By Leighton Woodhouse

On the morning of October 25, 2021, Dr. Anthony Fauci dashed off an email to eight of his colleagues, asking them to look into an experiment conducted in Tunisia in 2019. It was urgent. “I want this done right away,” he wrote, “since we are getting bombarded by protests.”

The experiment Fauci was referring to was the one that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene asked him about this week in a heated Congressional hearing. Holding up a photograph on poster board of two beagles with their heads locked into mesh cages, she said, “As director of the NIH, you did sign off on these so-called ‘scientific experiments,’ and as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting, and evil.”

Become a Supporter

Greene is to liberals what Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is to conservatives: an easy target for partisans to mock. Her questioning of Fauci predictably inspired the usual derision. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, referring to Greene as “the consistent frontrunner for stupidest member of the House of Representatives in history,” sneered, “No one knew what she was talking about.”

But in fact, Fauci knew exactly what Greene was talking about. Three years ago, the experiment in question was at the center of an entire crisis communications response within NIAID (the institute within NIH run by Dr. Fauci). Fauci claimed that it had provoked so many angry calls that his assistant had to stop answering the phone for two weeks. The day before Fauci sent his email about being “bombarded by protests,” one of his colleagues had advised him, “It might be wise to hold off on TV until we have a handle on this.” The story had become a full-blown publicity crisis for Fauci and NIAID — until the Washington Post came to his rescue, turning a legitimate news story into “right-wing disinformation,” based on flimsy evidence that was literally concocted by Fauci’s team.

In 2019, under the auspices of a microbiologist at the University of Ohio, researchers in Tunisia placed the heads of sedated beagles in mesh bags filled with starved sand flies. This was the image Rep. Greene had held up at this week’s hearing. Later, the beagles were placed in outdoor cages for nine consecutive nights, in an area dense with sand flies infected with a parasite that carries the disease with which the researchers were trying to infect the dogs.

In his paper, the Ohio microbiologist, Abhay Satoskar, along with his research partner, acknowledged funding from NIAID, which added up to about $80,000, alongside the grant number. The grant application read:

“Dogs will be exposed to sand fly bites each night throughout the sand fly season to ensure transmission…Dogs will be anesthetized…and for 2 hours will be placed in a cage containing between 15 and 30 females…”

The description fits the experiments in Tunisia perfectly.

In August of 2021, White Coat Waste Project, a non-profit group that advocates against federal funding of animal experimentation, exposed NIAID’s support for the experiment in a blog post. In October, based on White Coat Waste’s revelations, a bipartisan group of Congressional representatives released a letter expressing concern about cruel NIAID-funded experiments on dogs, drawing particular attention to the fact that some of the dogs had had their vocal cords severed to keep them from barking and howling in pain and distress. The story generated a maelstrom online, leading to the angry phone calls Fauci claimed to have received.  “#ArrestFauci” trended on Twitter.

NIAID staff went into damage control mode. Within hours of Fauci asking his staff to look into the experiment, Satoskar emailed NIAID, following up on a phone call. Satoskar now claimed that the acknowledgment of NIH funding was a mistake. “This grant was mistakenly cited as a funding source in the paper,” he wrote.

Later, NIAID would claim that it only funded an experiment that involved vaccinating the dogs against Leishmaniasis, the disease carried by the parasites in the sand flies. Leishmaniasis is the disease with which Satoskar infected his subject beagles in Tunisia.

There is no way to know what was said on the phone call with Satoskar, but released emails show that this is exactly what NIAID wanted to hear. “Will you forward this to Dr. Fauci or let me know if I should directly forward to him?”, the recipient of the email at NIAID wrote to a colleague (the names in the emails, which were obtained by a FOIA request from White Coat Waste Project, are redacted).

Satoskar then hurried to delink the paper from NIAID funding. Less than ten minutes after sending his email to NIAID, Satoskar emailed Shaden Kamhawi, editor of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the journal that had published the paper on the experiment. “We would like to request correction of this error,” Satoskar wrote.

He might as well have been asking himself. Kamhawi is a colleague of Satoskar. She is an expert on precisely the subject that Satoskar was studying. “Dr. Kamhawi is a world expert on phlebotomine sand flies,” her curriculum vitae reads, “vectors of the neglected tropical disease leishmaniasis.” Like Satoskar, Kamhawi has conducted research in which she used sand flies to infect beagles with the disease. She has even co-published with him. Indeed, Kamhawi’s own research has been the subject of White Coat Waste Project exposé. On top of that, she is an employee of NIAID: meaning that Anthony Fauci is her boss.

Kamhawi was aware of at least the last of these potential conflicts of interest. “BTW,” she emailed her colleagues at PLOS NTD, “as I am an NIAID employee, “I am not sure if there is a COI [Conflict of Interest] here so please let me know.”

It’s unclear whether the journal took that conflict seriously. In any case, the correction went forward. The journal now read:

“There are errors in the Funding statement. The correct Funding statement is as follows: the authors received no specific funding for this work. The US National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust did not provide any funding for this research and any such claim was made in error.”

This was the exonerating evidence that went out to reporters. On October 27th, a NIAID employee wrote to colleagues that “we can at least share with reporters that the journal has made the correction.” Another NIAID staffer emailed colleagues for help fielding a query from an Associated Press “fact checker,” who asked how NIAID could be sure that their funds weren’t used for the Tunisian beagle experiment. “Our evidence is simply the statement of the PI [Principal Investigator], Dr. Satoskar,” came the reply.

In fact, NIAID had no way to be certain that its funds were not used on the Tunisia experiment. Michael Fenton, Director of NIAID’s Division of Extramural Activities, wrote in an email, “It seems to me that the only way to prove that the grant funds weren’t used for other projects is to do an audit of those grant expenditures and invoices. This would not be something that could be done quickly.”  

The next day, NIAID was still putting out fires. “We are still getting clobbered on this,” one wrote in an email. But three days before, NIAID had scored a huge coup: On October 25, the same day Fauci wrote his “bombarded by protests” note, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column facetiously entitled, “Why is Anthony Fauci trying to kill my puppy?” The article maligned the story as a product of “the right wing disinformation machine and its crusade against Fauci,” and cited the correction in PLOS NTD as evidence that it was all just an innocent mistake.

In an email to a NIAID employee the next day, Milbank offered further assistance. He wrote, “I might do a follow-up column on the reaction, and the imperviousness to facts. Do you have any more info that could further prove that you didn't fund the Tunisia study involving feeding the anesthetized dogs to sand flies?” Forwarding Milbank’s story to colleagues, the NIAID staffer wrote approvingly, “Dana is being extremely helpful.”

From Milbank’s story came a cascade of “fact checks”: from Politifact, Snopes, FactCheck.org, MediaMatters, Mic, and USA Today. Then came a big story in the Washington Post about the “viral and false claim” that NIAID had funded the Tunisia experiment. The reporters who wrote the story had evidently already reached their conclusion before they began reporting on it. Their email to Satoskar and others asking for comment opened, “I am working on a story about a massive disinformation campaign that is being waged against Anthony Fauci.”

The media re-framing of the story had its intended effect. Three years later, following Marjorie Taylor Greene’s questioning, reporters are once again citing PLOS NTD’s correction as the definitive debunking of the beagle experiment story. The Washington Post effectively banished it from mainstream public debate, though today, the paper published a fact check that contradicts much of the Post’s previous reporting.

After the story came out, Beth Reinhard, one of the reporters on the Post story, emailed Satoskar the link. “Thanks Beth. This is a great article clearing up all misinformation and falsehood,” he wrote.

“Thanks!” she replied.

Become a Supporter

Leighton Woodhouse is freelance journalist and a documentary filmmaker currently based in Oakland, California. You can support his work at https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com

Watch the full episode HERE

Podcast: Apple - Spotify 

Rumble App: Apple - Google

Good evening. It's Monday, June 24. 

Tonight: Very little attention is paid these days to the war in Ukraine. Remember that? That would be, I suppose, somewhat understandable if the war were static or had become a frozen conflict or were in some retreat or a winding down. But none of that is happening; the opposite is. From the perspective of escalatory risks between the United States and Russia – which just happen to be the nations with the two world's largest nuclear stockpiles – the war in Ukraine is more dangerous today than ever. That's what makes the relative indifference toward it, the silence about it, so mystifying and so dangerous. 

Three weeks ago, the Biden administration announced that it was lifting restrictions on the use of U.S.-supplied weapons to strike inside Russia, on Russian soil. Over the weekend, a horrific airstrike launched by Ukraine, which the Russians insist was carried out with U.S. weapons, took place on a beach inside of Crimea, which Russia has governed since the U.S. supported coup in Kiev, in 2014, and whose residents are overwhelmingly Russian with far more allegiance to Moscow than to Kiev. The strike, aimed at a beach popular among area residents, killed at least four people and injured at least 150 more, including many children. 

The reaction from the highest levels of the Russian government was as clear as it was ominous. They said they do not hold Ukraine responsible for the attack and the death of those civilians but, instead, they hold the United States government responsible, given that the U.S. military, they say, played the key role in the launching and targeting of the bomb site. Unsurprisingly, the Russians not only blamed the United States but vowed retaliation not against Ukraine but against the U.S. And thus, as we spiral to greater and greater risk of escalatory dangers all over the question of who rules a few provinces in eastern Ukraine, or whether NATO will be permitted to expand right up to the most sensitive part of the Russian border, very few people in the U.S. seem to care much and are barely discussing these grave dangers, even as they escalate. It is worth examining how the main objective of the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War, avoiding direct combat between the two and avoiding the risk of nuclear aggression, whether through intentional choice or miscalculation and misperception, really seems to have almost no weight these days in Western capitals or among American liberals and their neocon allies in the Republican Party. 

Then: CNN is hosting the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Thursday night, in Atlanta. It will be hosted by CNN personalities Jake Tapper and Dana Bash. The Trump campaign, for whatever reasons, decided to hand CNN an unprecedented level of control over how the debate proceeds. Early this morning, a CNN host – someone named Kasie Hunt – invited to her show the Trump campaign's press secretary to talk about that debate. Hunt then proceeded to have a remarkable on-air meltdown that culminated in her cutting off that interview with the Trump campaign's spokesperson. We’ll examine exactly what happened, not only because of how deeply entertaining this was but also because it reveals so much about the character and function of U.S. corporate media. 

Finally, the independent journalists Lee Fong and Jack Paulson, working in collaboration with The Guardian, published an investigation today about the extent of Israeli influence operations in the United States. 

In the words of the article, the investigation reveals, “a hard line and sometimes covert operation by the Israeli government to strike back that student protests, human rights organizations and other voices of dissent inside the United States.” We'll speak to both of those journalists about their findings and try to understand the full gravity and extent of Israeli influence operations in the United States, including their connection to some very serious laws that abridge the free speech rights of Americans in the name of protecting Israel. 

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

The Interview: Journalists Lee Fang and Jack Poulson

As we said at the very top of the show, there was an incredibly entertaining and highly revealing meltdown by a CNN host, Kasie Hunt, that we wanted to cover. It says so much about the mindset of these kinds of journalists, which is a very important topic as we approach the presidential debate, the first one run by CNN, on Thursday. But because we had to cover and wanted to cover that much more important breaking news about Julian Assange's long overdue freedom, we're going to go ahead and postpone that segment until tomorrow night.

Instead, we’ll go to another breaking story, an independent reporting, an original and very important reporting, that was published today about the extent of the Israeli influence operation machine inside the United States. It was done by two highly accomplished independent journalists. Lee Fang is one of them. He was a colleague of mine back at The Intercept and after wisely leaving that outlet before it completely sunk into the sea, he is now doing that work at his own Substack, where he regularly breaks big stories using standard and tireless investigative techniques, which is why he is so often on our show: he's constantly breaking those kinds of stories through just sheer, hard investigative work. His coauthor on this story is Jack Paulson, who is an independent journalist who focuses on the intersection of technology and the military. He completed his PhD in computational and applied mathematics at UT Austin, in 2012, before serving as an assistant professor of computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech, and then an assistant professor of mathematics at Stanford University. 

The duo teamed up in a journalistic investigation that was published today in collaboration with The Guardian, into the extent of the Israeli Influence campaign aimed at the United States. 

This is obviously a topic that we have been covering for quite some time. We think it is of the utmost importance that there is a foreign country that is working very hard with a lot of money to not only influence public opinion but also the laws that the United States and our federal legislature enact that have a very direct relationship with that foreign government. And we are delighted to welcome both of them to the show. 

G. Greenwald: Good evening. It's great to see you guys both. Congratulations on this story. And I just want to kind of dive right into these questions because I do have a fair number of them. I guess you guys can decide amongst yourselves who's going to answer. If you want. I can just direct them. But let me just ask, let me ask each of you, actually, and, Jack, you can go first. As I said, there's been a lot of reporting recently, over many years, as well as recently, about the extent of what the Israelis are doing to influence American politics, the lawmaking process and American public opinion. What is one or two of what you think are the most significant new revelations in the story that you published? 

Jack Poulson: Yeah. So, there is a U.S. nonprofit called the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy, which is a bit of a mouthful there, pronounced ISGAP. It was originally a center within Yale. It was kind of kicked out in 2011 for not being sufficiently rigorous. What I think hasn't really been paid attention to is that they have publicly claimed credit for the hearings that led to the firings of the several university presidents, for example, in particular, claiming credit for the December 5 hearings in front of Congress, where Elise Stefanik really grilled Harvard president, Claudine Gay. And basically, we traced out what led to that, in particular their reports on alleged influence on U.S. student campus protests and then how that fits into broader, kind of formal public-private partnership that's pretty widely reported, known as Concert or – you know, it's undergone several different names, it kind of uses all of them interchangeably to this day – Originally it was Kela Shlomo, then it was Concert, and now it's Voices of Israel. And it's really a way for the Israeli government to chip in half the money and then for philanthropists in the U.S. and around the world to chip in the other half to fund kind of pro-Israeli nonprofits to advocate and lobby on behalf of the Israeli government. 

G. Greenwald: So, Lee, if you want to pick one or two nuggets of the story that you think provide kind of new revelations about the influence campaign by this foreign government inside the United States, please do so. But also, let me just add to that the kind of broader perspective of what the significance is of the fact that Israel is doing this. 

Lee Fang: Well, look, I’m just a few weeks into the Gaza war. There was a discussion in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, about what to do around all of these students at universities, particularly elite universities, where there's a lot of influence in American society, that were critical of Israel. And there was a government minister, Amichai Chickli, who said, “Don't worry, we're going on the offensive – and I'm paraphrasing him – “and we're going to do it in a Concert way.” And he's referencing what Jack was just talking about, this kind of semi-covert organization that's controlled by the Israeli government and ran these kinds of covert PR campaigns in the past. You know, they were set up to be a “PR commando unit” to control kind of troll armies on social media to lobby in the U.S. to actually help pass laws in the U.S. They were partially responsible for the passage of anti-BDS laws over the last few years and in state capitals around the country. Well, after October 7, there was a relaunch of this unit and it's partnering with a number of groups. Some of its partners are doing outreach to black Democrats. They have a partner organization in the U.S. that's mobilizing support from lawmakers from the African American community. Many of their former leaders are working with an Israeli NGO but very active in the U.S. that's helping Meta – You know, that's Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as TikTok, censor media. And, you know, they're using the same rubric that, you know, many other NGOs use, Media Matters and ADL and others, saying that “we're just here to provide assistance in stopping misinformation, disinformation, hate speech,” but they're very clearly working with the Israeli government in censoring and content moderating speech that's critical of Israel. 

In addition to all that, just as this same entity worked to pass anti-BDS laws in the past, and that's been well-documented, what we documented here that's completely new is that they are openly discussing their strategy to pass laws like the IHRA, International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, the definition of antisemitism and to basically encode that into U.S. law, state law, federal law. We saw the passage of the bill in the House last month on education policy, but there's similar laws around the country that basically say that a form of illegal discrimination, of antisemitism, is certain forms of harsh criticism. You know, it's saying terms or slogans like “Israel is a racist country” that now can be viewed as a hate crime or as an illegal form of discrimination. That's a big part of their agenda, redefining the term antisemitism, just to stifle certain criticisms of Israel. We were able to obtain exclusive documents showing that even the Israeli Foreign Ministry has been in touch with these local state lawmakers in Florida, to pass this type of legislation. They're openly talking about it in the Knesset, saying this is their top priority. They're saying they're very clear in discussing their strategy. And we looked at transcripts, we looked at various business filings, public documents and government contracts. We really blended together a lot of sources to tell the story. 

G. Greenwald: Absolutely. I really encourage people to read it on their own. We're not going to be able to do every part of it here tonight. I want to kind of highlight the important parts and then draw out the implications. 

I just want to add one thing, which is the very first story that I ever reported in my entire life on the question of big tech censorship at the behest of government was at the end of 2015, maybe the beginning of 2016, when there was a document that was released showing that the Israeli government had an ongoing relationship with the top leadership of Facebook, where they were able to submit lists of Facebook pages that the Israeli government alleged were promoting terrorism or were in some way inciting hatred toward Israel. And that basically means any page run by Palestinians that were critical of Israel. And in something like 98% of the cases, Facebook was taking these requests and approving them and banning whatever accounts the Israelis indicated. And of course, this has been going on since then, […] meetings Israel has with big tech companies and saying, we demand that you remove “disinformation.” One of the things they listed as disinformation was the idea that the Israeli military actually killed some of their own citizens on October 7, and it is now proven beyond any shadow of a doubt is true. The Israeli government even acknowledges that. So, they're trying to prevent and, again, not in Israel, but in the United States, the ability for Americans to express certain views. And yet another example where the right – parts of the right –have been indignant about this sort of government-Big Tech collaboration to censor. And this is one of those areas where, magically, the pro-Israel part of the right seems to have no problem. 

Jack, let me ask you. I want to hear your view on this as well, Lee. There's been this kind of obsession on the part of certain segments of the American punditry with what's going on in American colleges for quite some time. And there's always been this kind of strange – you can even say creepy – dynamic where like 45-year old writers from like The New Republic, like, you know, New York Magazine and those kinds of places are just constantly focused on what 19- and 20-year olds are doing and writing articles about that on college campuses like one of the arguments you could make is that, well, the reason you have to focus on that is because these people and those trends become in the future the leaders, shaping our culture. But one of the things I've started to believe over the last kind of 18 to 24 months, a lot of those pundits who have been focused on colleges happened to be among the most vocal supporters of the Israeli government and all of us media. They justify this focus on colleges under an “anti-woke” banner, like people like Bari Weiss and Ben Shapiro, that whole crowd. At the same time, there have been strategy documents from the Israeli government saying the most important thing that we need to do is focus on American college campuses and prevent the growth of anti-Israel sentiment on American college campuses because that is such a threat to our national interests. What have you been able to discover in this new reporting about the priority that the Israeli government has been giving to try to control or influence American citizens or American college campuses?