Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Durham Report Obliterates FBI for Russiagate Misconduct. Major Changes at Twitter Raise Serious Questions. And Reflections on the Extraordinary Life of David Miranda
Video Transcript
May 18, 2023
post photo preview

 

Watch full episode here:

placeholder

 

Good evening. It's Tuesday, May 16th. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. 

As many of you know, our show has been on a brief hiatus due to the death on May 9 of my husband, David Miranda. He had been hospitalized since August 6 of last year when he was at a campaign event for his bid to be reelected to the Brazilian Congress representing Rio de Janeiro when he began experiencing severe abdominal pain. He was admitted to the ICU with the diagnosis of severe inflammation of his gastrointestinal region that had spread to multiple organs, including his kidneys, liver and lungs due to sepsis. He remained in ICU for the next nine months, fighting an extraordinary battle that allowed us to me and our children, his family and friends to share some profound moments with him as he was very awake, alert, communicative and fully present, especially over the last several months. After a personal loss this is devastating, it's very difficult to know when to go back to work. There's really no perfect time or no right way to do it. I was largely inspired in my decision to come back today by my kids, who yesterday were adamant in their insistence that they wanted to return to school. I figured it is so rare to see young teenagers all but demand to go to school, despite my concerns that it was too early for them, and then come back home and declare how gratified they were by their decision, that there must be some wisdom in that. I can't say it's easy to be here. It has often been a real struggle over the last nine months to do many of our shows, but I think it's the right thing to do for myself and our kids, and I hope for our audience as well. 

As our last segment tonight, I will share some thoughts about David's life. There was a significant public component to his work as first an activist and a journalist who played a vital role in the Snowden story, often one that was overlooked, and then in his life as an elected official. I always believed that there are some vital lessons to learn from how David lived that part of his public life. And also share a few insights that I've developed over the last nine months, and especially the last week, about gratitude and the importance of human and spiritual connection that I hope and believe is worth hearing. I'm just not a person who can speak about anything, including our political conflicts and my journalism, without speaking the most genuinely and truthfully I can. And today, at least, that requires my talking about the most difficult and challenging moment of my life in a way that I hope will be enriching for everybody who hears it. 

But before that, as our top story, we will examine the devastating revelations – I mean, the devastating revelations – from the so-called Durham Report, the final investigative document filed by special counsel John Durham, who in April 2019 was appointed and assigned by the Justice Department as someone along widely respected in Washington as an apolitical and trustworthy prosecutor, to investigate the single most scandalous aspect of Russiagate – not the fictitious and ultimately non-existent collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election, and most certainly not the completely unhinged, deranged and wildly melodramatic conspiracy theory that dominated our political discourse for years, namely that the Kremlin had effectively seized control of the levers of American power through a combination of sexual, financial and personal blackmail over Donald Trump. Instead, the most scandalous part of all of this was the abuse of power, the flagrant abuse of power by the FBI and other parts of the U.S. security state to concoct a completely baseless investigation with the clear and improvable intent to interfere in and manipulate the 2016 election to ensure the defeat of Donald Trump. The 306-page report sent to Congress by Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week is full of extremely incriminating indictments of the FBI, and its senior leadership. We’ll review the key findings and most importantly, place them in the context of the last seven years of full-scale, highly illegal and profoundly anti-democratic interference by the U.S. security state in our domestic politics and in two consecutive presidential elections. 

And then, after that: there have been several significant developments on Twitter over the last two weeks. The announcement that Tucker Carlson, now fired by Fox News, will be bringing his show to Twitter in ways that, at least to me, still appear quite unclear. The hiring of a new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, who is currently a senior advertising executive with NBCUniversal and has a recent history of some very disturbing comments about how she believes social media should function, and then the revelation that Twitter censored the accounts of specific oppositional figures right before the presidential election in Turkey, held on Sunday, upon threat of being banned entirely from the country if it failed to comply. There are many significant implications in these events and the reaction to them, given that the battle over Twitter, whether it will become a free speech platform along the lines of Rumble or if the establishment will succeed in corralling it once again into a platform that they control is really of the highest importance. And we will examine what we think is the meaning of all of these events. 

Finally, in conjunction with the return today of System Update, we launched a long-planned campaign ad that will appear on multiple media and online platforms that conveys what we have done with this program thus far and more importantly, where we want to take it. We wanted to share this ad campaign with you, so please take a look. 

 

placeholder

 

So, as I said, that will appear on multiple online platforms across the Internet over the next several weeks and perhaps even longer and we hope that it will attract an even larger audience than we've been able to assemble thus far, one that is really thanks in large part due to Rumble, exceeding our expectations. 

This being Tuesday night, we ordinarily would have our live interactive show on Locals but given the need for me to ease back into my return to work this week, we will not hold that show tonight. We will be back with it as soon as possible, no later than next Tuesday. To have access to that show exclusively, just join our Locals community by clicking the join button right below the video on the Rumble page. 

As a reminder, System Update appears in podcast form as well, 12 hours after we air live here, first, on Rumble. To consume the show in podcast form on all major podcasting platforms, including Apple, Spotify, and others, simply follow us on those platforms. You can share and rate the show, which spreads visibility as well. 

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




One of the top three or four most significant political events of the last decade in the United States was the release in April 2019 of the final report by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. It may be easy to forget how significant that was, and that's because there has been a very concerted effort to foster this forgetting on the part of the American public about just how dominant that scandal was. It's not an exaggeration to say that Russiagate was the leading news story from mid-2016 when it first appeared as part of a campaign ad by Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump through at least the middle of 2019 when Robert Mueller finally concluded his investigation. And the reason I say the publication of the Mueller report was such a significant event – one of the top three or four or five political events of the last decade – is because the impetus for Russiagate, the core allegation that caused so much political turmoil and that suffocated and drowned our politics, and that ultimately led to the appointment of George Bush's post-9/11 FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel, was the claim that again, emanated first from the Clinton campaign, and that was spread by media outlets all over the place, driven by leaks from the intelligence community, was that the Trump campaign had colluded – a word we heard every day for years and, then, nonsense – had colluded with the Russian government in its attempts to hack into the emails of the Democratic National Committee, as well as the personal inbox of John Podesta. And the claim was that there was a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign on the one hand, and the Russian government on the other, to use foreign power and foreign influence to interfere in our democratic election. That was the central allegation. If you go back and read contemporaneous accounts of what led to the Mueller investigation, you will find with great clarity that that was the central accusation. 

The reason I say the Mueller investigation report, the final report, was so significant is because it obliterated that accusation. It obliterated it. It concluded in extremely explicit ways that despite 18 months of an investigation that had unlimited resources, supposedly the dream team of the most aggressive and skillful prosecutors in the country in full subpoena power, they were unable to find evidence that established that core allegation, namely a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The evidence was simply nonexistent to prove that that conspiracy existed, a conspiracy that leading media outlets not only entertained but insisted had been proven true. Any questioning of that conspiracy theory – and I say this from firsthand experience – led one to be excluded and relegated to the fringes of most major liberal institutions. That is how deceitful the narrative was. And it wasn't just the narrative on the side, it was the leading narrative in our politics. Beyond that, when the Mueller investigation concluded, it meant one overarching fact would be true and would forever be true, namely, not a single American citizen, not one, not Donald Trump or his family, not senior officials of the Trump campaign or the Trump White House, not low-level Republican operatives or Trump operatives like Carter Page or anyone else, George Papadopoulos, not a single American, was indicted and accused of criminally conspiring with the Russian government. The core allegation that gave rise to the entire political controversy, let alone was anyone convicted of that accusation. The entire thing proved to be a scam, a hoax. When the Mueller investigation concluded with no indictments of that kind, and then the report explicitly concluded that they searched everywhere and yet found no evidence for the core accusation that there was collusion. 

Beyond that, if you want to say there was something even more dominant than the narrative that there was collusion was the truly deranged, unhinged, mentally unwell conspiracy theory that almost every major media outlet in this country embraced while feigning scorn for conspiracy theories and almost every major political leader in the Democratic Party – and even many in the Republican Party – affirmed to be true, namely, that the Russians had essentially seized control of the levers of American power as a result of sexual, financial and personal blackmail leverage over Donald Trump, a claim that was first put into the bloodstream of American politics by the Steele dossier and the Steele report that CNN first reported the existence of – and then BuzzFeed published the dossier itself – all while admitting that they cannot verify any, let alone all of the claims within it. 

So preposterous was this conspiracy theory that the Russians effectively controlled the United States and could force Trump to take actions against American interests and in servitude to the Kremlin, that the Mueller investigation barely even mentioned it, let alone debunked it or even bothered to discuss the evidence for it. There was no evidence. It was a gigantic fraud, one that every major leading liberal institution of power in journalism, in politics and in corporations all collectively affirmed. That is why the far more scandalous aspect of the Russiagate narrative was not Russiagate itself, but how this fraud was perpetrated on our country. Who is it that abused the power of the American government to launch an investigation based on nothing and then continuously leaked, often very illegally, the most incriminating information possible to the Washington Post and the New York Times and NBC News, principally, to affirm and fortify and fuel what all along was a completely fictitious narrative to the point that The Washington Post and The New York Times showered themselves with Pulitzers in 2018 for their supposedly brave and intrepid work in investigating what all along was a complete hoax? 

It was a long-time very respected prosecutor, renowned for his bipartisan respect and his reputation for apolitical independence and his doggedness as a prosecutor, John Durham, who was appointed in April 2019 by the Justice Department, the same month the Mueller investigation concluded and the Mueller report became public. He was tasked with investigating the origins of this hoax. How is it that American politics were drowned for at least three years in a completely fraudulent conspiracy theory, one that put a stranglehold on the U.S. government that distracted almost all of our attention on a daily basis, away from what mattered and on to this complete fairy tale? The investigation by John Durham lasted four years. It officially closed late last week, when the 306-page report that he authored was sent by Merrick Garland to Congress as the official report of the Durham investigation. And one of the things we find is that even in very unlikely places, including the media outlets, which most aggressively and relentlessly and single-mindedly promoted this conspiracy theory, were forced to admit that this report is devastating to the FBI and to the Russiagate narrative and highly exonerating of Donald Trump. 

So, let's just take a look at one example, which is Jake Tapper, who I suppose is probably the fairest or who attempts to be the fairest-minded host on CNN – which isn't saying very much at all, but is something that I would say for him if I were forced with a gun to my head to choose – and here's what he said about the Durham investigation. You know that every single CNN viewer, the shrinking number that they still cling to, hated to hear. It infuriated them to hear it but hear it, they did. Because in Jake Tapper's view, there was nothing else he could say after having reviewed the findings of that report. 

 

Video. CNN The Lead. May 15, 2023

Jake Tapper: Regardless, the report is now here. It has dropped and it might not have produced everything of what some Republicans hoped for. It is, regardless devastating to the FBI and to a degree it does exonerate Donald Trump. 



And there you see the text on the screen, which typically is written in almost comically anti-Trump tones, which reads “Special Counsel Durham concludes FBI Never Should Have Launched the Trump-Russia Probe.” It was an abuse of power, this report concluded, for the investigation even to be launched at all, because they had no evidence that could possibly have justified an investigation of this type. In fact, they had ample evidence proving that it was a fraud, to begin with, and what John Durham uncovered was abundant proof that the senior leadership of the FBI – James Comey, who was the director, Andrew McCabe, who was his deputy, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page, the lovers who ended up playing a crucial role in the investigation, all while talking openly about the vital need to use the FBI to sabotage the Trump campaign – that all of them had only one goal in mind when pursuing this investigation, nothing to do with legitimate law enforcement functions and everything to do with their desire to abuse the FBI and its vast powers to manipulate the 2016 election. That was where the corrupt interference came from, not from Moscow and the Kremlin, not from WikiLeaks or Jill Stein, but from the senior leadership of the FBI under President Obama, who obviously wanted his close friend and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in his party to win the 2016 election and allowed the FBI to abuse its power to do so. 

So, let's take a look at a couple of the key findings. And I want to say we have a lot to cover tonight. The report could really justify an entire 90-minute show. And my guess is we will at some point soon devote our entire program to digging deep into these findings. But I want to just show you a few of the key components of it and more importantly, place in context what these findings mean. There has been reporting over the last several days about the substance of this report I just showed you, Jake Tapper, essentially saying that it doesn't give the Republicans everything they wanted, but pretty much gave them most of what they wanted. Exonerated Trump proved the FBI should never have launched this fake investigation. But I want to put it in context that kind of take a step back and see what it means. 

So here is the letter from John Durham to Merrick Garland, where he submits his final report. And this is where he says, 

 

The office also considered as part of its investigation the government's handling of certain intelligence that it received during the summer of 2016. 

That intelligence concerned the purported, “approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services. (DOJ. May 12, 2023).

 

This was not an investigation that emanated from the FBI. This was a narrative, a campaign tactic, that emanated from the Clinton campaign, which obviously had all sorts of vital connections to the senior leadership of the U.S. government under President Obama, who was still president during the 2016 election. Durham goes on:

 

We've referred to that intelligence hereafter as the “Clinton plan intelligence.” DNI John Ratcliffe declassified the following information about the Clinton plan intelligence in September 2020 and conveyed it to the Senate Judiciary Committee: “In late July 2016, U.S. intelligence agencies obtained insight into Russian intelligence analysis alleging that U.S. Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The IC [Intelligence Community] does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.

According to his handwritten notes, CIA Director Brennan subsequently briefed President Obama and other senior national security officials on the intelligence, including “the alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016, of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” (DOJ. May 12, 2023).

 

This finding is incredibly devastating. It proves that this was not a legitimate law enforcement investigation, nor was it a legitimate intelligence investigation. It was cooked up as a campaign tactic by Hillary Clinton, and then that was briefed to President Obama and to CIA Director John Brennan, which means the highest levels of the government knew that Hillary Clinton intended to concoct this false claim linking Donald Trump to the Kremlin and to try and claim that the Trump campaign participated with or conspired with or colluded with the Kremlin and their hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's email, essentially accusing them of a crime and then using the FBI, weaponizing the FBI to go off and do an investigation, even though there was no basis under the law for launching that investigation that had only one purpose – a political one – to sabotage Trump's campaign. 

There were people inside the FBI in late October of 2016 who wanted it to be known that there was no evidence linking Donald Trump and the Russians because, by this point, it had become one of the predominant themes of the 2016 campaign. Every day – it's vital to remember – leading media outlets – The Times, The Post, CNN, NBC News – were headlining this fairy tale that came from the bowels of the Clinton campaign and then connected to the FBI. 

Here you see The New York Times – and they were vilified for this truthful article. Do you see the headline? “Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees no clear Link to Russia.” 

For much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats and even chased a lead – which they ultimately came to doubt – about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. 

Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government. And even the hacking into Democratic emails, FBI and intelligence officials now believe was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Mr. Trump. (New York Times. Oct 31, 2016).

 

I can't overstate the rage and indignation that was directed at The New York Times for this article, both when it appeared and since, because the predominant view of the American elite class in politics and journalism is that there is only one valid goal in life, in politics, in journalism, and that is the destruction of Donald Trump and his political movement. And they really do believe – they have really come to believe over time – that the most significant and the most ethically obligatory mission of everybody, every relevant institution, is that single-minded goal, and that anything that deviates from that goal, that overarching paramount goal to destroy Donald Trump and his movement, anything that deviates from that mission is inherently improper, is inherently unethical, even if it means that journalists are telling the truth while they do it. That was for years the dominant ethos in American journalism that you do not tell the truth if there's any possibility it might help Donald Trump. Instead, you're required to endorse disinformation and to lie because the goal of defeating Donald Trump is so paramount that it renders everything including lying and deceit and censorship and disinformation, justified. That was what made that Sam Harris video resonate so virally, was that he was one of the few people unwittingly to be so candid in that worldview, that has corrupted almost every major liberal institution in the United States – and it continues to this very day and will continue into the 2024 campaign. 

At the time that this tactic was first unveiled, trying to link Donald Trump to the Russian government, I wrote my first article on Russiagate, which was on August 8, 2016, because I could see the emergence of this tactic. Every day I was seeing the FBI and the CIA leaking information to the Washington Post, The New York Times and NBC News designed to forward and advance this McCarthyite script that was dug up from the deepest levels of the CIA. These crusted scripts from the 1950s, trying to tie your political opponents to the Kremlin argued that you're disloyal to the United States, that you're somehow in bed with the Russians. The headline of my article was “Democrats’ Tactic of Accusing Critics of Kremlin Allegiance Has Long, Ugly History.” United States Democrats “are mimicking and echoing many of the most shameful people and tactics of the 20th century” because they really couldn't believe that something so blatantly McCarthyite, something that we were all taught to regard as one of our shameful moments in American history – the baseless accusations that a huge number of people who had no ties to the Kremlin were loyalists to the Kremlin – had been dredged up, rejuvenated by the Clinton campaign and specifically by U.S. security state agencies. 

I want to show you the very first video that the Clinton campaign launched in May 2016 that made me recoil instinctively. And I couldn't believe – I genuinely couldn't believe – that every Democrat and every liberal and especially every leftist who had been inculcated with the evils of McCarthyism were not reacting in similar ways because the script was so blatantly scummy and baseless. Let's take a look. 

Watch.

(Video. "What is Donald Trump's connection to Vladimir Putin?" 2017)

 OFF and edited TV news comments: He's been a very strong leader for Russia. / He kills journalists that don't agree with him. / At least he's a leader. / “Putin did call me a genius. He said very nice things about me.” Trump always seems to upend American foreign policy tradition in a way that benefits Vladimir Putin/ The prime objective of Putin’s foreign policy has been to destroy NATO. / NATO is obsolete and it's extremely expensive in the United States. / Manafort has represented a pro-Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Ukraine, Yanukovych. 

 

So, you get the gist here: this kind of sinister music playing, every kind of scummy tactic of guilt by association that this person said nice things about this person and the fact that Donald Trump was doing what should have been done a long time ago but he was really the first politician to have the courage to do, which is to stand up and question the ongoing viability of NATO, a military alliance that was created to protect Western Europe from a country that no longer exists, the Soviet Union. And it's something that we were pouring enormous amounts of money into way beyond what the Europeans were bearing. And even though their citizens have in many ways a better quality of life than huge numbers of Americans, questioning the viability of NATO, asking why the United States should be willing to risk a war with the world's largest nuclear-armed power over Ukraine – a country that Barack Obama repeatedly said had no vital interest for the United States – just the attempt, essentially, to equate questioning of American foreign policy with disloyalty and allegiance to Moscow, the ugliest tactics that have been used, were the ones being launched by the Clinton campaign and, then, the FBI's powers of investigation were weaponized to give credence to it. 

Let's look at a couple more passages from the Durham Report because I think it's vital to understand what it is that he concluded.

 

Based on the evidence gathered in the multiple, exhaustive and costly federal investigations of these matters, including the instant investigation, neither U.S. law enforcement nor the intelligence community appears to have possessed any actual evidence of collusion in their holdings at the commencement of the Crossfire Hurricane Investigation. (DOJ. May 12. 2023).

 

Crossfire Hurricane was the code name for the investigation by the FBI into Trump-Moscow links. There was no evidence in their possession of collusion at the time they launched an investigation. Instead, he says, 

 

Upon receipt of unevaluated intelligence from Australia, the FBI swiftly opened the Crossfire Hurricane investigation. In particular, at the direction of Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, opened Crossfire Hurricane immediately. Strzok, at a minimum, had pronounced hostile feelings toward Trump. The matter was opened as a full investigation without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information. 

Further, the FBI did so without (i) one any significant review of its own intelligence databases, (ii) collection and examination of any relevant intelligence from other U.S. intelligence entities, (iii) interviews of witnesses essential to understand the raw information it had received or (iv) using any of the standard analytical tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence. 

Had it done so, again as set out in sections IV.A.3.b and c, the FBI would have learned that their own experienced Russia analysts had no information about Trump being involved with Russian leadership officials, nor were others in sensitive positions at the CIA, the NSA and the Department of State aware of such evidence concerning the subject. In addition, FBI records prepared by Strzok in February and March of 2017 show that at the time of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI had no information in its holdings indicating that, at any time during the campaign, anyone in the Trump campaign had been in contact with any Russian intelligence officials. It was not until mid-September that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators received several of the Steele reports. Within days of their receipt, the unvetted and unverified Steele reports were used to support probable cause in the FBI’s FISA applications targeting [Carter] Page, a U.S. citizen, who, for a period of time, had been an advisor to Donald Trump. 

As discussed later in the report, this was done at a time when the FBI knew that the same information Steele had provided to the FBI had also been fed to the media and others in Washington. (DOJ. May 12. 2023).

 

Again, there are a huge number of highly incriminating components of this report, which we will cover in a later show, including the fact that, unlike the investigation into Trump's ties with Russia, for which there was no evidence in the FBI’s possession to justify an investigation, there was abundant evidence in the FBI's possession to justify investigating whether or not Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had received illegal foreign donations. That was where the foreign influence was coming from and yet Comey and McCabe, according to this report, squashed every attempt to investigate that. 

There are other incredibly incriminating parts of this report. We know, for example, that a senior FBI lawyer ultimately pled guilty to submitting false information to the FISA court to justify spying on Carter Page. Remember the Trump accusation that Obama spied on his campaign was not only absolutely true, but it was done by lying to the FISA court to the point where an FBI senior lawyer was forced to plead guilty to having done that. 

What I find interesting and amazing is that the prosecutor here, John Durham, is somebody who had long been talked about as being a highly respected and apolitical actor. This is not someone they can dismiss as being Clarence Thomas or some right-wing Trump appointee. John Durham has been around forever and he's always been talked about in the most respected terms. Here, for example, is The New York Times, in 2008, in an article entitled “Prosecutor Who Unraveled Corruption in Boston Turns to CIA Tapes.” And this is what they said about him at the time: 

 

Michael Clarke, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who worked with him for years in Connecticut, said that Mr. Durham's experience in unraveling the corrupt relationships in Massachusetts, as well as in convicting public officials in Connecticut, including former Gov. John G. Rowland, demonstrate why his methods may be well-suited to his new task. 

Mr. Clarke, now first selectman in Farmington, Conn., said that the investigation of Mr. Rowland was fraught with political pitfalls and detours. “John’s style is dogged and focused, Mr. Clarke said. “Because he is so intent on following the facts, he refused to become involved in any political dimension or detour.” He said Mr. Durham was undeterred by “certain roadblocks people wanted to put in the way”. He has been and remains, by all accounts, a man of moderation and some modesty. 

Jeffrey Meyer, a law professor at Quinnipiac University who worked as a junior prosecutor under Mr. Durham, described him as both stringent and fair in his approach to cases. Professor Meyer recalled that when he went to work in the office, he excitedly told Mr. Durham of what he thought was a strong criminal case. Mr. Durham, he said, gently disagreed and proceeded in the kindest terms to remind him of the obligation of prosecutors to consider mitigating circumstances and to use their authority carefully. (The New York Times. Jan 13, 2008).

 

So here you have and this is amazing that this is not the top dominant story in the United States – and it isn't because our media institutions are irrevocably and fundamentally corrupted. To the extent they weren't when Trump emerged, they most certainly are now. So here you have one of the most respected federal prosecutors in the country who has long been given politically fraught cases to investigate because of his reputation for being apolitical, for following the facts wherever they take him and he just issued a 306-page report that concludes with ample evidence that the powers of the FBI were radically and consistently and repeatedly abused for overtly political ends – not just for any overtly political ends, but with the specific intention of coercing an outcome in the 2016 election that the ideologically and politically motivated agents of the senior leadership of the FBI wanted. We've read Peter Strzok’s emails to Lisa Page talking about how everything must be done to ensure Donald Trump never becomes president of the United States. These were the people – Jim Comey and Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok – who were in charge of the FBI, who steered the FBI to abuse its powers in the most extreme way, in the most corrupt way, in the most illegal way to interfere in our domestic politics. Exactly what the U.S. security state was never supposed to do. The worst sin of the U.S. security state. That is what this report by a highly respected prosecutor documents in great detail. How is this not the biggest story in the United States? It is because they have purposely encouraged people to forget how dominant this scam was for years, how affirmed it was by every institution that insists that they are the guardians against disinformation, that you have to empower them to protect you from lies because they are the owners of truth. It destroys the credibility of every media outlet, with a few exceptions, in the United States, and of the FBI and of the Obama administration that permitted this and overseeing saw it knowing that this emanated from the Clinton campaign. So, this has to be erased. It has to be dismissed as yet another nothing burger. It got some coverage for one day and now it's gone. They're counting on you to just embrace your own impotence, to decide that it's just too much corruption, that there's nothing that can be done about it. 

That's the learned helplessness they try and foster in the population and I think what is so worth realizing is that this is not an isolated case. We already knew that the 2020 election was exactly the byproduct of the same abuse of power from the same agencies – the U.S. security state. The reporting that The New York Post was able to do about Joe Biden and the pursuit of profit in Ukraine and China and elsewhere through his son and brother, had the potential to sabotage Joe Biden's campaign. Joe Biden barely was declared the winner of the 2020 election, and they were desperate to discredit that reporting by concocting another lie, not the one that they used for the 2016 election, that Trump was in bed with the Kremlin instead the lie that the Hunter Biden reporting and the laptop was Russian disinformation, which was used not only to discredit the reporting, to not only stigmatize everyone who raised it, but to censor it from Facebook and Twitter. 

And the fact that this was done by 51 former intelligence operatives was always proof that this actually was done by the CIA. There’s no such thing as former intelligence operatives. When you reach the highest level of the CIA, you can go work for NBC News or CNN, you are still an intelligence operative. Everyone knows that. But we recently discovered in case anyone had doubts about that or that more proof was required that the CIA itself was directly involved in the creation and dissemination of that lie. 

Here from the Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2023, you see the headline “Biden's CIA Assist in the 2020 Presidential Election.” So, it's two elections in a row for the U.S. security state is intervening on behalf of the Democrats to defeat Donald Trump. There you see the subheading “The agency, not only retirees, turns out to have worked on the Hunter excuse letter.” 

 

It seems President-elect Biden on Nov. 4, 2020, owed thanks not only to a cabal of former intelligence officials but to the Central Intelligence Agency. That's the big takeaway of this week's interim report from House committees detailing the origins of the October 2020 disinformation letter about Hunter Biden's laptop. An earlier release revealed that Joe Biden's campaign helped engineer a statement from 51 former U.S. spies that claimed the laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian intel information operation.” That letter provided Democrats, journalists and social-media companies the excuse to dismiss and censor evidence of Hunter's influence peddling, removing an obstacle from his father's path to victory. Now we find out that, according to a written statement supplied to the committee, an active CIA official joined the effort to solicit more signers to the letter The campaign to elect Joe Biden extended into Langley. (The Wall Street Journal. May 11, 2023). 

 

 

 

I don't think it's possible to overstate the danger that these events reveal that we face in the United States. The people who prattle on about the need to protect democracy from authoritarianism are authoritarians. The media outlets and the billionaire-funded organizations that claim that they need to protect you from disinformation are the most aggressive purveyors of disinformation, spreading it constantly and with no constraints of any kind. But the most dangerous development of all in the United States is that the intelligence agencies, the security state, is fully liberated out in the open, not only to place their senior operatives at our major media outlets, as they have done but to use their investigative powers and their intelligence and surveillance mechanisms to manipulate our politics, to control the outcome of our elections, to destroy any political leader that gets in their way. 

The interview I've shown you many times of Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader in the Senate, telling Rachel Maddow that Trump was being stupid for confronting and criticizing the intelligence community – because, as he put it, everyone in Washington knows not to do that because they have six different ways to Sunday to get back to you – is really a perfect reflection of the despotic climate that has arisen in the United States. If our intelligence agencies, vested with billions and billions of dollars of budget and the most invasive spying technologies and most aggressive law enforcement authorities, are now in the business of controlling the flow of information in the United States, of censoring the information that flows on social media, which we know they did from the Twitter Files, and of deciding which candidate they want to win and which candidate they want to lose, and then abusing those powers to ensure that that outcome is the one that happens, we really are a democracy in name only. That is the definition of a deep state, a permanent power faction that operates in the dark and with no constraints, and that has no constraints of any kind on their power. That is absolutely the reality in the United States. Anybody who denies it is inherently a disinformation agent, and I think there is no greater danger to all of our interests, to our core political values than the abuse of the U.S. security state's powers, as revealed by multiple investigations now culminating with this 306-page report. 

We will definitely the voters show in the future the granular detail and evidence because seeing the whole story matters so much but putting it in context reveals that it is far from an isolated event. It is now the way we do business in the United States, and nothing is more menacing and disturbing and anti-democratic than that. 


 

So, let’s now turn to the second story we want to do tonight, which is some recent events at Twitter that I think are worth looking into – not so much because of what they say about Twitter, but because I think a lot of the questions about Twitter are unresolved and we won't really know the answers to where it's going and what it will do until we see how things unfold, especially with the hiring of this new CEO. But some things have happened relating to Twitter and at Twitter that I think tell us a great deal, not only because of these events, but the reaction to them. So, I want to take a look at some of the recent events over the last couple of weeks and deconstruct what it means in ways that I think haven’t quite yet been done. 

One of the precipitating events that caused a lot of controversies was the fact that – as you see in The Washington Post headline from May 13, “Twitter Says it Will Restrict Access to Some Tweets Before Turkey's Election. The move comes as the country's right-wing leader, President […] Erdogan, faces a tight contest at the polls on Sunday.” 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
34
What else you may like…
Videos
Podcasts
Posts
Articles
Answering Your Questions About Tariffs

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!

00:11:10
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Breaks Down Trump's DOJ Speech on Fox News
00:04:52
In Case You Missed It: Glenn Discusses Mahmoud Khalil on Fox News
00:08:35
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
August 29, 2025

Hi Glenn, I really enjoyed the interview yesterday with Taylor Lorenz. I respect you for having her on to discuss her recent article about hidden doner money going to social media influencers for political messaging despite your past criticisms of her. Likewise I respect Taylor for coming onto your show and facing questions from someone who has been an ardent critic of her knowing it will be uncomfortable. This kind of interview is why I enjoy watching your program, you have an open mind about talking to people respectfully despite differences, real or perceived, you have with one another. Which, for me, raises some questions about biases we all have. More specifically, the negative bias you have appeared to have towards Taylor’s journalism over the years. Your harshest criticisms of her have been over her perceived pro censorship positions she was taking at different times in addition to her being overly sensitive to criticisms she’s received from others. I thought she ...

Glenn, please INVITE WW onto your show and work this out. I can’t have two of my favourite journalists calling each other dishonest. Work this shit out brother!

I found Glenn's interview with Taylor Lorenz to be human (facing the social awkwardness of two people who have said unflattering things about each other), charming and interesting. I hope that Glenn's objections to Taylor's reporting is sufficiently principled that it doesn't just evaporate now because they both agree about Glenn's main concern, censorship. I would love to hear an episode where they clarify and discuss the issues they don't agree on.

post photo preview
Glenn Takes Your Questions on Censorship, Epstein, and More; DNC Rejects Embargo of Weapons to Israel with Journalist Dave Weigel
System Update #505

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!

We are not necessarily a fan of corporate media in general, as you may have heard, but some reporters actually do the kind of work one really needs reporters to do. One of them is Dave Weigel, who has cycled through numerous outlets and now covers politics for Semafor. He was present today in Minneapolis for a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, where, among other things, they rejected a resolution that would have called for an arms embargo on Israel: even though their party members overwhelmingly, according to every poll, support such a plan. We'll talk to Dave about this specific vote as well as other ongoings at the DNC and what it all bodes for the future of this sputtering and sick party, including for 2028. 

Before we get to that, there are ongoing questions from our Q&A that we were going to do on Friday night, and we didn't get a chance to do it. As always, there's a very wide range of questions about censorship and entrapment in police stings of the kind that we saw in Las Vegas, where that accused Israeli pedophile was allowed to walk. There are questions about Lula and Brazil and a whole bunch of other topics as well, some of which we cover, some of which we often don't, that I am anxious to address.

All right. I've really been enjoying doing as many of these Q&A sessions as we can because oftentimes it gets us on the topics that we wouldn't otherwise cover or even on topics from a perspective different than the one that we might approach from. I think it diversifies the range of topics we cover and the way we do it, but also, I think it’s important to have interactive features with our members, and this is the way that we provide them. 

So, if you are a member of our Locals community or you want to become one, definitely keep submitting your questions and we're always going to get to as many as we can. 

The first one is from @Diego-Garcia. It's an interesting name. A lot of interesting names chosen.

It is an interesting question. As someone who began by studying the Constitution and becoming a constitutional lawyer and wanting to focus a lot and focusing on First Amendment litigation, my focus has always been on the negative aspect of this liberty of free speech, which is the Bill of Rights, which essentially, and we've talked about this before, when it comes to people who are non-citizens who are in the country, or even people who are non-citizens and in the country illegally, the reason why everybody on U.S. soil has the right to invoke constitutional protections is because it's not, as this question suggest, a gift of certain privileges and liberties to a certain group of people, citizens or whomever. What they are are restraints on what the government can do with regard to everybody on its soil. 

I was just thinking about this the other day, this ongoing insistence by a lot of people, especially on the right, that people who are non-citizens don't have constitutional protections or even that people who are in the country illegally don't have any. We've shown you before, even Antonin Scalia, as far right of a justice as it got for many decades, said, “Of course, everybody in the country, no matter how you're here, no matter what class you are, has constitutional rights.” The reason for that is that it's a restriction on what the government can do. It's not a privilege that is given to you. 

So, exactly as the question suggests, the First Amendment does not say that you're entitled to equal platforms with somebody else. If your neighbor can attract more people to listen to them because people find him more interesting, and he can attract 1,000 people to come to a speech that he gives and all you can do is stand on the street corner and stand on a cardboard box and have two people listen to you, obviously in one sense, there's not equal speech because the reach is much different. And then if you take that even further, someone who can buy a big corporation the way that Larry Ellison's son just did – bought Paramount and CBS News and now has control of it essentially – obviously, he can have his messaging disseminated in a much more extensive way than someone who's not born to a billionaire and inherits all of that unearned wealth the way that David Ellison did. 

There are obviously different levels of reach that people have. Some people have big platforms; some people have small platforms. As a result, obviously, there's a differing impact on the speech. So, I think the first part of this, the negative part, is extremely important, which is you don't want the government picking and choosing who can speak and who can't, or punishing certain views and permitting other views. That's what the First Amendment is designed to achieve, and that is applied equally and should be applied equally. And that is an extremely important part of the picture.

The argument that I think is being raised is, well, that only gets you so far because in a capitalist system, especially one with vast inequality, the reality is that if you have more money or if you have other assets, if you more charisma, if you have more charm, if you have more innate talent on a camera or in a microphone or on radio, the amount of reach that your speech will have will be far greater than somebody who doesn't have as much money or doesn't as much skill or doesn't have much ability to have others find them interesting and so you get this gigantic gap, this massive disparity in the actual impact and value of people's speech from one person to the next. 

And so, you can call it free speech, but if somebody who's extremely wealthy can buy TV time to disseminate their views, and people who are working-class or poor or middle class don't have that ability, then this question suggests the premise of it, that free speech is really kind of illusory until you address this more positive aspect of it, this guarantee of reach, or at least an attempt to eliminate that disparity, you don't really have free speech. 

I think it's extremely difficult to try to address that disparity because any attempt to do so would almost automatically involve the state having to regulate how you can be heard, who can be heard. I've talked about it in the context of campaign finance before, and in the context of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United, issued in 2009. It was a five-to-four vote overturning certain campaign finance restrictions because they violated the First Amendment. It essentially involved a case where a group, an advocacy group, a nonprofit, had paid for a film that exposed what they believed were serious ethical shortcomings of Hillary Clinton right before the 2008 election. The FEC tried to intervene and say, “No, this violates federal spending, and you cannot disseminate this film.” And the Supreme Court said, “This is classic censorship. If you're saying you can't disseminate a film that this person wants to pay for about a presidential candidate before an election to inform their fellow citizens what they think they ought to hear, of course, that's political censorship.”

 A lot of people are upset with that decision because it permits those with money to be heard more than those with less money. And I understand that concern, I understand that objection, especially as more and more money pours into our elections, we have billions of dollars being spent in our politics. You have Trump and Kamala Harris, whose entire campaign is basically funded by, you could call it, 10 billionaires, maybe add to that, I don't know if you really want to expand it, another 30 almost billionaires. So, we're talking about a tiny handful of people who are meaningfully funding political campaigns at the national level and even on the level of the Senate. And then you have what we're going to talk to Dave about once he's here, you have major, massive super PACs like AIPAC intervening in various races, putting $15 million behind a single congressional candidate to try to remove somebody from Congress who's insufficiently supportive of Israel. And then it does sort of become illusory on some level, like this whole idea of free speech. It's a nice-sounding concept, but it doesn't really mean much if the only people who can be heard are people with money or, as I said before, other talents that enable you to break through and find a big platform. You're still not going to have as big a platform, though, as billionaires, obviously, who can spend endlessly. 

I always thought the problem with that was exactly what Citizens United presented, that the only way to really address that disparity is by having the government regulate the reach of everybody's views, to try to either limit the reach of certain people by preventing them from spending money on the spread of their messaging. And you get into the whole question of, is money speech? And that was wildly misunderstood. Of course, it's not that money is speech, but how you use your money to promote your political views. If you want to pay for fires that call for an arms embargo against Israel and distribute them on the street corner, the government can't come and say, “We're barring you from doing that.” And then if you go to court and say, “My First Amendment rights are being objected,” the government says, “No, no. This isn't about speech. This is about how they're spending their money. They paid for these fliers, so we have the right to stop it.” Obviously, your right to free speech includes your right to use your money to print fliers or to disseminate your views, to travel somewhere, to pay for a conference room, to have a gathering. And all nine members of the Supreme Court Agreed with this notion that the fact that money is being spent doesn't remove it from a free speech context, even though that became the primary objection of the liberal left: “Oh, the Citizens United found that money is speech, that's not really what was at stake in that case.” 

So, I'm uncomfortable with any government solution because I think to invite government into regulating how speech can be heard, the reach of it will automatically result in abuses. They'll crack down on speech they dislike, they'll ignore it, or promote speech they like, and then you're right back into the problem where you no longer have that negative liberty of the government regulating the speech, which to me is always the greatest danger. 

In a political context, I can imagine a program that we're starting to get now that tries to address or at least mitigate the disparity between, say, the ability of an extremely rich candidate or one backed by a lot of money to be heard versus one who is representing, say, working-class and poor people and therefore doesn't have billionaire donors. But the way to address that disparity is not by limiting the ability of the candidate with wealthier backers to be heard. It's to boost the ability of the candidate without the money to be heard through things like public financing of campaigns. And that, I think, presents far fewer problems from a constitutional perspective in terms of addressing this disparity. 

But in general, the fact is that in a capitalist system, which is the system in which we currently live and are likely to live for the foreseeable future, having more money means that you're probably going to enable yourself to be heard. Although there are people who start with nothing and create big, gigantic platforms on the internet, and are able to be heard that way by increasingly large numbers of people.  So, I think that problem is also being mitigated by the leveling of the playing field as opposed to even 10 years ago, when you knew a giant corporation behind you who could pay for a printing press, a television network, or a cable network; you now no longer need that. And so that disparity is automatically working itself out. 

But outside of the campaign context, I can't think of a way for the government to address that. Even though the last point I will make is that the founders were very aware of this problem. The founders of the United States were all capitalists. They were all quite wealthy. They were all landowners, aristocrats, for the most part. And the reality is that the Bill of Rights was ultimately a document that is about protecting minorities from the excesses of a democratic or majoritarian mob. That's what they were worried about. They were worried that majorities were going to form against elites and the wealthy in society and say, We passed a law, 70% of people to take away big farms and distribute them to workers, that's why they inserted a clause saying you cannot deprive somebody of property without just compensation and due process of law. Or they were worried that 80% of people would say we don't like this political view, we want to ban it, we want to ban this religion. And that's why it was designed to say it doesn't matter how many people want to ban a certain religion, or ban a certain view, or ban the media outlet, even if you get 80% of members of Congress to do it, the Constitution supersedes that and says Congress shall make no law, even if huge majorities want to. 

So, the Bill of Rights is a minoritarian document. It's designed essentially to limit what democracy can do, to say that majoritarian mobs can't infringe on basic rights, no matter how big the majorities are that want to do that. So, they were definitely capitalist, but they were also very aware, and you find a lot of this in Thomas Paine's writing, as even some of the debates in the Federalist Papers and some writings in Thomas Jefferson, about how if economic inequality becomes too extreme, it will spill over into the political realm, which is supposed to be equal. In capitalism, you have financial inequality, but in a system governed by rules and constitutions, you're supposed to have political equality between citizens. They were very well aware that if financial and economic inequality becomes too severe, it will contaminate the political realm, and that same inequality will be reflected in the political round, rendering all these nice-sounding concepts, written on parchment, illusory, and they were concerned about that, and you can make the argument that we've arrived at that point. 

And I do think that is a huge problem, the amount of money in politics, the ability of the extremely wealthy to dominate the two parties. I think it's a big reason why the two parties agree on so many things, because the donor base of each party overlaps in so many ways and has the same interests. The question, though, becomes, what is the more dangerous path? Is it to permit this inequality of reach of speech to continue, or is it to empower the government to intervene and start regulating how often or much people can be heard in the name of trying to reduce that disparity? And of course, if you have a very benevolent and ideal government, they would do so in a very noble way. They would just try to level the playing field. But typically, that's not the kind of government we have and we have to assume that we don't have a perfectly pure and well-motivated government. We always have to assume the opposite if the government is eager to abuse rights or corruptly apply laws. So, to empower a government to be the regulator of this disparity, to address this disparity, and no one else can really do it besides the government, is, in my view, to invite far more dangers in terms of censorship and things like that than it is to allow this inequality to continue. 


All right, I think we have time for one more before our guest is here. This comes from @Nelson_Baboon. As I said, people choose very interesting names, so welcome @Nelson_Baboon to the show and your question is:

So, on the question of these kind of sting arrests for pedophiles, this recently came up in the context of the story we covered with that high-ranking Israeli official in the cyberwarfare unit of the Israeli military who was charged with luring a minor or trying to lure a minor to have sex with him using the internet, which is a felony in all 50 states, including Nevada, where he was charged. Yet, he was somehow permitted to be released on bail without any seizure of his passport or ankle monitor or any measures to prevent him from just leaving the country that he has no ties to and going back to Israel. And of course, that's exactly what he proceeded to do. And so, Michael raised the issue, which is unrelated to the issue that I just described, which is my concern about why this person was allowed to get out on bail without any kind of precautions to prevent them from returning, which I've seen in many instances are used in exactly these circumstances. Otherwise, you just have foreign nationals coming to the United States and committing felonies. And when they're caught, they just say, “All right, here's $10,000 in bail, and now I'm out. I have no ties to your country. I'm going back to my country, where I'll never have any consequences.” 

Michael was raising the question of whether these kinds of sting operations are justified at all, because the way the sting operation worked here, and they caught eight people, was that there was no proof that any of these people were seeking out minors to have sex on the internet. They used an app, a sex app, or a dating or hookup app for straight people. None of them is gay; all of them are straight. They were all accused of trying to lure underage girls to have sex with them. And there was no evidence they were looking for minors, but the police created profiles pretending to be a 15-year-old girl, or a 14-year-old girl, or a 16-year-old girl. And then they initiate a conversation with their target. And say, “Hey, I'm 15, and here are some pictures.” And then if the person responds positively, even if they're prodded, like, “Hey, do you want to meet? I find you hot.” And the person says, “Yeah, that'd be great, let's meet,” the police can swoop in and arrest them. And the question is, was that person really inclined to commit that crime? Were they going on their own to seek out minors to lure them to have sex so that the police were preemptively catching those who would do such things before they did them? Or were the police creating a crime that otherwise wouldn't have existed by essentially entrapping somebody, by kind of luring them into committing a crime? 

And I definitely see both sides of that. I mean, it seems like if you are a law-abiding, responsible, mentally healthy person and somebody appears in your DMs or your dating app messages and says, “Hey, I'm a 15-year-old girl. We should meet.”  Your immediate answer ought to be, “No, I'm not interested in that,” and block them and move on. But at the same time, I think there's a legitimate law enforcement effort, I guess, that you could argue for. On the other side, you can definitely end up sweeping up people that you've provoked into committing a crime who never would have committed that crime in the first place and never intended to. That's what entrapment is. And that's obviously a defense that people would raise: the police entrapped me. I would never have committed this crime on my own. I've never done anything like this in my life, but they kind of lured me in. 

I think the reason why a lot of people don't want to enter that argument, and Michael doesn't care about this, is that the minute you start questioning police sting operations, you seem like you're defending the rights of accused pedophiles. As soon as you do that, you yourself get accused of being a pedophile, which nobody wants. Very few people are indifferent to that false accusation. Michael Tracey happens to be one of them for very Michael-Tracey reasons that I think are commendable. I mean, I remember I defended Matt Gaetz on due process grounds alone. I just said, “Look, he hasn't been convicted of anything. He's accused of having sex with a 17-year-old woman. A 17-year-old girl is called a 17-year-old woman in many jurisdictions. In a minority of jurisdictions, 17 is under the age of consent.” And all I did was write an article saying, until he's guilty, we shouldn't be assuming that he's guilty. That's what basic due process means. And I got widely called a pedophile. Why are you defending Matt Gaetz? He must be a pedophile. 

So, I understand the reluctance most people have to enter that debate. So, let's take it out of the pedophilia debate. And you, the questioner, raised this issue, which is the issue of, in the terrorism context, which I wrote about for many, many years. You could find articles of mine with titles like “The FBI once again creates its own terrorist plot that it then boasts of breaking up.” And this is what the FBI would do constantly during the War on Terror. The whole War on Terror, the massive budgets that were issued, and the increase in spying and surveillance and police authorities justified in its name depended on constantly showing that there was a real terrorist threat. And they didn't find many terrorist threats, meaning terrorist plots that were underway. So, they would go and manufacture them, similar to these kinds of stings. And what they always did, in almost every case, the FBI would go to a mosque, have an undercover agent there. Often, these guys were scumbags being used as their agents provocateurs. They were people who were already convicted of financial crimes, trying to get out of prison and agreeing to work for the FBI to get benefits for themselves. They would go to the mosque, and they would look around for some vulnerable young person who was financially struggling or often mentally unwell or intellectually impaired, and the FBI would create a terrorist plot.  And they would pay for it. They would provide equipment, and they would say to the guy, this 20-year-old kid at a mosque who's from a very poor family or, as I said, has mental or intellectual impairments, “Hey, if you join with us, we'll pay you $50,000. We're going to go blow up this bridge.” And he’s like “No,” A lot of times they say no, and they pressure and pressure him. And then the minute he finally says, yes, they swoop in and arrest him in a very theatrical way and charge him with conspiracy to commit the terrorism act. A lot of these people went to not just prison, the harshest prisons the United States has at Terre Haute, Indiana, or even Florence Supermax, in Colorado, where the restrictions were incredibly inhumane, because they were charged with terrorism offenses. After 9/11, all these laws were severely heightened for obvious reasons, and in most of these cases, the FBI created its own crime. These were kids who were never going to, on their own, embark on some terrorist plot. They didn't have the ability to, they didn't have the thought in their heads to. Sometimes they would hear of a 20-year-old or a 22-year-old in a dorm criticizing U.S. foreign policy in a very harsh way, and they would target those kinds of people, just like normal young people exploring radical ideas, and they would then lure them into a terrorist plot. So, I am deeply uncomfortable with all of these sorts of sting operations because of the concern that the police are creating their own criminals; they're turning law-abiding citizens into criminals by luring and provoking them in a way that they wouldn't have done absent that provocation. And that's what entrapment is. 

Ultimately, the question of entrapment is this person would have committed this crime absent the undercover police sting? Or were these people on the path where they were going to commit this crime, and the police intervened before they let it happen and saved victims and saved society from these crimes that were about to happen? And I think in most cases, the police are trying to justify their existence and their budget, just like the FBI was trying so hard to justify its huge surveillance authorities. They constantly had to show the public, look, we caught another group of Muslims trying to blow things up. And so often there were plots that the FBI created. 

So, I think there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. I'm glad Michael Tracey is out there doing his Michael Tracey thing of not caring what kind of bullets get thrown at him. I don't agree with everything he says. We argue about it in private, but I think it's always important to have someone willing to take those bullets and say, “I don’t care what you call me. I'm going to stand up and question these orthodoxies and this conventional wisdom.” And in the case of sting operations, whether they happen in the terrorism context or any other context, and I criticized harshly every one of these cases, I reported on them and interviewed the lawyers and the accused and would write months of articles dissecting the entrapment. It's the same thing if you do it in any other context, including pedophilia, just people are very reluctant to do it, for the reason I said, but it's extremely important to because I agree that these sting operations have a lot of not just unethical components to them or morally dubious ones, but I think very legally dangerous ones as well, where you take law abiding citizens and for the interest of the law enforcement officers or agencies, you convert them into criminals on purpose because you can't actually find any on your own. 

I have no idea if that's the case, obviously, with this Israeli cyberwarfare official, my reporting and analysis was simply about the oddity, the extreme oddity that, after meeting all week with NSA and FBI officials, he was permitted to just waltz out of jail, get on a plane back to Israel, which he admitted he was going to do. And now he's just back home in Israel with no obligation to return and face the charges against him. So, I have no view of his guilt or innocence. I don't know the details of what the police did there. But in the abstract, I think there are a lot of reasons to be extremely skeptical and always question these kinds of sting operations where the police don't catch anyone in the course of committing a crime or plotting a crime, but are the ones who lure the person into doing so. 

The Interview: Dave Weigel

Dave Weigel covers American politics for Semafor, where he's done some of the, I think, most tireless reporting on our political scene. I'll just give you, instead of reading this introduction, my mental image that I always have in my head whenever I hear somebody mention Dave, or whenever I read one of his articles: I always picture him kind of like on a regional jet in like a middle seat going to like Cincinnati or Toledo in order to stay at some like mid-range Hilton, where he's going to be in a conference room for three days, drinking plastic cups of coffee, covering meetings of politicians or party officials and doing the kind of reporting that you need reporters to do, not from a distance, but by being there. 

That's what he's currently doing today. He's in Minneapolis. I have no idea if that mental image is true or not. I'm going to ask him, I bet it is. But he's at the Annual DNC Meeting where there was a lot done by a party that's obviously struggling to determine what its identity is, what it stands for, and tried to make some progress today. I'm not sure if it had progress or if it went backwards, but that's part of what I'm excited to talk to Dave about. 

G. Greenwald: Dave, it's great to see you. Welcome to what is weirdly your debut episode, your first appearance on System Update. I appreciate the time. 

Dave Weigel: It's good to be here. And you called it. This is a mid-range Hilton, but the conference is in a higher-range Hilton. So they're not out of money yet. 

G. Greenwald: I see the mid-range Hilton photo behind you. This is exactly how I picture you. I hope you have enough miles to avoid the middle seat on the regional jets at least, but otherwise, I'm confident. 

Dave Weigel: I got a window seat. Thank you for checking. 

G. Greenwald: Good, good, good. I'm glad about that. I feel a lot better now. All right, so let me ask you, first of all, just before we get into the specifics, what is this DNC meeting? I mean, what is it designed to do? And what are the proceedings about? 

Dave Weigel: Well, this is their summer meeting. It happens every year, as you might guess. Republicans just had their summer meeting last week in Atlanta. Republicans these days do not let the press cover much of their business. I wasn't at that despite the intro. The Press wasn't allowed in anything but an hour-long ending session where they confirmed that Joe Gruters would be the new RNC chair, Trump's choice. Democrats opened this up to the press, and I do thank them for that because it's not like we're out here trying to write the most negative story we can. We just want to see what is happening inside the guts of the party. They are open, they're accessible, and they're struggling. This is not something they deny. Ken Martin, the chair of the Party, I saw him speak to a number of the caucuses here and his pitch is, yeah, it's tough. I'm not going anywhere, even though a lot of people want me to go. This is going to take years to build back from. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Israel Slaughters More Journalists, Hiding War Crimes; Trump's Unconstitutional Flag Burning Ban; Glenn Takes Your Questions
System Update #504

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_4nXfDSZARKhyRtwv4IOhm4vEhB_45LlyrR14zgYXB4RdZh1VCzXCYR0BW_bENlZpphILS4wOfQn6aVmsQkTTaFPWCZd6fjiRb8ig8KYsaqemBCPv_4BmfvYxV7HYI8_aFkXwJKqXOtDZieOggmeiObQ?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

As we have unfortunately said many times over the last 22 months, whenever you believe that Israel's atrocities and crimes against humanity in Gaza cannot get any worse, the IDF finds a way to prove you wrong. Earlier today, it did just that when Israel slaughtered another 20 people in Gaza after it bombed Nasser Hospital, the only functioning medical facility in all of Southern Gaza. 

When medical workers showed up to treat the wounded, and journalists appeared on the scene to document the latest Israeli horror, Israel bombed that gathering, as well – in what is known as "a double tap" strike, widely considered to be terrorism. In that massacre were five dead journalists, including ones who worked for AP, NBC News and Reuters, as well as other medical professionals on the scene to help the wounded. 

As Israel always does when they murder people who are connected to important Western institutions, they had Benjamin Netanyahu express very sincere "regret" and he vowed to have Israel investigate itself. But this is who Israel is, what they do every day in Gaza, and there is nothing they regret about it. Yet, the United States continues to force its citizens to finance and arm all of it. 

 Donald Trump once again assaulted the First Amendment by doing something American demagogues including Hillary Clinton and many others, have long vowed to do: criminalize the burning of the American flag, despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that such expressive action is protected by the free speech clause of the First Amendment. 

Also: we usually do a Q&A session on Friday night, but because I was really under the weather last week, we didn't do a Q&A. So, each day this week, whenever we have time permitting after the first couple segments, we're going to try to answer a couple of Q&As questions that have been submitted by our Locals members. 

AD_4nXfDSZARKhyRtwv4IOhm4vEhB_45LlyrR14zgYXB4RdZh1VCzXCYR0BW_bENlZpphILS4wOfQn6aVmsQkTTaFPWCZd6fjiRb8ig8KYsaqemBCPv_4BmfvYxV7HYI8_aFkXwJKqXOtDZieOggmeiObQ?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

AD_4nXd5pXbBfXm8lpMAw04DzgTete3vaWyXWnKJyDRQOD-EKRWNoUKI31edkd8_KKcl1C4ULZqRBUGHhSFkLvSUdBn3d8LVKAp2JAXHx2Fl2LLxKae3F_FjR0fCU0TDyB_IvOLJnrpZ6hhn-fsn6IMe8Ic?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, and that is what it is: genocide. There's just no avoiding that word, as Israeli scholars of genocide themselves have now said it in mass, including many who resisted that word for a long time because of the force that it carries, especially for Israelis, but that's certainly what it is. 

It really presents a dilemma if you're somebody who covers the news, because on the one hand, there's not much more you can say about the horrors, atrocities and crimes against humanity that are being committed on a daily basis –, the unparalleled suffering and sadism, the imposition of mass famine, and just the indiscriminate slaughter of turning people's lives into a sustained and prolonged hell, as could possibly be imagined for those who are lucky or unlucky enough to survive it. 

A population of 2.2 million, where half the population are children – half, fully half of the people enduring all of this are children – and on the one hand, you feel like, look, I've said everything there is to say about it. I have expressed my horror, my disgust, my moral contempt, not just for Israel, but for the United States that's funding and arming it, as well as Western countries like the U.K. and Germany. And there's not a lot more to say. On the other hand, it is ongoing, and every day brings new atrocities. And there's public opinion still forming and still molding and still changing. You feel still compelled, I'm speaking for myself here, to do everything you can to try to keep the light shining on it and to ensure that people who haven't yet been exposed to the full truth of it, or haven't been convinced of it, become convinced. 

Although it seems repetitive, the reality is that the inhumanity on display only gets worse and worse. It's an ongoing atrocity. Today in particular, when things happened that are of significance and of high consequence – that you hope at least are of high consequences – I think it's particularly important to cover what is taking place because that's when the world pays most attention. 

Here from the Financial Times

AD_4nXcpAGbQPU_k9FnVNygyK9DVBb8xaViYY3U2kkdZYdYMWZouuiS2-z4api7cE0-TeZotbDnL3RHoHtGsS4_TSKmO8BRAui-ywlmXA_rPZo8b0Tx8jpgvi0bML7cKs-hBmTNMS6Nx3HPETwYj1VGXnao?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

So, I just want to spend a second talking about double-tap strikes. They are things that we actually saw the United States do during the War on Terror. For a long time, they were the hallmark of groups we consider terrorist groups, like al-Qaeda. 

The essence of a double tap strike is that you bomb a certain place, kill a bunch of people, wound a bunch people and then you wait for other people to show up to start rescuing the wounded, to start treating the wounded, to start reporting on what happened, and then you do your double tap, your second strike, so that you kill not only the initial people that were in the vicinity where you bombed, but you kill rescue workers, aid workers, physicians, ambulance drivers and journalists. And that's exactly what happened here. 

And there's footage of what is considered to be the second strike, the double tap, where you see these rescue workers in a place that Israel had just bombed, on the fourth floor of this hospital. They are looking for the wounded, they're treating the wounded and then you'll see the strike – because there were journalists there filming it, including several who were killed. 

I think the video is pretty graphic; it's kind of horrifying. You see the people as they're working on the wounded, and then, the next second, you see the Israeli strike that was clearly very deliberate. So, watch it based on the use of your own discretion, but I think it's important to show it because so many repulsive supporters of Israel constantly, instinctively, automatically claim that every event that's reported that reflects on Israel is a lie, including Bari Weiss, who's engaged in an unparalleled act of genocide denial and atrocity denial masquerading under journalism. 

She published an editorial today justifying herself and the rag that serves the Israeli military, and it mentioned us and several other people. We'll probably respond to that tomorrow. But that's the nature of the evil we're dealing with: people who are loyal, primarily, or solely, to Israel, and will simply deny every single act of evil Israel engages in. 

It's important to show the truth, and here's the video from Al-Ghad TV at the Nasser Hospital overnight, in Southern Gaza. 

Video. Al-Ghad TV, Nasser Hospital. August 25, 2025,

It was a precise second strike. It happened at the same place as the first strike. Those are the 20 people who ended up being killed. That's how five journalists died because they knew that when there's a bomb, journalists, brave journalists – not like Bari Weiss, who runs a rag that denies everything from afar while she shoves her face full of food and publishes one article after the next denying that people in Gaza, including children, are dying of starvation. These are actual reporters, very brave reporters who have been doing this for 22 months, even watching their colleagues deliberately targeted with murder, one after the next. And Israel knows that when there are these strikes, the journalists go there, the rescue workers and the aid workers, as well as doctors, go there. And that's who they intentionally sought out to kill, and that's exactly who they killed. 

You have journalists from all over the world who want to go into Gaza. They want to report on what they see there. They want to report on starvation. They want to report on the number of children in danger, dying of malnutrition and famine. They want to report on the destruction in Gaza. They want to document what they're seeing, but Israel doesn't let them in. They handpicked a couple of puppets, like Douglas Murray, or a couple of people they pay. They take them on little excursions for three hours in the IDF. They show them something they want them to see and say what they want them to say, and then they bring them back to Israel, and they go on social media or shows and say it.

They don't allow real journalists from any media outlets into Gaza, independent journalists who aren't dependent on the Israeli government or the IDF. Why would you do that? Why would you ban journalists from the place that you're operating, especially when you're disputing what's taking place there, except that you fear the world seeing the truth and the reality of who you are and what you've done? 

There are journalists in Gaza, Palestinian journalists, who, as I said, have done an incredible job, remarkably heroic and admirable, of documenting under the most difficult and dangerous circumstances everything that's taking place in Gaza. So, we have had journalists document it. The problem is that Israel and its supporters don't just immediately call them liars, but accuse them of being operatives with Hamas, which then by design is justifying their murder – and they're often murdered. 

There's a huge number of prominent journalists who have been the eyes and ears of the world in Gaza who have been deliberately murdered by the IDF. On the one hand, they are preventing independent media from entering, and then, on the other, slaughtering all the people who are documenting what's taking place inside of Gaza. The message that they're sending is obvious: if you want to show the world the reality of what we are doing inside of Gaza, you are likely to be the target of one of our missiles or bombs as well, and not just you, but your family will blow up, your entire house with your parents and grandparents and siblings and spouse and children, as they've done many, many times. 

The Western media has been, shamefully and disgracefully, relatively silent. There have been a few noble exceptions. I've said before, Trey Yingst with Fox News, especially given that he works at Fox News, a fanatically pro-Israel outlet owned by Rupert Murdoch, the fanatically pro-Israel Murdoch family has been loudly protesting the number of Gazan journalists being murdered by the IDF. But very, very few others have. 

The Foreign Press Association today issued a statement, given the five journalists who were killed, and it says this:

AD_4nXfGTA63c8WHlPEICFjtpp_1dGeRKFn8y-pFPv0NzIThNW7eeR4G1QNQ1q_7QGqHaDVCKCiKppI_T67BhaZrOmQZ8L8oY_YYy0Ap2AHmQKbiRvXuiDPkTjfy6_hbmtekSmlcMXdr0SXPlMvhJcJM7Q?key=myKUnVaC9XzGNUw2vaBXLw

TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

This must be a watershed moment, and that's what I was referring to earlier as to why I think it's so crucial to cover the events of the last 24 hours. Unfortunately, what happens is the world pays most attention when the dead who are part of Israeli massacres and genocidal acts and ethnic cleansing are not just ordinary Gazans, but are people who, for some reason, have value to Western institutions. Each time Israel has killed somebody with a connection to a Western institution, Benjamin Netanyahu has to come out and do what he did today, which he did only because the people he murdered worked for AP and NBC News and Reuters. He doesn't care about Al Jazeera, and so he must pretend that he feels bad about it because he knows the West is enraged by it. 

Here's what Benjamin Netanyahu said:

TextoO conteúdo gerado por IA pode estar incorreto.

The hostages' families know that that's a lie. They don't care at all about the hostages. They've had many opportunities to get the hostages back. In fact, just last week, Hamas agreed to a cease-fire agreement that the Americans presented that would have let half of the living hostages go back, and the Israelis just ignored it because they just want to keep killing. The hostages have nothing to do with this war other than serving as a good pretext. 

So, Israel does this every day, and then they feign regret and remorse when they know that Western governments and Western institutions have to object. 

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
post photo preview
Israeli Official Caught in Pedophile Sting Operation Allowed to Flee; Israeli Data: 83% of the Dead in Gaza are Civilians; Ukrainian Man Arrested over Nord Stream Explosions
System Update #503

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_4nXdaGf-OUt5rx2OlijwoDptT2KOdBDC2-rvOLI2E9v_QXsv1kqWdHPRG9vJZlXUyxHF6xG_Y672b6ozMNqom3EFUZIHiCekCe9-4nNOlzJgrPNbQMt__EjrQiPIgZpphDnU1f-D3i9zeQb95dlqi-40?key=a5jNMVYDIfzm6rNucvCEvA

A top official of Israel's cyberwarfare unit was arrested in Nevada on Monday night after police say he tried to lure what he thought was an underage child to have sex with him. The Israeli, Tom Alexandrovich, was let out of jail on bail and then – rather strangely – had no measures imposed on him to ensure that he did not simply flee the country and go back to Israel. As a result, the accused pedophile did exactly that – after telling the FBI that he intended to get on a plane to go back to Israel, that is what he predictably did. 

Why were no measures undertaken to prevent that, whether it be the seizure of his passport or wearing an ankle bracelet, or monitoring? We'll examine the latest about this increasingly strange case, as well as one of the officials, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, who has her own background. 

Then: a harrowing report from Israel's own intelligence units’ documents that an astonishing 83% of the people the IDF has killed in Gaza are civilians, all this revealed today, as Bari Weiss' Free Press continues to engage in some of the most brazen atrocity and genocide denialism imaginable in service of the foreign government to which they are loyal. We'll examine these latest revelations and what they mean for U.S. policy. 

AD_4nXdaGf-OUt5rx2OlijwoDptT2KOdBDC2-rvOLI2E9v_QXsv1kqWdHPRG9vJZlXUyxHF6xG_Y672b6ozMNqom3EFUZIHiCekCe9-4nNOlzJgrPNbQMt__EjrQiPIgZpphDnU1f-D3i9zeQb95dlqi-40?key=a5jNMVYDIfzm6rNucvCEvA

AD_4nXfYbsB_pACPYJiv_DKAFAI-FRzJ27qVc_luLNVZNqAklGZq4Onz7xz8QgYi1ClvmahCIYv4zEmaF8C8fEZSCpn8yDulvnrGxuyCtqaGxMN68GkZbR_MhIEcCPg4G0ndHnyiCvqaClsbHHxYkbOtO04?key=a5jNMVYDIfzm6rNucvCEvA

Only for Supporters
To read the rest of this article and access other paid content, you must be a supporter
Read full Article
See More
Available on mobile and TV devices
google store google store app store app store
google store google store app tv store app tv store amazon store amazon store roku store roku store
Powered by Locals