Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Politicized DOJ: Anti-Trump Law Professor Warns of Indictment Dangers. Plus: Is Biden's Ukraine Policy Compromised by Personal Interests? And Is Left v. Right Still Relevant?
Video Transcript
August 10, 2023
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Good evening. It's Tuesday, August 8. 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.

Tonight, the fact that many of us are immersed in the daily news cycle can mean on the one hand that we're more informed but on the other, this intense immersion sometimes results in extraordinary situations becoming rapidly normalized. In the digital era, a news cycle of three weeks can feel like it's a full year, which means that our ability to take a step back and contemplatively evaluate events with in-depth analysis can be easily compromised. To invoke a horrid cliché – one that applies here, though – the speed of the flow of information and the intensity of the 24-7 news cycle can easily cause us to focus on individual trees at the expense of seeing the entire forest. Such is the case with the fact that there are now three separate criminal indictments and likely more to come brought against the former president and current frontrunner for the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump. Two of those are federal indictments, which means they have been filed by an agency, the U.S. Department of Justice, that works under the authority and power of the sitting American President, Joe Biden, who only narrowly defeated Trump in certified Electoral College results of 2020 despite a wide array of obstacles that could not have been any more unfavorable to an incumbent president, starting with the COVID pandemic and all the resulting economic harm that it fostered. Trump is, no matter how you cut it, a direct political threat to the ability of Joe Biden to remain in political power. The fact that Trump is now being prosecuted by the administration of Joe Biden and not for classic or easily recognized crimes such as murder or bribery, extortion or other forms of political corruption, but instead on charges that depend upon novel and dubious interpretations of law. That is an extraordinary set of events that has become and quickly normalized as the result of a dissent-free media that treats these accusations as unquestionably valid and treats Trump as an already proven criminal. 

An op-ed published today, remarkably with The New York Times, does one of the best jobs yet in illuminating how destabilizing and dangerous these indictments are likely to be. Its author is a vocal Trump critic, Jack Goldsmith, who is a high-ranking official in the Bush Justice Department and is a long-time professor at Harvard Law. He writes,

 

There is no getting around the fact that the indictment comes from the Biden administration when Mr. Trump holds a formidable lead in the polls to secure the Republican Party nomination and is running neck and neck with Mr. Biden, the Democratic Party’s probable nominee.

 

We'll examine Professor Goldsmith's arguments and the broader historical and political context whereby the D.C. ruling class has eagerly and recklessly abandoned their long-standing view that only "banana republics" prosecute former presidents and opposition leaders for crimes of a political nature.

Then: the most unhinged arrange an evidence-free conspiracy theory in the last 20 years – the worst – since Jeffrey Goldberg used the pages of The New Yorker in 2002 to convince Americans that Saddam Hussein had a secret alliance with al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden came not from boomer pages on Facebook, nor from the bowels of Fortune. It came instead from the largest and most powerful media corporations. For years, they recited as gospel, a deranged script that was cooked up by the CIA, that maintained that Russia had seized control of the levers of American power through various forms of sexual, personal and financial blackmail held over the head of Donald Trump, which Moscow used to force Trump to do Putin's bidding at the expense of the interests of the United States. They continued to insist on this conspiracy, even in the face of Trump's attacking the most vital Russian interests, such as when he reversed President Obama's decision and sent lethal arms to Ukraine, in 2017, or then spent years badgering Germany to abandon Nord Stream 2. Those are the most vital components of future Russian plans for economic growth, and Trump did everything in his power to sabotage them. And the defenders of this conspiracy theory barely blinked – let alone apologize and issued retractions – when their Jack Smith of 2018, former Bush-Cheney FBI Director Robert Mueller closed his 18-month investigation without even mentioning, let alone vindicating, this laughable and paranoid McCarthyite tale. In Newsweek, today, political science professor Max Abrams asked a provocative question, only half tongue in cheek. His article appears under the headline “Does Ukraine have kompromat on Joe Biden?”

 I always find it so amusing whenever our media class takes what are very common practices: it uses the Russian term for that as though the Russians invented that by calling blackmail kompromat. But that's the media just discourse. In this article, Professor Abrams argues with obviously compelling evidence that the case for suspecting Ukraine's leverage over Biden is far more credible than the fever-swamp dream that Trump was controlled with sexual and financial blackmail by Putin. Professor Abrams examines the multiple evidentiary basis for concluding that Joe Biden is vulnerable to all sorts of leverage that the Ukrainian government could wield over him, in large part due to the various ways that his son, Hunter Biden, profited enormously by selling at least a perception, if not the reality, of his father's influence in that country. Abrams reviews the evidence now lost under a pile of intense partisan media dials that Biden's interference in Kyiv, whereby he boasted of having a prosecutor fired, directly benefited the gas company Burisma, which was paying Biden's son roughly $80,000 a month. We'll speak to Professor Abrams tonight about his argument and how, as is so often the case, the Biden administration is the living, breathing embodiment of what Democrats breathlessly accused Trump and his administration of being. 

So much of this points to a vital but often overlooked fact. One of the central questions in American political life, if not the central question, is not whether someone is now on the right or the left in the sense of how those terms have been traditionally understood. What is often more determinative is whether one sees this widespread, intense and deep distrust of America's leading institutions of authority and believes that that distrust is valid and deserved. In other words, the defining metric for placing someone on the political spectrum is not so much liberal versus conservative or Democrat versus Republican but instead is whether one is pro-establishment or anti-establishment when it comes to the most powerful political and financial actors in this country. 

As we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, as soon as we're done with our one-hour live show here on Rumble, we will move to Locals, which is the platform that is part of Rumble, for our interactive Aftershow, to take your questions and comment on your feedback. To obtain access to that aftershow, simply sign up as a member to our Locals community. The red Join button is right below the video player here on the Rumble page. That gives you access not only to that show every Tuesday and Thursday night, but also to the exclusive and original written content that we post. And doing that helps the independent journalism that we do here as well. 

We are also encouraging our audience to download the Rumble app, which is very high quality and, certainly, has functionalities far superior to the browser that will enable you to follow this show and other shows as well, such as the one on which I appeared earlier today, The Russell Brand Show, and other. It also enables notifications, which means as soon as we go live with our show, it will notify you immediately. That will help you not to have to wait online for the show to begin or try to remember when it starts. And you can also encourage others to download that app and follow their favorite shows on Rumble that way as well.

As one last reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form on Spotify, Apple and all other major podcasting platforms. Each episode is posted 12 hours after we first broadcast it live here on Rumble and rating and reviewing the show help spread the visibility of the program.

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

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Is anybody out there? The question regarding noise chaos in media etc. that prompted Rush for this piece. A song that defined the era of NAFTA, the simultaneous framing of OJ Simpson and Mark Fuhrman for political polling purposes, and the ensuing chaos is still with all of us today.

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Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference
System Update #508

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!

 

 The Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela. It claimed that – without presenting even a shred of evidence – that the boat carried 11 members of the Tren de Aragua gang, and that the boat was filled with drugs. Secretary of State Marco Rubio – whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba – claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad. But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was, in fact, headed to the United States. 

There are numerous vital issues and questions here. First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. Government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth. Second, what is the basis, the legal or Constitutional basis, that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat, if you believe there are drugs on it, to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off the planet? And then third, and perhaps most important: is all of this – as it seems – merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time, one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela? We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela. For a political movement that claims to hate Bush/neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate. 

Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracey, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer. Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing. He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers, lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told. All of this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama – efforts that include claims he's made, with which I have sometimes disagreed, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable in every instance: we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of mob justice or emoting-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims. And that's what Michael has been doing, and he's basically been standing alone while doing it, and he'll be here to discuss yesterday’s expulsion from this press conference as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do. 

 

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Minnesota Shooting Exploited to Impose AI Mass Surveillance; Taylor Lorenz on Dark Money Group Paying Dem Influencers, and the Online Safety Act
System Update #507

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!

 

The ramifications of yesterday's Minneapolis school shooting – and the exploitations of it – continue to grow. On last night's program, we reviewed the transparently opportunistic efforts by people across the political spectrum to immediately proclaim that they knew exactly what caused this murderer to shoot people. As it turned out, the murderer was motivated by whatever party or ideology, religion, or social belief that they hate most. Always a huge coincidence and a great gift for those who claim that. 

There's an even more common and actually far more sinister manner of exploiting such shootings: namely, by immediately playing on people's anger and fear to tell them that they must submit to greater and greater forms of mass surveillance and other authoritarian powers to avoid such events in the future. As they did after the 9/11 attack, which ushered in the full-scale online surveillance system under which we all live, Fox News is back to push a comprehensive Israel-developed AI mass surveillance program in the name of stopping violent events in the future. We'll tell you all about it. 

 Then, we have a very special surprise guest for tonight. She is Taylor Lorenz, who reported for years for The New York Times and The Washington Post on internet culture, trends in online discourse, and social media platforms. She's here in part to talk about her new story that appeared in WIRED Magazine today that details a dark money program that secretly shovels money to pro-Democratic Party podcasters and content creators, including ones with large audiences, and yet they are prohibited from disclosing even to their viewership that they're being paid in this way. We'll talk about this program and its implications. And while she's here, we'll also discuss her reporting on, and warnings about new online censorship schemes that masquerade as child protection laws, namely, by requiring users to submit proof of their identity to access various sites, all in the name of protecting children, but in the process destroying the key value of online anonymity. We'll talk to her about several other related issues as well. 


 

There've been a lot of revelations over the last 25 years, since the 9/11 attack, of all sorts of secretive programs that were implemented in the dark that many people I think correctly view as un-American in the sense that they run a foul and constitute a direct assault on the rights, protections and guarantees that we all think define what it means to be an American. And a lot of that happened. In fact, much of it, one could say most of it, happened because of the fears and emotions that were generated quite predictably by the 9/11 attack in 2001 and also the anthrax attack, which followed along just about a month later, six weeks later. We've done an entire show on it because of its importance in escalating the fear level in the United States in the wake of 9/11, even though it's extremely mysterious – the whole thing, how it happened, how it was resolved. But the point is that the fear levels increased, the anger increased, the sadness over the victims increased and into that breach, into that highly emotional state, stepped both the government and their partners in the media, which essentially included all major media outlets at the time, to tell people they essentially have to give up their rights if they want to be safe from future terrorist attacks. 

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Glenn Takes Your Questions on the Minneapolis School Shooting, MTG & Thomas Massie VS AIPAC, and More
System Update #506

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 going to devote the show tonight to more questions that have come from our Locals members over the week. It continues to be some really interesting ones, raising all sorts of topics. 

We do have a question that we want to begin with that deals with what I think is the at least most discussed and talked about story of the day, if not the most important one, which is the school shooting that took place in a Catholic church in Minneapolis earlier today when a former student who attended that school went to the church, opened fire and shot 19 people, two of whom, young students between eight and ten, were killed. The other 17 were wounded, and amazingly, it’s expected that all of them are to survive. The carnage could have been much worse; the tragedy is manifest, however, and there is a lot of, as always, political commentary surrounding the mass shooting attempts to identify the ideology of the shooter in a way that is designed to promote a lot of people's political agenda. So, let's get to the first question.

 It is from @ZellFive, who's a member of our Locals community. He offers this question, but also a viewpoint that I think really ought to be considered by a lot more people. They write:

 

So, I'm really glad that this is one of the questions that we got today because this is a point I've been arguing for so long. So, let me just try to give you as many facts as I possibly can, facts that seem to be confirmed by law rather than just circulating on the internet. 

So, the suspected killer is somebody named Robin Westman, who is 23 years old. After they shot 19 people inside this church, killing two young children, they then committed suicide with a weapon. The person's birth name is Robert Westman, and around 16 or 17 years old, he decided that he identified as a woman, went to court, changed the legal name from Robert to Robin, and began identifying as a trans woman, so that obviously is going to provoke a lot of commentary, and there's been a lot of commentary provoked around that. We will definitely get to that. 

 

The suspected killer also left a very lengthy manifesto, a written manifesto which they filmed and uploaded on a video to YouTube, along with showing a huge arsenal of guns, including rifles and pistols and some automatic weapons. I believe various automatic rifles as well. I don't think they used any of those weapons at school. I believe they just used a rifle and a pistol, if I'm not mistaken. But we'll see about that. 

It was essentially a manifesto both in written terms, but then they also wrote various slogans on each of these weapons and various parts of the weapons. And we're going to go over a lot of what they put there because there's an obvious and instantaneous attempt, as there always is, to instantly exploit any of these shootings before the corpses are even removed from the ground. And I mean that literally. The effort already begins to inject partisan agenda, partisan ideology, ideological agendas to immediately try to depict the shooter as being representative of whatever faction the person offering this theory most hates or to claim that they're motivated by or an adherent of whatever ideology the person offering the theory most hates. And it happens in every single case. 

Oftentimes, there's an immediate attempt to squeeze some unrelated or perhaps even related agenda in and out of it instantly. Liberals almost always insist that whenever there's a mass shooting, it proves the need for a greater gun control without bothering to demonstrate whether the gun control they favor would have actually stopped the person from acquiring these weapons in the first place, whether they were legally acquired, whether they could have been legally acquired, even with gun control measures, it doesn't matter, instantaneously exploiting the emotions surrounding a shooting like this to try to increase support for gun control. Whereas people on the right often do the opposite. 

On the right, they typically will argue that more guns would have enabled somebody to neutralize the shooter more rapidly, that perhaps churches and schools need greater security. We need more police. So, there's that kind of an almost automatic and reflexive exploitation again, almost before anything is known, but there is an even more pernicious attempt to instantly declare that everyone knows the motives of the shooter, that they know the political outlook and perspective of the shooter. They know their partisan ideology and their ideological beliefs in an attempt to demonize whatever group a person hates most. 

This is unbelievably ignorant, deceitful and ill-advised for so many reasons. The first of which is that every single political action, every single ideological movement, produces evil mass shooters. For every far-leftist mass shooter that you want to show or white supremacist mass shooters that you want to show, you can show people who have murdered in defense of all kinds of causes. And so even if you can pinpoint the ideology of the shooter on the same day the shooting happened, I mean, you can develop a clear, reliable, concise and specific understanding of the shooter that you never even heard of until four hours ago, but you're so insightful, your investigative skills are so profound, that you're able to discern exactly what the motive of this person was in doing something so intrinsically insane and evil as shooting up a church filled with young school children. 

The idea that anyone can do that is preposterous on its face. I mean, the police always say, because they're actual investigators, actual law enforcement officers who want to collect evidence that stands up for public scrutiny and also in court, “We don't know yet what the motive is; we're collecting clues.” But almost nobody on Twitter or social media or in the commentariat is willing to say that. Everybody insists immediately, no, the killer was motivated by the other party, the opposite party of the one I'm a member of, or this ideology that's not mine, or in this religion that is the one I like the most to demonize. It's just so transparent and so blatant what is being done here. And yet it's so prevalent. 

I mean, you could go on to social media and principally the social media platform where the most journalists and political pundits, influencers and the like congregate, which is X, and I could show you probably 40 different theories offered definitively with an authoritative voice. Not like, hey, this might be possibly the case, but saying clearly, we know that the killer was motivated by this particular ideology, this particular set of beliefs. And I'm not talking about random X users, I'm talking about people with significant platforms, people who are well-known. 

I could probably show you 40 different theories like that, where every person is purporting to know definitively exactly what the motive of the shooter was and by huge coincidence they all have latched on to whatever ideology or faction or motive most serves their own political worldview to demonize the people with whom they most disagree, or whatever ideology or group of people they most hate. That's always what is done. And I guess in some cases, if a shooter leaves a particularly clear and coherent manifesto, and we have had those sometimes, we have had Anders Breivik in Norway, who made it very clear that his motive was hatred for Muslim immigrants who shot up a summer camp in Norway. We had the Christchurch, New Zealand killer who attacked two mosques and mass murdered dozens of Muslims at a mosque and made clear he was doing so because it was viewed that Islam is a danger. We had the mass shooter in a Buffalo supermarket, who made manifest their white supremacist views. We've had mass shooters who are motivated by hatred of Christianity, as happened in the Nashville shooter attack on a Christian school there, I mean, I could go on and on. 

As I said, every single political faction produces mass shooters, mass killers, evil, crazy people who use violence indiscriminately against innocents in advance of their beliefs. But most of the time, and you might even be able to say all of the times – I mean, maybe I don't like the phrase all of the times because you can conceive of exceptions, but close to all the time, most of the time, people who go and just randomly shoot at innocent people whom they don't know are above all else driven by mental illness and spiritual decay, not by political ideology or adherence to a political cause. That often is the pretext for what they're doing; that may be how they convince themselves that what they are doing is justified. But far more often than not, the principle overriding factor is the fact that the person is just mentally ill or spiritually broken, by which I mean just a completely nihilistic person who has given up on life and wants to just inflict suffering on other people because of the suffering that they feel or their suffering from delusions. 

And this isn't something I invented today. This is something I've long been saying. And I just want to make one more point, which is, even though there are sometimes manifestos that are extremely clear and say, “I am murdering people in a supermarket that is African-American because I hate Black people and I don't think they belong in the United States,” or “I believe that white people are the sole proper citizens of the United States and I want to murder and kill inspired by those other mass murderers” that I mentioned, even then, it may not be the case that the person's representation of what they're is the actual motive because it could be driven by a whole variety of other factors, including mental illness, or all kinds of other issues to be able to conclude in six hours, even with a crystal-clear manifesto that the person did it for reasons that you're ready to definitively assert are the reasons is so irresponsible. It's just so intellectually bankrupt. 

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