repressive, intimidating, but after October 7, huge numbers of people in media, Hollywood and politics and journalism were fired for expressing criticism of Israel and their destruction of Gaza in academia as well. And suddenly, all the concerns about cancel culture disappeared. 

So, if you're 21 years old and you basically say “I want Trump to be a king and an autocrat and that's because I'm a fascist, self-identifying as a fascist is going to fall rather shockingly on the ears of a lot of people in the United States. And if you're an employer who deals with the public and you're a private company, especially if you are in a certain community and deal with a certain group of people, it might be very harmful to your business interests to have somebody like that employed. So I understand why that could happen. 

Again, if this were an isolated case, I would say: when you live in a society, you do have to kind of think about how you express yourself and what effect it has on others; if you decide you don't, then you probably are going to suffer consequences. It’s just a lesson you learn in life, living in a society; you have to accommodate, to some extent, how you're perceived.

But I also think that it can be very dangerous if it becomes too much of an automatic reaction, which, in a lot of different ways, I think it became, and a lot of the right was very opposed to these sorts of things when it was conservatives who were largely the target of it, and then, after October 7, a lot of that changed. People started applauding much more draconian forms of cancel culture like Bill Ackman, spearheading and organizing a blacklist among the most powerful law firms, Wall Street banks and hedge funds to vow never to hire undergraduate kids, 18 to 22, who sign a letter condemning Israel for their use of indiscriminate violence in Gaza, trying to make sure they're unemployable and having mass firings of people who express similar views. I noticed the disappearance of the concerns over cancel culture when that happened. And so, if you're going to be concerned with cancel culture and you don't apply it equally, it's like anything, not really a principle. 

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All right, last question is from @KCM71, who says this:

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Let me say, I find this dynamic so fascinating that whenever the American left is faced with a nominee from the Democratic Party that they hate, they are Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or countless senators or whomever, they're told it's your obligation to support and vote for whoever your party nominates, whether you like them or not. But the minute there's a nominee of the Democratic Party that the Democratic Party nominates who the establishment hates and the left likes, that obligation disappears. 

I still believe, in 2016, had the DNC not cheated and Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination, Democratic Party elites absolutely would have done everything to prevent him from being president, even if it meant electing Trump because what party leaders typically fear the most is the loss of their prerogatives within their own party. They would rather lose and keep control of the party than win if it means this shifting to some new group or some new generation. 

We especially saw that when Jeremy Corbyn became the leader of the Labour Party and the vast majority of Blairites and people in the center and the center-right of that party, overwhelmingly and overtly sought to destroy him, not to get a new party leader in, but to ensure that he lost the election. They would rather have lost to Boris Johnson, had Boris Johnson become prime minister, which is what happened, than lose control of the Labour Party by winning under Jeremy Corbyn. 

This is why I don't think that the Democratic establishment and elites believe they can stop Zohran at this point, in part because the alternatives are just so weak. I mean, you have Andrew Cuomo completely plagued by all sorts of scandal, just old, not really having anything to do with New York City, clearly not even wanting to be mayor; you have Eric Adams who caught red-handed taking bribes from Turkey and was only let go because he did a deal with the Trump administration to allow ICE to operate in New York City and then Curtis Sliwa, who's not a serious candidate, but are going to divide the vote enough to ensure that Zohran will win – not 100% sure anything could happen, but I think they're kind of resigned to it. 

But they also are afraid, more so – you see this with Hakeem Jeffries: Zohran Mamdani won Hakeem Jeffries’ congressional district by 12 points and yet, Hakeem Jeffries, the head of the Democratic House caucus in New York, refuses to endorse Zohran Mamdani. Left-wing people to this day got angry that Bernie Sanders didn't endorse Hillary Clinton quickly enough. He went around the country campaigning for her, but they say he didn't do it enthusiastically enough. 

But look at the prerogatives they take for themselves and there's never a point at which the left says, God, these people hate us so much. Like, why are we giving them our support when they so blatantly subvert and sabotage our candidates. You would think they would just have some dignity and finally leave. Jeremy Corbyn finally left the Labour Party, but only this week. He and a much younger, leftist member of parliament whose parents or grandparents were Pakistani immigrants to the U.K. – but she was born in the U.K. as her parents were third generation now, U.K. citizens – the two of them are the co-leaders of this new party in protest of the Labour Party's support for Israel and other policies as well because they concluded that there's no way within the Labour Party to actually reform. They will sabotage you if you try. 

And this is something we saw with AOC, when AOC was running and won her primary, in 2018, against a very senior member of the Democratic leadership, Joe Crowley, who was really in line to become House Speaker once Nancy Pelosi left, she sounded all these radical notes. I interviewed her. I was amazed at how thoughtful she seemed to be about making sure that her primary criticisms are directed mostly at the Democratic Party, how she understood that her main job had to be to go in and change the Democratic Party and not the Republican Party, so that there were two actual parties with two different sets of views. She gets in and she understands that to play the game, to get ahead, to gain power, you have to compromise constantly, become a good Democrat. She's barely distinguishable from Nancy Pelosi at this point. Remember, AOC just voted last week to send $500 million in military aid to Israel while calling it a genocide. Even while four members of her own party, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Al Green, all voted for Marjorie Taylor Greene's amendment to block that money from going there. AOC voted to send $500 million to Israel. 

One of the things that got my attention about her in 2018 was when she said – this was at the time when the Palestinians were doing their peaceful march up to the border fence, and the Israelis started just sniping them to death – and AOC said, “It's time for the Democratic Party to stop supporting these grotesque human rights abuses by Israel.” And I thought, OK, that's interesting to me. And now, here she is just a few years later, sending $500 million to Israel while pretending to believe that Israel is engaged in a genocide. 

So, there is the very real question of whether somebody who's very politically ambitious, as Zohran Mamdani is, can possibly change anything with any party system that is designed to destroy any challenge to its leadership, to its core dogma, to its donor base. And you see him making some concessions already. And while I still hope he wins given the alternatives, I mean the part of the debate alone where they said, “What's your first foreign trip going to be? And they all said, “We're going to go to the Holy Land and we're going to go right to Israel and we going to take our first trip to Israel” and he said, “I'm going to stay at home and work on the affordability issues facing the people of our city.” That alone, that kind of politics – as mayor of an American city, my job is to focus on the American people and not go pay some homage to Israel or to some other foreign country or that he understands that affordability and economic populism is the key issue, not culture war stuff, which is what he ran on in his campaign – those are the kind of things, that populist messages, that I think we need more of, both on the left and the right. But if you ask me, do I think he's going to immediately start compromising? Then my answer is probably going to be yes, because he's going to have to work with the Democratic Party infrastructure to get anything done. 

I think I might have talked about this before, but I'll just tell this quick story. When my husband got elected to become an elected official and got into elected office, first as a city councilman in Rio de Janeiro, and then as a member of the Brazilian Congress, I saw this firsthand. He wanted to go and introduce packages and laws and projects to help the people of his community, the people who voted for him, and whom he felt an obligation to serve. The only reason why he was interested in politics was to try to change people's material lives for the better. And then you get there, and you hear like, “Oh, that seems like a good bill. We're not sure we can get it to the fore, though. But if you're willing to support this project of mine, it's kind of corrupt, like just about greasing the wheels, then, maybe, you'll be able to get your bill to the fore and we support you.” You're suddenly faced with this choice: do I now start compromising and becoming part of the system in the hope that I can actually get the things done that I want to get done or do I just stand on principle and say, no, I'm not going to play your game, even if it means I can never get my things to the floor? Maybe in 10 years you can use your charisma and ability to get a platform. 

When you first get there, you're faced with these huge obstacles where, if you want to do anything, you have to play the game. And then, at some point, you have to consider how much are you really compromising to serve your original goals, or how much are you now compromising because you want to get on the key committees, and what are the motives that you want to get on the keys committees, is it because that's a better path to power? It's a very, very difficult road to navigate. Even if you arrive with the best of intentions, you find yourself in this corrupt, sleazy system constructed to co-opt you and to basically get you to play the game that you were running to destroy and it's very hard once you're immersed in it to see what the real principles are and what the real compromises are that are going to actually undermine what you set out to be. I think the only way to do that is by avoiding the structures that are already so fundamentally rotted and so fundamentally corrupt that they're going to contaminate you the more you attach yourself to them. 

I think being part of the Democratic Party is going to guarantee that you end up on the AOC to Pelosi path. Remember, Nancy Pelosi, when she started a career from San Francisco, was considered way to the left in the Democratic Party and by the end, she had no ideology. She was just a manager, like a technocrat, supporting wars and Wall Street and finance, insider trading. That's the path that you end up on and that the system is guaranteed to lure you into. You have to be someone who just has a personality that's very combative, very willing to sacrifice your own ambition and self-interest in career pursuits to combat. 

And if you ask me if that's Zohran Mamdani, I don't know him well enough to say one way or the other for sure, but it doesn't seem like that's what he is to me. Kind of like what Obama pretended to be and then wasn't. Every 10 years the Democratic Party offers a new person like this: here's the exciting one, here's a new one, here's the one who's really going to be on your side. We know you hate our party, we know you hit our dogma, our leadership, but look, we found something really new and exciting for you and it keeps people, young people and people identified as the left, on that path to identifying with the Democratic Party. 

Oftentimes, the Democratic Party changes very little; usually, that's the case. Everybody likes to keep up hope. Nobody likes to be defeatist or nihilistic but wants to believe that there's something hopeful. I'm the same way. Why would I wake up and focus on these sorts of things every day unless I believe that there were prospects and hope for positive change? 

I've seen positive change. You look at history, you look at current politics. It can happen. Changes in public opinion can happen. You want to believe that if you didn't believe that you would go do something else, if you thought it was all futile. But the road of being lured in by outsiders to the Democratic Party who seek to get into the Democratic Party and assume power within it is one fraught with almost nothing but disappointment, defeat and betrayal, ultimately, a draining of any belief that that continues to be the correct path. And people want to believe that. So, they keep kind of being vulnerable to that sales pitch. 

Maybe Zohran will be different. It's possible. But I certainly won't be shocked sitting here six months from now or a year from now if someone comes and shows me or I see for myself all the evidence that he's basically morphing into AOC and then Nancy Pelosi, that will not shock me in the slightest. 

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Aaron Maté on More Russiagate Fallout, Protests in Ukraine and Israel's Strikes on Syria with Special Guests John Solomon, Marta Havryshko, and Joshua Landis
System Update #491

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.  

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I'm Aaron Maté, sitting in for Glenn Greenwald. 

Tonight, we'll be looking at three major stories: the latest in Russiagate and the latest as well in Ukraine and Syria. There's a through line to all three of these stories. That's the CIA. That is right. From Russiagate to Ukraine to Syria, a lot of the mess that we're still dealing with after so many years in all these major stories runs through the CIA. 

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Interview: John Solomon 

During Donald Trump's first term, the dominant story of his presidency was the allegation that he had secretly conspired with Russia as part of a massive Russian interference campaign to install him in office. A lot of this story was fueled by intelligence officials who fueled the Russiagate conspiracy theory with anonymous stories to the press. Well, now we all know, after multiple investigations, that a lot of it was a scam and we continue to learn more. The new Director of National Intelligence under Trump, Tulsi Gabbard, has been declassifying critical information on the Russiagate story and unveiling a brand-new batch of newly disclosed records. Tulsi Gabbard accused Barack Obama of being a part of a plot against Trump. 

Video. Tulsi Gabbard, White House July 23, 2025.

So, that's Tulsi Gabbard accusing Barack Obama and other officials in his administration of being part of a coup against Trump. 

I think the language is a little bit too strong. I also think that the administration has messed up some of the messaging here in putting out the Russiagate documents. They've conflated, for example, vote hacking and email hacking. Email hacking was the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate and if you listen to the messaging that Tulsi Gabbard has been putting out, she's conflating the two. 

So, there have been some mistakes in putting out this story, and it also comes out of time when there's a lot of anger at the Trump administration for reneging on their promise to bring disclosure to the story of Jeffrey Epstein, which Donald Trump is very much implicated in. However, that does not negate the fact that there are really important disclosures in these new Russiagate documents. 

I have a brand-new article at RealClear Investigations talking about what I think is the essential story here, which is that the core allegation at the heart of Russiagate, along with the conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots, which nobody believes anymore. But the other major story was that Russia waged a massive interference campaign, and the heart of that supposed interference campaign was that Russian stole emails from the Democratic Party and released them via WikiLeaks. 

Well, if you read the new documents, you will see that U.S. intelligence officials who lodged this Russian email hacking allegation buried the fact that there was dissent at the highest levels that Russia was responsible for the hack and release of these emails. The NSA and the FBI, two premier U.S. intelligence agencies, expressed low confidence in that Russian hacking allegation. That assessment from the FBI and the NSA, which was suppressed until now, until Tulsi Gabbard just released it. 

So even though the messaging has been screwed up, the disclosures are important, and transparency is paramount because whether you want to think this was a coup or not, this was an attempt to frame Trump and his campaign as Russian agents and accuse Russia of a massive interference campaign that was aimed at destroying American democracy. There have been many consequences to this Russiagate scandal, including fueling tensions with Russia, and I think helping to lead to the current crisis we're in inside Ukraine. 

To discuss all this and more, I am joined by one of the premier journalists on the Russiagate story. John Solomon is the founder of the website, Just the News, a veteran reporter who's previously worked for The Washington Post and Associated Press, and he's been on the Russiagate story since day one. 

Aaron Maté: John Solomon, thanks so much for joining us on System Update. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, great to be with you. Great to join you. 

 

Aaron Maté: You have covered Russiagate extensively, and we've just gotten a series of really important document releases declassified by the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. For people not following this story as closely as you and I have, what do you think is most important to know, and what revelations stand out to you? 

 

John Solomon: What we now know is that both our intelligence and our law enforcement communities were hijacked by political operatives in the 2016 election to take the normal process of how you would evaluate election interference, which goes on, by the way, in every election with multiple countries, and tried to turn it into a political weapon and to create the perception in the public that Donald Trump conspired with Vladimir Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton. 

That concept starts with Hillary Clinton herself. The intelligence committee intercepts a conversation indicating that Hillary personally approved a plan in mid-July to hang a fake Russian shingle on Donald Trump's campaign house, basically, play a dirty trick and make it look like Vladimir and Donald were together in the election. The President of the United States at the time, Barack Obama, was personally warned about this on or about July 25 by John Brennan. Then, five days later, the president does not stop the FBI when the FBI decides to open up on that allegation. Between July and November, there's a concerted effort to get an FBI investigation going, to get a FISA warrant going, to then leak the information to try to get voters to believe this false story that was an illusion of the Clinton campaign. 

Donald Trump still wins the election, not with Vladimir Putin's help, but with the help of the American people. In December, with Hillary Clinton chastened by her loss, the intelligence community, working with John Brennan, tries to create a plausible explanation that Hillary only lost because Vladimir Putin had hijacked the election for Donald Trump. And they do this over the objections of career CIA officials. They do this in violation of the Intelligence Committee's directive rules; they do it by relying on a document that, by December 2016, the Steele Dossier, we all know it now, had been fully discredited, yet is used to drive a conclusion that Vladimir Putin was trying specifically to help Donald Trump win. It's really dramatic how it happens. 

On December 8, 2016, after the election, the Intelligence Committee was going to come to Barack Obama and say, “Hey, we assess that Russia, like it always did, gotten meddled in the election a little bit, but it did not have a favorite candidate.” In fact, it so much didn't have a favored candidate that it dropped out of its active measures, its “dirty tricks,” its intelligence, in October, the very month, if you were going to try to influence the election, you would most be active, right? If you wanted Hillary or Donald Trump to win, October's the month when people are making up their minds: that's when you would do your most active things. Putin pulls out of the election in October. 

On December 8, they were going to tell Barack Obama that that briefing had been canceled. The next day, Barack Obama orders a new review, led only by John Brennan, James Comey, and the NSA director, and within a few short weeks, they flip-flop the conclusions and say, “Oh, we've now decided, magically, that Vladimir Putin was specifically trying to help Donald Trump.” The only way they can get there, by today's explosive revelations that Tulsi Gabbard gave us, is because they have to use the Steele Dossier, which by that time has been discredited over and over again. Bruce Ohr told them in August that it was not to be relied on. The CIA warned the FBI in September that Steele's network of sources had been infiltrated by Russian intelligence. He needed to be reevaluated. The FBI fires Christopher Steele after catching him leaking the existence of the investigation and his dossier in November, and by December, the FBI has completed a spreadsheet of every sentence of the Steele dossier and concluded they can't corroborate it, or they've debunked every sentence. And despite all that, they decide to use it over the rules of the Intelligence Committee to plant this dirty secret or to plant a lie on the American people that Vladimir Putin helped Donald Trump win the election. 

 

Aaron Maté: I'm personally skeptical that there even was any kind of serious Russian meddling operation at all. There were some Facebook ads, we know about that, and some memes, but in terms of the email hacking, I am even more skeptical now after seeing the newly declassified intelligence. But before I get into that with you, I want to go back to July, because it's really important what you discussed initially. 

So, in July, we learned years later, that the Obama administration got a warning that Russia was aware of a plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia and despite that, as you explained, the Obama administration still let the FBI go ahead with its collusion investigation. And what we also learned way later was that weeks before the FBI opened up its fake collusion investigation into Trump and Russia, Victoria Nuland, who was then a senior State Department official, authorized the FBI to go and collect the Steele dossier, which is the Clinton campaign-funded collection of conspiracy theories. But yet the FBI wants us to believe that it had nothing to do with their decision to open up Crossfire Hurricane, the Trump-Russia occlusion probe. But on the issue of this warning by Brennan, of the so-called Clinton plan intelligence… 

 

John Solomon: Let me stop here, just for one second, because you just said something pretty profound. It's really important to realize that after they're warned that Hillary Clinton's going to plant the dirty trick, the FBI's FISA warrant relies on the direct evidence of that dirty trick. The Steele dossier was a big part of the dirty trick that the Clinton campaign was planting, along with the fake Alpha Bank story. The FBI takes the very fruit of what they know to be a dirty trick because they were warned, and they use it to predicate the investigation. That's what makes it more than just bumbling and stumbling. That's why a lot of people like Kash Patel, who's now open to conspiracy case, believe it was criminal in nature. 

 

Aaron Maté: Absolutely. Okay, speaking of criminal, in early September, weeks after John Brennan shared this information that Russia is aware of a Clinton plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia. All of a sudden, John Brennan sends a criminal referral or an investigative referral to the FBI, to James Comey, to Peter Strzok, warning them about this Clinton plan intelligence, this Clinton plot to falsely tie Trump to Russia. And yet nothing happens, and in fact, years later, James Comey is asked about this in Congress, and he claims it doesn't ring any bells. 

What do you think is going on here? So, Brennan received his intelligence, he warns Obama about it, then in September, why does he all of a sudden send a referral to the FBI? Do you buy James Comey's claim that it doesn't ring any bells? He doesn't remember receiving that referral. 

 

John Solomon: On multiple instances over the last four or five years, including this week when Barack Obama said, “I don't know how they can say I was part of a conspiracy,” I kept thinking back to the figure on the old Hogan Heroes TV show, Sgt. Schultz, who always used to say, “I know nothing,” even though he knew everything that was going on in the camp. 

It's important to realize that these statements are not true, based on the emails, text messages and other evidence we have. Everybody was read into these different developments as they were happening. There's no chance that James Comey can't remember that he was warned that Hillary Clinton was going to hang a dirty shingle on Donald Trump's house called Russia collusion. You just would remember something that important. If it didn't get to him, it would be one of the greatest failures of the FBI. You'd tell your director things of this importance. 

Everybody claims a lack of knowledge, even though they're present for the moments when these happen. Let's take Barack Obama's denial this week, because it can be disassembled so quickly. Barack Obama is basically like, “This is a political weapon; I didn't do anything. I don't even know what they're talking about.” He's in the meeting with Brennan in July when he's told Hillary Clinton's going to do this. In December, he orders the re-review after the Intelligence Committee comes to a conclusion that's different. In January, just 15 days before Donald Trump was going to take office, he presided over the meeting in the White House with Joe Biden, where they were trying to figure out how they can keep the investigation of Mike Flynn open, the incoming national security advisor. 

That is so significant, because one day before, on January 4, the FBI had decided that Mike Flynn had not engaged in a single act of criminality and that he should be cleared in the investigation against him that was launched during the election, it should be shut down. And there is Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and the FBI gang trying to figure out how we can keep this going. When they leave that meeting, there's an FBI agent so disturbed by what happened in that meeting. What he witnessed, he writes down, is our mission here to get the truth for the American people, or are we just trying to trip up Mike Flynn to lie so we can charge him with something? That's what a senior FBI official witnessed the President of the United States engaging in. Barack Obama, I can refresh your recollections pretty quickly. Stop lying to the American people. Own up to what you did. 

 

Aaron Maté: And then you have John Brennan, who testified under oath that the Steele Dossier played no part in the formation of that intelligence community assessment that Barack Obama ordered in December 2016, and that was released to the public in January 2017. John Brennan said to Congress that the Steele Dossier was in no way used for the intelligence community assessment that accused Russia of a sweeping operation to try to elect Trump. 

Now we know that that's false. We've seen the new report by HPSCI, the House Intelligence Committee, that's just been declassified by Tulsi Gabbard, which says that the Steele Dossier was explicitly referenced in the body of the ICA and that John Brennan himself personally argued in favor of including it over the objections of some senior CIA analysts. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, and by the way, Brennan gets very similar testimony to what you show, again, in 2023, which is in the Statute of Limitations right now. There are four bullets upon which the key conclusions of the ICA that was produced in December 2016 rest on one of those bullets, which is the bullet that helps back up the argument that Donald Trump was aided by Putin. Putin's goal was to help Donald Trump win. That bullet refers to Annex 1, which is the annex that we now know to be the Steele Dossier. So, it was used as an analytical product to come to the most contentious of the analytical conclusions, which is that contrary to what the government had been saying for months, now, we're going to say that Putin was trying to help Donald Trump and that rests on the Steele Dossier, which by December, as we've said, was completely debunked by the time. It was not a reliable intelligence product. It contradicts everything you just heard in that clip from John Brennan. 

 

Aaron Maté: Alright, so on the issue of Russian email hacking, which was the core Russiagate allegation – it's actually what triggered Russiagate when CrowdStrike, a firm working for Hillary Clinton's campaign, came out in June 2016 and accused Russia of hacking the DNC. We've learned since then that the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s forensics, even though CrowdStrike redacted its own reports and refused to let the FBI examine the DNC's servers for itself. Just as the FBI relied on the Steele Dossier, I've always flagged this as a major investigative lapse because you're relying on Trump's political opponent for such a critical component of this investigation and now, we've gotten more information that I think bolsters skepticism of this Russian hacking allegation. 

So, even if Russia did hack into the DNC servers which is quite plausible and it seems as if the intelligence community had a basis to believe that the actual evidence that Russia took something from the server and gave it to WikiLeaks remains very thin and now you have, newly released by Tulsi Gabbard, in September 2016, an intelligence community assessment that says the FBI and the NSA had low confidence that Russia actually hacked the emails and gave them to other actors, including WikiLeaks, for publication. We only got that now, this low confidence. Somehow, the FBI, the NSA go from expressing low confidence to going along with the John Brennan-led judgment that actually it was Russia that hacked and leaked the DNC. 

And what happens? Well, the timeline is, after the election, as you mentioned, Barack Obama orders a brand-new assessment and at a December 9 meeting, they decide ‘we're going to make an attribution to Russia.’ Now, missing from that meeting are James Comey and Mike Rogers, the respective heads of the FBI and the NSA, who had at that point still been dissenting on this Russian email hacking claim. What I'm speculating here is that it was at that point that they were told to fall in line, and James Comey, having been blamed for Hillary Clinton losing because of his handling of the Clinton email server investigation, he goes along with it. That's what I'm speculating here. 

What do you think? And what do you make of this very assessment that there was low confidence here? 

 

John Solomon: So, listen, you've done such a great reporting, Aaron, you know, as well as anyone, how elaborate this dirty trick was. I believe that that probably will be what the evidence shows when we're done. This is the time now where we have the contemporaneous documents, but we haven't compelled people to go before a grand jury and find out the truth on this. And I think the next moment, the moment we'll know whether this is going to be a serious move towards accountability or just another great set of Fox News revelations that go away in a few months, is whether Pam Bondi follows the normal procedures for the Justice Department. 

As you laid out, and we've laid out for the last 20 minutes, this is a conspiracy case now. And by the way, Kash Patel opened a predicated conspiracy case in April, looking at the events of 2016 through 2024 as one ongoing conspiracy. Clear Hillary Clinton, hang the Russian shingle on Donald Trump, Hunter Biden's got a Ukraine problem, start Ukraine impeachment, Joe Biden's got to classified documents problem, let's raid Donald Trump's house and find classified documents problem for him. They're looking at that as one continuous conspiracy, which by the way, winds back the statutes. You can now start taking events in 2016 and make them part of the conspiracy. 

If in any other case, a conspiracy case is open, the usual step that the FBI and the Justice Department take is they create a federal strike force. If this was a drug kingpin for the cartels or a godfather for the mafia, the next step is, the FBI predicated a case, you now create a Federal Strike Task Force and you take your best prosecutors and your agents, you make them one team and they look at every overt act and try to tell you whether this rises to the level of a criminal conspiracy. If Pam Bondi does that in the next few days or weeks, then something serious is going on. If she doesn't, then all we have is a lot more detail, but still a very short lack of accountability for the people who are involved in this. 

 

Aaron Maté: One more question on the email hacking. You reported years ago that there were talks with Julian Assange between Assange and the FBI, the Trump administration, where Assange was talking about providing some technical evidence that would rule out the role of state actors, including Russia, in the hack and leak. It was James Comey, I believe, that killed those talks… 

 

John Solomon: That's right, according to, I think it was Adam Waldman, the lawyer for Julian Assange at the time. That's where we learned that information. Yeah, that's what happened. And we have text messages that were going on. You can see in real time, I think Mark Warner and Comey were the ones who seemed to put the kibosh on it. That needs to be looked back now, in light of these other events, because it could be another overt act, another act of cover-up, to try to keep the lid on the dirty trick that started with Hillary Clinton. That's where a strike force and a grand jury could be potentially very helpful because there are still missing pieces of this puzzle. For instance, why didn't the FBI grab the servers? In any other investigation, you wouldn't rely on someone's private vendor and say, trust us, by the way, a private vendor who worked for a client that had a vested interest in the case, Hillary Clinton's and the Democratic National Committee, that's who they're working for at the time, you would grab the servers yourself… 

 

Aaron Maté: As they're framing Trump as a Russian agent…

 

John Solomon: …just like when they got the five thumb drives with all of Hillary Clinton’s exfiltration, you would normally look at that, but they didn't. All of the basic requirements of the FBI DIAG, all of the basic requirements of the U.S. attorney's manual, all the basic requirements of the Intelligence Communities directive, which is the Bible for how you do assessments, all of them get abandoned during this hour and during this window. All of them take all of their training and they cast it aside in order to come up with this ruse. The answer to why they did that will probably determine whether this is criminal in nature or not. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yeah, what did Comey say when he was asked about this by Congress, he said, Well, CrowdStrike, which is working for the Clinton campaign, was a highly respected firm, so nothing to see here. I suppose he could have said the same thing about Christopher Steele, a highly respected agent whom the FBI was also relying on. So, the fact that you have the FBI relying on a Clinton campaign contractor for not just one but two of Russiagate's core allegations, collusion and email hacking, the fact that we're only still getting transparency about this now, eight years later, really is mind-boggling. So you've laid out the fact that we're looking at a conspiracy case here. What are you expecting to happen in the coming months? More document releases? Who do you think they're looking at when it comes to building a criminal case? 

 

John Solomon: Well, listen, you got to have the apparatus to do it. It's one thing for the FBI to open the case and gather the evidence that's currently available, but for the evidence that hasn't been produced and needs to be forcibly produced, you need grand jury power, you need grand jury’s subpoenas. Conspiracies are typically applied to drug cartels and mob cases and things like that. If this is treated like every other case, the next step is to create a strike force and then give that strike force the ability to use a grand jury, maybe you name a special counsel because Donald Trump is the alleged victim for some of this, he creates some independence. Whether they do that or not, if they don't create the strike force, they're not following the normal procedures that a Justice Department would use for a conspiracy case like this. So, the ball is in Pam Bondi's court. The question is, is she going to shoot the three-point shot or not? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I will tell you, the way the Justice Department normally would work, the strike force would be the very next part of the process that you would see unfold in the next week or two. 

 

Aaron Maté: This conspiracy theory that Trump and Russia were in cahoots was so dominant, so widespread and so mainstream. I mean, The New York Times and The Washington Post gave themselves publishers for advancing this conspiracy theory, that I'm not expecting very much accountability from them. But I am wondering if you have thoughts on, first of all, the way Tulsi Gabbard rolled this out, there is a criticism that she conflated in her messaging, vote hacking and email hacking. And I think that criticism actually is correct. I do think she conflated it. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, I think it's right. I agree with you. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yeah, it doesn't change the fact that she revealed important stuff, but the messaging I think has been off. And then you have the fact that Trump is dealing with this Jeffrey Epstein controversy, and there's anger even among some of the MAGA faithful that there have not been the disclosures that they were promised. I'm wondering, do you think that the fact that Trump has been hesitant to address the Jeffrey Epstein issue and told people to move on, that that might undermine the ability to get out and to convince people that this Russiagate stuff really is important? Because what critics will do here is say that Trump and Gabbard are just releasing this to deflect from the Jeffrey Epstein mess. 

 

John Solomon: Yeah, yeah, listen, Donald Trump has been worried about Russia collusion since 2017. So, it's going to be hard to say he suddenly got interested because of Epstein, right? He has cried about this and rightly so for eight years and he's done everything in his power to get the American people the truth because he felt victimized and he felt the American people were victimized. He said that to me several times in interviews and he doesn't want another president ever to face what he faced. So I don't think you can say, “Boy, Donald Trump ramped this up because he to make the Epstein thing.” The Epstein crisis exists because of bad messaging. Pam Bondi was more interested in getting in front of the camera before getting her facts straight before she got in front of the cameras, and so she messed it up. 

I think, in some way, Tulsi Gabbard's rollout on Saturday and some of the messaging in the Friday, Saturday, Sunday time frame was a little messed up. But at the end of the day, they have released really significant evidence. And we, elitists inside the beltway, worry about all the messaging and stuff. The American people just want to know, were they defrauded? And I think in Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, President Trump and the others. We now have a body of evidence that could answer that question for history, could answer that question for the courts and it would be a crying shame if the normal processes of the Justice Department aren't followed in this next step. There are grounds for a criminal conspiracy case and a strike force to be named. Let's see if that happens. I think history will not judge the Epstein matter and this matter in Tulsi on the fumbles, they did make fumbles. I don't disagree with you, I totally agree with you. They'll judge them on, did they handle the evidence right and did we do the right thing? That judgment will come in the next few weeks. We'll know whether Pam Bondi and Tulsi Gabbard get us to the right place or not. Kash Patel has started the process. Let's see if it gets to the right place like every other person who's been accused of a crime would face in similar circumstances. Let's not treat it differently. If they treat it the same way as other criminal scales, I think the American people will be forgiving and remember this as a good period. 

 

Aaron Maté: John Solomon of Just the News, thank you so much for joining us. 

 

John Solomon: Aaron, great work. You are such a great reporter. I read you all the time and congratulations for the work you've done in this story. 

 

Aaron Maté: Well, likewise, you've been an essential voice understanding this whole Russiagate mess and I really appreciate you taking the time to share some of your insight with us. 

 

John Solomon: Anytime. Great honor to be on the show. 

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Interview:  Marta Havryshko

We’re turning now to Ukraine, a crisis that was very much fueled by the Russiagate controversy. Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy is facing the biggest protests he's seen since Russia invaded more than three years ago. 

To discuss Zelenskyy's current turmoil, I spoke to Marta Havryshko. She is visiting assistant professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. 

 

Aaron Maté: So for people who want to know what's going on in Ukraine, you have these massive protests now outside Zelenskyy's presidential residence calling out him cracking down on an anti-corruption bureau. What should people know? What's going on in Ukraine? 

 

Marta Havryshko: So, yesterday, for the first time since the Russian aggression in February 2022, the mass protest took place in major Ukrainian cities. Yesterday, they were in Kiev, Dnipro, Lviv, and other cities. What were the demands of protesters? They started to go out to the streets and protest with the hope that Zelenskyy will put a veto on the law adopted yesterday by the Verkhovna Rada. Actually, people call it an anti-corruption law and according to this law, the main anti-corruption bodies in Ukraine, NABU and SAPO, are losing independence and they have become subjected almost entirely to the prosecutor general, which is the person appointed by Zelenskyy. So, what does it mean? The entire activities of those structures are now paralyzed and Zelenskyy can use it as a tool to reward his loyal politicians, and to punish this loyal. That's why many, first of all young people, many students, they go out to the streets, and they started to shout and demand to veto. 

And while they were protesting, they found out that Zelenskyy very quickly signed this document and it was the big outrage. And nowadays, even in more numbers of cities, we have similar demonstrations. People are so angry. Why? Because Zelenskyy is constantly talking that Ukraine is a part of the European family, that Ukraine will join NATO and the EU, and one of the preconditions of joining the EU is the building of an effective anti-corruption system. And what is going on? Zelenskyy is destroying the whole system. That's why many people believe that the EU can even put sanctions in Ukraine, could stop this move of Ukraine to the European nation. That's why they are so angry. And mostly those people are young people, they are students. 

Aaron Maté: And Zelenskyy says that he's just cracking down on what he calls Russian influence, that somehow this anti-corruption bureau was corrupted by Russia. What do you say to that? 

 

Marta Havryshko: Actually, many observers, many experts, many anti-corruption activists say it's bullshit. In other words, it's not true, because those charges are very suspicious. First of all, some of them were accused of connections with the previous president Yanukovych and because Yanukovych is  now not a important person in political life, not Ukraine, not Russia. Some of them were charged with some offenses connected to traffic offenses that happened several years ago, and some of them were accused with direct cooperation with Russian security service. So these charges are very serious. And we know that SBU, the Security Service of Ukraine, in the past days, they made approximately eight raids across offices and homes of NABU agents, without court warrants, which makes them suspicious, debatable, controversial and basically illegal. So, but many experts say that the main reason is because NABU that was created by Western powers, predominantly U.S., was financed by U.S., inspired by U.S., agents were trained by U.S. Basically, they say that in recent days, they wanted to open investigation against the closest allies of Zelenskyy, for example, Timur Mindych, who was and is his long-term business partner, the owner of  Kvartal 95, his entertainment company, together with Zelenskyy. Also recently one of the criminal investigation with very serious charges of great corruption was opened against one of the closest friends of Zelenskyy, Deputy Prime Minister Oleg Chernyshov. And we know that Minister Oleg Chernyshov left the country, and there were so many rumors about his desire to return; he was afraid that he will be put in prison. So Mindich went to him, presumably, and argued that you can go, because you will be free, you will be not put in jail, and basically it happened, despite this massive damage to Ukraine budget, which cost approximately one billion hryvnia, to Ukraine's budget, he wasn't dismissed, and he wasn't put in trial. He paid enormously big bail, approximately $3 million, which for Ukraine's settings is an enormous sum and he's enjoying his office. He's still in place. 

But Mindych never returned to Ukraine. Why? Because he was afraid that he would be the next Oleg Chernyshov. So, experts say that by cracking down on anti-corruption bodies, Zelenskyy wants to protect, basically, his friends, his closest friends. So, he's not caring about the anti-corruption system, about the European future of Ukraine, about the effectiveness of anti-corruption struggle in Ukraine, which is one of the biggest problems in Ukraine from the very beginning of its creation, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. According to some polls, it's even a bigger problem than Russian drone and missile attacks because corruption kills, and many protesters hold signs, “Corruption kills.” 

And another reason: some investigative journalists say that NABU was closely investigating the so-called army of drones. It was and it is still one of the biggest projects in this security service where millions of dollars – including Western aid and the taxes of Western people – are going, supported by the Ministry of Defense, supported by the general staff, supported by a crowdfunding platform, United 24, with these celebrities from around the world. So, this army of drones has a lot of speculations, and the great corruption is there, and who is involved in this? The closest people to Zelenskyy: Arakhamia, who is the leader of Zelenskyy’s party in the parliament, and Yermak, who recently became a celebrity, I would say, in Western press, because so many articles were written about him, about his power… 

 

Aaron Maté: Andriy Yermak, that's Zelenskyy's chief of staff, yeah. Yes. I mean, hearing you talk about just like the key role of U.S. funding and all this, U.S. influence, it speaks to one irony of this whole conflict, which is that, in the name of fighting supposed Russian influence, Ukraine's been consumed with U.S. influence. And Zelenskyy feels empowered to be doing these things because he wants to curry favor with the U.S. But let me ask you about the war here. 

There's an article in The Spectator, which is a British publication, that's been a huge cheerleader for the proxy war, but even they are now being forced to admit that the war is not going well for Zelenskyy and they quote a former senior official in Zelenskyy's administration who says this: “If the war continues soon there will be no Ukraine left to fight for” (The Spectator. July 20, 2025.)

 And this person goes on to say that Zelenskyy is “prolonging the war to hold on to power.” The Spectator also spoke to a Zelenskyy ally named Mariia Berlinska, who is head of a prominent Ukrainian volunteer movement, who said: “We are hanging over the abyss” and ‘Ukraine is an expendable pawn in an American game.” (The Spectator. July 20, 2025.)

How much discontent is there right now with Zelenskyy because of the war and because Ukraine continues to lose so many of its people in this horrible conflict? 

 

Marta Havryshko: Actually, this point is very common nowadays in Ukraine, it's very widespread. That's why there are so many draft dodgers, because people don't believe that they own their lives and they can make their own decisions because even when we take into consideration this mineral deal, we observe, and many members of the Ukrainian parliament, they were very open, that they didn't even read these documents, they were provided only this general paper, this general document, but two others were hidden from them. So they can't even learn the details and they just were “strongly advised” to vote for this. Some of them were threatened by Zelenskyy and his inner circle that they risk be stripped of Western/U.S. and we know that many of them have property in the Western countries, so they were really afraid of these sanctions, probably, by U.S. and they just voted for this mineral deal. 

The problem is that this mineral bill, in general is even against the Ukraine constitution because, according to the Ukrainian constitution, all minerals belong to the people, but nowadays, they are stripped even of those resources. So, many Ukrainians ask themselves, “What I'm dying for? Why should I go to the front line, to lie in these trenches, to be hunted by Russian drones, to gather remains of my comrades, to bury them, to visit their family members and to talk to their wives? Why should I suffer when I not even own those minerals? I have nothing. 

Ukraine nowadays is perceived as a colony of the West. Everything in Ukraine is influenced by the West. Every single decision: military decision, financial decision, political decision, who will be the prime minister, who will be the head of the SBU security service. From the Western media we’ll learn that Budanov attempted to dismiss 10 times, but because he has a protege in the U.S. and it is believed that he is very close to some U.S. military circles, Zelenskyy wasn't allowed to dismiss him. So, basically, Zelenskyy and his team are not independent decision-makers. That's why many people who are now protesting against this anti-corruption crackdown ask the EU, the World Bank, the White House to put pressure on Zelenskyy because they know that all leverage is there in the West. 

We learned from some investigative journalists that some people say that this decision is already being done, that Zelenskyy is not needed anymore. His popularity is going down. And after yesterday's decision, it reminded people of Yanukovych’s time so much because, during the Maidan protest in 2013-2014, Yanukovych was associated with the massive corruption, but also with this break of this European dream of Ukrainians, because he refused to sign this association with EU. And nowadays, many EU members, Ursula von der Leyen, G7, other bodies, Macron, EU, Marta Kos from EU, they express their deeply concerns about this law and many people are afraid that this will be another case when Ukraine will be prevented from entering EU and will be stopped by their own government, prevented by their politicians. That's why many people compare Zelenskyy to Yanukovych, and in the memory of many Maidan protesters, it's the biggest […], pro-Russian, bloody murder of peaceful protesters. That's why the climate is very hot nowadays in Ukraine, and we shouldn't underestimate this protest.

The main question, for me, nowadays, is: Will Zelenskyy get this other Maidan? And will he be the next Ukraine president who will be forced to leave the country and his post? 

 

Aaron Maté: And if he is forced to leave like what does this leave groups like Azov, the Azov Battalion, which is a paramilitary force with neo-Nazi ties, led by some really extremist people, they've endorsed his crackdown on this anti-corruption bureau. So if he's forced out of office, does that mean they take even more power? Would their power be reduced? Where would they stand in a post-Zelenskyy Ukraine? 

 

Marta Havryshko: I was very struck when I read statements from Bielanski, the leader of the movement. Several of his deputies and other members, not only from the Azov movement but close to the Azov movement, who are also far right like the leader of C14, Yevhen Karas, who is the extremist and far-right neo-Nazi and others, basically, those neo-Nazis who are in close alliance with Zelenskyy and heavily rely on his support, are very critical of NABU and basically support him, started to disseminate this talking point that, “Yes, there were Russian agents, assets, they are in NABU, that's why this decision was very good.” 

We should keep in mind that all these far-right in Ukraine, are proponents of the cult of a strong leader. And they really believe that one person in the state should hold the maximum power like Führer, like Mussolini and other strong leaders. That's why they supported him. And I believe – and for many NGO activists, for many human rights activists, they were surprised because many of them didn't follow their agenda. So they were very surprised, how can you? It's about the European future, it's about the democratic future of Ukraine. But those guys have nothing to do with these democratic views. They are proponents of this strong authoritarian state with a strong leader, that's why. And we observe how they enjoy the state support, support from the security service, support from military intelligence, support from oligarchs close to Zelenskyy, and they join everything. 

So, they want this war to prolong, to go on, and they support Zelenskyy. That's why I believe it could be a civil unrest if they will support this strong position of Zelenskyy. Those anti-corruption organs were created and inspired by the Biden administration mostly, by Democrats, and now Trump allegedly is not interested in fighting corruption, he's not interested all this internal politics, he just want to leave this Ukraine cause, everything, and to just concentrate on other problems, so he doesn't care about this, and Zelenskyy believes that he can get away with these actions. And Europe needs him because he's a proponent of war, he's the proponent of these radical decisions. That's why he believed that he can do whatever they want without any resistance. 

But I believe that this potential for violent resistance inside the Ukraine country – I'm talking about even civil war, yeah, civil unrest. – it is very possible because there are even more radical far-right who are not in alliance with the state. For example, this White Phoenix who is allegedly involved in the killing of this SBU Colonel Voronych and others, they are very radical, white supremacist, and they are against even the Azov movement because they believe that Azov nowadays is in conjunction with globalists and Zionists, all this conspiracy and so on and so forth. 

 

Aaron Maté: Which is why it underscores why it was not a wise decision to block the Minsk accords, block opportunities that were out there a while ago, to avoid all this bloodshed and to not empower the most extremist elements of society. 

Marta, final question for you. I recently signed an open letter in your defense that was put out because you faced a lot of threats yourself for speaking out as a Ukrainian, as a scholar of the Holocaust, against Zelenskyy's government, against the influence of the far right. Very briefly, because we only have a few minutes, talk about the threats that you faced and this open letter that a bunch of us have just signed in your defense. 

 

Marta Havryshko: Thank you, Aaron, for the support, and I invite everyone to visit my Twitter, for example, and you can sign this letter too, because the general idea of this letter that was drafted by scholars, journalists and human rights activists, is about basically free speech and academic freedom in Ukraine, because not only me, but many scholars in Ukraine face pressure. They face pressure to ally with the state agenda, to obey all these ethnic, national agenda and not criticize the rights of the far-right in Ukraine. And I started to receive those death threats more than one year ago when I criticized for the first time this Azov exhibition, the 3rd assault brigade exhibition about the Waffen-Nazis division, Galicia. During this exhibition they compared themselves to Nazi collaborators basically and I asked them: is it okay when Putin is using this denazification talking point to justify his aggression against Ukraine? What are you doing, guys? Why do you need those Nazi symbols to fight Russians? You have beautiful Ukrainian symbols. 

Then, I started to do more research and I understood that they have basically freehand in Ukraine and they are in cooperation with the state authorities and political elites. And they are so unhappy about my activity and about my research exposing all these problematic developments that they send me rape threats, death threats, they openly discuss in their channels how they will kill me. I'm cooperating with the Massachusetts State Police and FBI in this regard because they have connections with many far-right neo-Nazis group here in the U.S., Atom Weapon Division, Misanthropic Division, Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other, because they have a similar agenda. 

As you know, many American neo-Nazis nowadays are in the war in Ukraine, fighting for Ukraine. So, basically, they are trained, they are armored to the teeth by American weapon, by NATO weapon, and I was strongly advised to be conscious about those threats and to do whatever I can to protect myself and protect my child because the very important thing and most important for me is to save my child from that threat. That's why my friends supported me, and I encourage everyone to protect freedom of speech, even despite all those challenging developments and troubling times. So, free speech is a core stone of democracy, human rights and freedom. 

 

Aaron Maté: Marta Havryschko, you're a very, very brave person, and I'm very grateful, too, for joining us on System Update. Marta Havryshko is a visiting assistant professor at the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. Marta, thank you so much. 

 

Marta Havryshko: Thank you so much. 

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Interview: Joshua Landis

Aaron Maté: Turning now to another part of the world that's been turned upside down by a CIA proxy war: Syria. When Syrian President Bashar Assad was overthrown last year, the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, openly took credit for the regime change in Damascus. 

Video. Benjamin Netanyahu, X. December 8, 2024.

So that's Netanyahu last year, taking credit for Assad's ouster, and in Assad's place came a new government led by the former leader of al-Qaeda in Syria named Mohammed al-Golani, who since changed his name to Ahmed al-Shara. But now Netanyahu, who, after taking credit for installing this al-Qaeda offshoot, is bombing that new government as well. Just recently, Israel bombed Damascus after sectarian clashes broke out with a lot of Druze, members of the Druze minority in Syria, being killed and Netanyahu claimed he was acting on their behalf in their defense. So, what is going on in Syria? Why is sectarian killing still going on? And why is Netanyahu intervening after helping to install the new government that he is now bombing? 

Well, to discuss that, I spoke to Joshua Landis. He is the Sandra Mackey Chair and Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. 

 

Aaron Maté: Joshua Landis, thanks so much for joining me. 

 

Joshua Landis: Aaron, it's always a pleasure. 

 

Aaron Maté: So, what's going on here with Israel bombing a government that it took credit for installing? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, Netanyahu did say that it was because he had destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon, or larger, decimated it, that Syria and Assad fell because there was no support for him; they'd also bombed Iran and that clipped the normal support for the Assad army. But he very quickly decided that he did not like the new ruler of Syria, Ahmed al-Shara, because he had been head of al-Qaeda for many years, and he's very closely attached to Turkey. And Turkey, of course, had welcomed Hamas leaders in Istanbul and had spoken out against Israel. So, in a sense, Iran was out, but Netanyahu said that Turkey is our new big enemy, and is dangerous, if not more dangerous than Iran. 

 

Aaron Maté: The pretext for this, according to Israel, is that there were atrocities being committed against the Druze in Suwayda, which was happening. There were atrocities. So what happened there? And then why is Israel getting involved on their behalf, or purportedly on their behalf? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, the Druze situation. Druze are 3% of Syria. They're a small minority, heterodox, Shia, like the Alawites or the Ismailis. They did not trust this government because the government had persecuted the Druzes in the past. Ahmed al-Shara had killed about 20. He apologized and made up for it, but their shrines were blown apart. ISIS had forced many to convert, and Shara had been a member of ISIS before he was just al-Qaeda. They didn't trust him. And the Druze freed themselves of Assad's rule a year ahead of the taking of Damascus. So, they had set up their own autonomous regime. When Shara formulated his new constitution several months ago, an interim constitution for five years, it gave all power to him. There is no democracy. The parliament is appointed by him, a third directly, two-thirds indirectly. He appoints all the judges in the Supreme Court. He is everything in that country and there is a Druze minister, who's resigned, but they don't have any power. They are things like transportation, or various things. So, the real central figures are all from this al-Qaeda organization and very close to Shara, whether it's the interior or defense or foreign ministry and so forth. 

So they didn't trust him. They said we want some kind of federal arrangement. The Kurds are saying the same thing. The Alawites are saying the same thing. They don't want to just put down their arms, because that's what he was asking. He said, “I'm the ruler, I'm going to have a monopoly on power. All the minorities should put down their guns and trust us.” And they said, “We don't trust you.” And so it became a classic standoff. And that's the important background to this assault by the state on the Druze Mountain. It's a mountainous region. It is in the south, near the Jordanian border and not too far from the Golan. But there is a big Arab city, Dara, that sits between the Jabal Druze and the Golan Heights, which makes it impractical for Israel to move its troops in and protect them directly. So it used bombing, and Israel stepped in to defend the Druze. 

Israel has, it's important to know that they have 150,000 Druze who've served loyal in the military and are an important lobbying group that's not to be sneezed at. I know many Israeli Druze and they were frantic to get Netanyahu to step in. Now, Netanyahu was much bigger fish to fry than just the Druze. He has got a strategic vision, which is Israel being the predominant power.  And we've got to say that Israel has established not only complete air power over Lebanon, but now over Syria, over Iraq, and today, Iran as well. It doesn't want a strong Damascus, a Damascus that's armed by Turkey, that has a real army, that spreads its power over the border. So, Netanyahu said it very early on, we're not going to allow Damascus to deploy its troops South of Damascus City, not going to allow Shara to deploy his troops. 

The first day that Assad fell, Israel bombed Syria 400 times, destroying its entire navy, every missile depot, any airplane that was still existent. It erased everything it could find of the old Syrian army so that Shara would not have anything. And it's continued to bomb various airfields that Turkey is trying to resurrect, because it's very worried that Turkey will send its planes down there, build up the military, and that they'll have Turkey on Israel's border. That's what Netanyahu says. They said they're not going to do it, over our dead body. Of course, America doesn't like that, but that's the situation with the Jabal-Druze and Israel's entrance into this war. 

 

Aaron Maté: So, Israel claims to be fighting the sectarian oppression, the sectarian atrocities backed by the government, but it seems to me actually that they want to foment sectarianism in Syria. I mean, they were supporting the insurgency that was sectarian. I was reminded of a quote from way back, in 2013, by an Israeli official named Alon Pinkas. He's the former Israeli Consul General in New York and he said this about Syria, back in 2014. He said: “This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win – we'll settle for a tie. Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria.” (Israel Backs Limited Strike Against Syria. September 5, 2013.)

So what he was basically saying back then was, as long as Syria is divided, as all sides are fighting each other, then Israel is dominant. And my question to you is, do you think that is still basically Israel strategy? 

 

Joshua Landis: Israel wants a weak and divided Syria, one that cannot present any challenge to Israel whatsoever on the Golan or anywhere else. In that sense, sweeping in and being a defender, having this human rights position and having the Druze actually want the Israelis to come and defend them fits perfectly into this larger strategic vision of a broken Syria that can't get back on its feet. 

 

Aaron Maté: And I don't want to minimize the atrocities the Druze have suffered. So talk to us a bit about what you know happened. For example, there seems to be a documented massacre that occurred at a Druze hospital in Syria.

 

Joshua Landis: Yes. The National Hospital in Suwayda. It was taken over by regime forces; they shot doctors, nurses and patients. They threw people off the roof. They were jihadists who went in there to wreak vengeance on the Druze. We've got to say that this came on the heels, already in May, there had been a dustup between the Druze and the Central State, because the Druzes had refused to make these concessions to the Central States. So, Shara, who wants to spread his military control over the country, is looking for ways. What happened in May was that this tape came out, a recording of a Druze Sheik – theoretically, the Druze denied it, said it was fake – of the Sheik saying something bad about Muhammad, the Prophet and they said, this is unacceptable. Students began to attack Druze students in dormitories in Hama. There were demonstrations in the street and very quickly it escalated into a situation where the Druze were being attacked from one end of Syria to the other, and particularly in two towns, Jaramana and Sahnaya, on the outskirts of Damascus towards the Jabal Druze. Many jihadist types and irregulars poured in, as well as regime troops, in order to attack the Druze, and Israel came into their defense, which of course, caused many Syrians to say, these are traitors, they're siding with Israel, look what they're doing in Gaza, this is terrible, and we've got to kill these Druze. So that was the background, and it was festering. 

A local story happened just on July 13, in which Bedouin, who make up 3% of the city of Suwayda, the capital city in the Jabal Druze, kidnapped a Druze merchant. And then it was tit for tat. It exploded. Over 10 people were killed. But the regime Shara said, only the central police and our security soldiers can bring calm to the Jabal Druze, we're sending them in. And so they attacked. And many people felt that the Bedouin situation was really a pretext to allow the regime to try to impose its will over the Jabal Druze. And this turned into a major conflagration because the Jews resisted. Regime elements came into the city, took over this national hospital, killed everybody in it, dozens of people. We don't know how many, but you look at pictures of body bags and there are probably 50 or 60. 

The videos are really horrendous. I published one of the videos very early on and my X account was inundated with regime supporters saying, This is fake news. These are not real things. They've either been doctored or the Druze were killing themselves because [   ], one of their leaders there. They've tried to demonize him and said that he's evil and he's shooting all these Druze because they really want to be part, they give up their guns to the government. 

It was very hard to tell what the truth was in those first moments, but there are major narrative campaigns going on in social media to defend the government, to defend the Druze, this sort of thing. But a lot of Druze have been killed. We don't have a sense so far, but it's probably going to approach a thousand. Whole families have been mowed down in their houses and so forth. Now, a bunch of Bedouins got killed and the Druze were very brutal to the regime troops that they later captured. And there were executions on both sides. And I'm not saying that – but this is the way that the government has been treating minorities. 

 

Aaron Maté: Yes. Well, that's what I was going to ask you about. So this follows the documented sectarian killings against the Alawites. And the death toll there is unknown, but it's believed to be very, very high. And that was also by forces linked to the government. Talk about what happened there and what a recent Reuters investigation newly confirmed. 

 

Joshua Landis: Right. Well, about 2,000 Alawites were killed. The government is claiming that – it came out with a report just the other day and said it was about 1,465, just under 1.5. But it's probably closer to 2,000. The government has closed down a lot of its bureaus for registering deaths along the coast. I know that because my father-in-law, an Alawite, died recently, and the family is still unable to record his death because all the offices are saying come back later, we're closed on this, you can't register the deaths. So, there's a lot of sleights of hand going on here, but 2,000 Alawites were killed on the coast, roughly. And this started with an attack on regime soldiers by some Alawites, and about 16, 17 Alawite soldiers were killed in one incidence, and it spread to two other places. 

The Alawites claim this is because we're being terribly mistreated, and this little convoy of troops was coming to a village to drag people out, claiming that they are regime remainders, and that they were coming to drag them off for transitional justice. The trouble is transitional justice is dragging people off and shooting them. There haven't been court trials. It's unclear. Many innocent people have been killed, people have never served in the military, houses have been robbed. So, the Alawites were beginning to feel that this regime is just going to kick us to the curb and mistreat us. 

So, it's hard to tell. The regime said this is a big conspiracy with Iran to bring back the Assad regime. The Alawite said, No, this is completely false. This is a self-defense thing. But the point is, once it began, the regime called for a general mobilization. Tens of thousands of militia members and militias began to swoop down onto the coast in long, that evening, in long, big lines of trucks and everything else. And many of them put hate in their hearts. They had their jihadist principles of we're going to kill all the Alawites. who are unbelievers, calling them pigs, making them bark like dogs. And we got this outpouring of videos, of whole families being lined up and just shot against walls, being made to bark like dogs and being shot. So, some villages, over 200 people were killed and then just laying all over the village. So, it was very brutal. Five of my wife's cousins had their houses broken into. People asked them, “Are you Alawite?” And then they proceeded to steal everything in the house, their car keys. One of their sons, Haidar, who grew up with my son, was dragged to – he never served in the military. He was an only son. You don't have to serve in the military if you're only son, he's the breadwinner for the family because a father had died of a heart attack and the mother didn't work – and he was dragged out to the step and just shot summarily. And this happened in family after family, up and down the coast. And so, it just put terror into the whole minority, and they'd begun to flood out of the country. 

As a result, the statistics from the U.N. show that about 100,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon have returned to Syria since the fall of the regime, the Assad regime, mostly Sunnis. But 100,00 have fled into Lebanon since the fall of the regime, mostly minorities and mostly Alawites who are looking for safety. So, the shoe is on the other foot, and the regime is increasingly using force and a good dollop of terror in order to try to subjugate the minorities who've been recalcitrant. And they're a problem, but they don't feel that there's any protection for them. They don't have any buy-in, and they don't trust this ex-al-Qaeda guy, who has a very low regard for these minorities as unbelievers and so forth. The language that's used by officials is a very religious language and it really marks them out for persecution.

 

Aaron Maté: Well, so on that note, how did the government respond recently when there was a suicide bombing in Damascus at a church? 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, the Christian church. Well over 20 people were killed, a bunch were wounded. The priests and so forth said, “We didn't get a visit from the president”. So, the president did finally call them, the minister, the Christian minister, the woman minister, did immediately go there and in the subsequent days, some other ministers went. But this is after Christians began to complain that they felt like they weren't treated the same as other people and that the president didn't really want to address the issue properly. So, the Christians feel that the government is begrudgingly recognizing their pain but not doing it in a serious way. And so, all the minorities are feeling like they're being kicked to the curb. And it must be said that the minorities were spoiled by the French during the first half of the last century. They were overrepresented in the military. Bashar al-Assad and his father were Alawites, and they privileged minorities because they needed minority support. So, many Sunnis feel like the West has supported this, has put up with this, and they've been mistreated for a century, and that the minorities are always spoiled. Therefore, they're getting their comeuppance. 

 

Aaron Maté: Well, but the minorities were also protected from sectarian atrocities and that's why some of us just, I'm speaking for myself here, we're opposed to regime change on top of the fact that I don't think we have the right to flood a country with weapons and fuel and arms and all kinds of dominant insurgency. It's also a disaster for groups like the ones that are being attacked now. And I think we're seeing an ongoing reminder of that with all these atrocities. That chant that was attributed to some of the early protests, “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave,” the protests against Assad, I mean, that's proved to be prophetic. They are sending Alawites now to the graves. So, whether you want to call that previously Alawites being spoiled or just being maybe protected from sectarian murder. 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, you didn't have to go very far. When al-Qaeda takes over, even an ex-al-Qaeda guy who's trying to fly right, and he's surrounded by all these al-Qaeda guys, that's what's going to happen. We saw it in Iraq. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that minorities are going to get persecuted. And they are being persecuted, and they're being robbed, they're having their houses taken over. Yes, America was concerned about Iran. They wanted Iran out of Syria. They wanted Iran to stop funding Hezbollah. That was the primary concern of America: if having al-Qaeda take over, that was the price and, in a sense, that's what's happened. 

 

Aaron Maté: That's why Jake Sullivan said in that infamous email to Hillary Clinton, “Al-Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” 

Final question for you. All this is happening at an awkward time for the Trump administration, which is moving to lift sanctions on Syria, the sanctions that helped achieve regime change by basically crippling the country and preventing reconstruction. But just as Trump is asking for these sanctions to be lifted, we're still seeing all these sectarian atrocities. So, talk to us a bit about the debate that's playing out right now in Washington over whether or not to lift these sanctions, which, in my opinion, again, should never have been imposed in the first place. We don't have the right to destroy another economy to regime change their government. But I think they're sadistic and should be removed. But now there's a problem because of all these sectarian murders that keep happening. 

 

Joshua Landis: Right. The first article I wrote after the fall of Assad was about the time to lift the sanctions. Sanctions are a brutal force that hurt the most vulnerable, no doubt about it. But the United States, and understandably, Trump made his deal with the Saudis and the Turks when he was visiting Saudi Arabia, and he said, I'm going to lift all sanctions. He embraced, Shara. He said, yes, he's a tough guy and he's done tough things, but sometimes you need a tough leader to rule a country. He said, Make Syria great again. We're not going to be in the business of regime change anymore. He really slammed George Bush, the son, and said all that regime change stuff was a big waste of time and what have we gotten out of it? Nothing. Make America great again, let the Syrians be Syrians. 

That was translated then into policy by our ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria, Ambassador Barak, who said, “We're lifting everything. We're not demanding anything in exchange.” He did say we want to see Syria fight ISIS, get rid of all the Palestinian groups, join the Abraham Accords, get rid of chemical weapons, and there were a few other little items on there. But mostly, he didn't say anything about human rights. He didn't say anything about minorities. He didn't say anything about democracy because America's finished with democracy promotion in the Middle East. And in a sense, America threw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, these are unreasonable expectations, but you want to give some guidance. And this might not have happened if the United States had been a little bit firmer, saying, You can't do this, you can't use force to just crush the minorities. There's got to be some kind of representation and you can work that out. They're beginning to say it. There's just a movement in Congress to lift the Caesar sanctions. There are tons of sanctions on Syria. The president can lift many of them because they're presidential sanctions. But the major package, the Caesar sanctions, was put on by Congress. And those are the ones that give secondary sanctions. So, if companies go in and help rebuild Syria, they can be sanctioned. Most Republicans voted against lifting those, even though all the Syrian opposition who are in favor of the Shara regime said, We've got to lift them, we're against Assad, now we're good. And Republicans have been loath to do that. I think that's because a lot of their minority constituents have been screaming bloody murder and saying, you've got to hold this regime to account. So, they haven't all been lifted. They've been changed to a certain degree. It's still unclear what they mean. But they aren't completely gone. 

 

Aaron Maté: It's such a mess and this is what happens when you try to regime change a country: you end up creating a monster that is really very hard to roll back. The sanctions regime and now the fact that it's ruled by an offshoot of al-Qaeda. I'll just say, on the issue of chemical weapons, as someone who's been skeptical of these chemical weapons allegations, especially after they destroyed their stockpile in 2013-2014 under a deal with the OPCW, the fact that they haven't been able to find a trace of Assad's supposed chemical weapons stockpile in the more than seven months since he was ousted, I find that very interesting. And to me, it bolsters the skepticism that I've had of those allegations, which were also bolstered by things like the OPCW whistleblowers and leaked documents. 

 

Joshua Landis: Well, let me add, on your point about regime change being really just a terrible thing to do, most of these countries in the Middle East were established after World War I at the Paris Peace Conference: Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, so forth. They're very young. Various groups of people who didn't necessarily want to live together were stuck together in these newly drawn nation-states and told to get along. It's been very difficult. Almost all of the Middle Eastern countries have had a dictatorship almost from the beginning because they don't get along and they're fighting over who's going to be on top and so forth. 

So, there's been a lot of coercion in order to keep people from fighting each other, when you're trying to do state building, that's going to create a common citizenship and a political community where people will trust each other enough to vote on a constitution and follow the laws. That's what's basically required for democracies. You've got to have some common game rules that everybody buys into. That isn't present in most Middle Eastern countries, which is why there remain either kings or dictators. And it's very difficult to keep people from breaking into civil war. 

So, when America goes into these new countries that are still trying to reshape their citizenry and kick over the state, which was weak to begin with, maybe a little bit muscle-bound with military dictatorship, but unable to tax their people, unable to really get people to buy in, it turns into civil war. And that's what happened in Iraq. That's what happened in Libya. That's what happened in Afghanistan. That's going to happen in Iran if we try to overturn the regime there. And it's certainly what happened to Syria. And you get very long and bloody civil wars with tons of ethnic cleansing. It's not a good thing. And people need to just put regime change out of their minds because Western regime change isn't going to produce democracy. It's going to produce civil war in societies that are trying to find a way to live together and build a common political community. 

 

Aaron Maté: Joshua Landis, Sandra Mackey Chair and Professor of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. Thanks so much for joining us. 

 

Joshua Landis: Always a pleasure, Aaron. Love your show.

 

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Semafor Editor Ben Smith on Epstein Saga; How do MAGA Supporters Really Feel About Trump's Foreign Policy? Eddington Movie Review: Reflections on 2020
System Update #490

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!

AD_4nXfT_BDy4ZmCv7YowmlpimI3uiq7dVGVrebs2HL5mg4ECkvfhs3Y9eBAUpJII2f7KX_c0cHmCe_nJBq8K854h7KfY2o0T-_oXaV3vkUdy7KoA6IgnNWbT7_2jA5tfHRgXGATMZsLGqoQcnMQKCpn6Fk?key=4MGSGk-P8UsiVP_KGEUadw

Michael Tracey: Good evening, everybody. I'm Michael Tracey, and Glenn is somewhere. So, this is where I triumphantly storm in and anger parts of the audience who would prefer not to have to see my face, which I have to say, on some level, I sympathize with. 

Tonight, an interesting show. We'll be joined by Ben Smith, who is the editor-in-chief of Semafor and a longtime political observer, journalist, editor. And we will probably, I think, provide you with a slightly counterintuitive for different perspective anyway, on the meaning of the whole Epstein saga that continues to engulf American politics and media, seemingly. 

We'll also bring in somebody who works on this very show, and who you often don't see on camera, she stays behind the cameras but today, we're going to pry her out because Meagan O'Rourke, who I often do interviews with, and she's a producer on the show, I'm sure should be a fan favorite anyway. We're going to do actually a review of a new movie. This is a little out of left field based on typical System Update content, but there's a new movie that I happened to see last night, partly at the adamant urging of Meagan, called Eddington. And I think it's an incredible movie and an incredible window into a lot that's going on politically and culturally. So we're going to a movie review tonight. 

And we are also going to show some footage that she and I collected, actually back on the Fourth of July, earlier this month, that has been available on Locals for you subscribers for several weeks. But what we wanted to do was go to like an area that is sort of ground zero for salt of the earth, Joe six-pack style supporters of Trump voters and ask them about his foreign policy record thus far, particularly the bombing of Iran, which may seem like eons ago at this point, but it was only last month, and the full ramifications have not really been settled. 

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Michael Tracey and Meagan O'Rourke

Okay, so we're going to go a little bit off the beaten path tonight because I know my mind has been largely occupied by this movie that I saw last night. And if it was just a well-crafted drama, or if there were just some sterling acting performances that were put in, I'm not sure that I would necessarily have been compelled to discuss it on System Update. 

However, there's like an interesting synergy going on in the universe where we have this Epstein story that keeps embroiling the American political and media worlds with some new developments on that score even just this afternoon and we have the opening of this movie which really gets to the beating heart in a very unparalleled way for like a cinematic experience of what drives the contemporary kind of like internet addled American political psyche. 

It's called “Eddington.” I guess we'll try to steer away from spoilers. We'll play the trailer for those who are not familiar. 

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