Glenn Greenwald
Politics • Culture • Writing
Separating Fact From Fiction on Fox News/Dominion Lawsuit. PLUS: 50th Episode Reflections on Rumble & Our Show
Video Transcript: System Update #50
March 08, 2023
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Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Friday March 3, 2023. Watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to the podcast on Spotify

Virtually the entirety of the corporate media has spent the last two weeks gleefully writing the obituary of Fox News and its primetime hosts, especially the nation's most-watched cable news host, Tucker Carlson. They have constructed a narrative that, if true, would be indisputably crippling, if not permanently destructive, to their journalistic credibility. Namely, they claim these Fox hosts in the weeks following the 2020 election were promoting and endorsing Trump's accusation that he lost due to widespread voting machine fraud, all while the same hosts in private were ridiculing these same claims and admitting they found them baseless and ridiculous. But is there a truth to this narrative, one which, incidentally, is based entirely on a legal brief filed by the lawyers for the voting machine company Dominion that is suing Fox News, a legal brief that Fox News is yet to answer? 

That this narrative has been proven is virtually gospel among American liberals. As usual, these corporate media outlets, along with Democratic Party leaders, are marching in total lockstep, and none has aired any skepticism or questioning of this accusatory framework, let alone give airtime to anyone challenging it. So we will examine these accusations in depth, evaluate the evidence offered for them, and assess whether they have indeed been proven true. 

As I just indicated, tonight is the 50th episode of System Update and we will use this solemn and commemorative occasion to engage in a bit of self-reflection to assess what we are trying to achieve with this program, how the platform provided by Rumble is so vital to allowing independent media to thrive, and why the growing success of independent media is, in our view, of the greatest priority and a major cause of optimism. 

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


Monologue

 

If it were your goal to destroy a journalist’s reputation, it's hard to imagine anything more effective than being able to prove that they publicly affirmed facts, which in private they admitted they did not actually believe. If you could show that - that a journalist was privately mocking a theory that on their own shows they were pretending to believe - then it's almost impossible to imagine how that journalist could retain any credibility. 

The part of the corporate media that hates Fox News and has long craved its destruction – meaning almost all of the corporate media except Fox News – believes with great excitement that this is what they have now proven. They believe they have now proven this about Fox's most-watched host, Tucker Carlson, as well as the other Fox primetime hosts such as Laura Ingraham. To listen to them tell it they have a smoking gun proof that, at the end of the 2020 election, both Carlson and Ingraham were privately mocking as frivolous and deranged Trump's allegations of widespread election fraud, while then going on their own shows and – in order to please the right-wing audience – were pretending to support and affirm the very theories of election fraud that they were privately mocking. 

Similar to how CNN and MSNBC spent years bringing on various CIA, FBI and NSA operatives to promise bloodthirsty liberals that the walls really were closing in on Trump this time, that it was just a matter of time before he would be frogmarched out of the White House to finally receive his just desserts, liberal corporate outlets are celebrating the full-scale destruction of Tucker Carlson's journalistic credibility. That is because they insist they caught him red-handed publicly endorsing election fraud theories that, in private, he was mocking as fictitious and deranged.

 The CNN media critic whose life appears to center around the only cable show that anyone watches, Oliver Darcy, published this obituary of Fox News, on February 24, under the headline “It's a major blow. Dominion has uncovered “smoking gun” evidence in a case against Fox News, legal experts say”. this whole article uses one of the favorite corrupt tactics of corporate media. They hand-picked so-called experts whom they know share their political worldview and ideology and then quote them – and only them – saying what they themselves really believe, all so that they can maintain the pretense that they're really just nonpartisan, objective reporters who, in a great stroke of luck, randomly chose experts “who all happen to agree with them”. That way, they get to launder their own opinions as just what “the experts say”. This article illustrating the narrative that almost every American liberal has embraced begins, 

 

Fox News is in serious hot water. That’s what several legal experts told CNN this week following Dominion Voting Systems explosive legal filing against the right-wing talk channel, revealing the network's executives and hosts privately blasted the election fraud claims being peddled by Donald Trump's team, despite allowing lies about the 2020 contest to be promoted on its air. Rebecca Tushnet, the Frank Stanton professor of First Amendment law at Harvard Law School, described Dominion's evidence as a very strong filing ‘that clearly lays out the difference between what Fox was saying publicly and what top people at Fox were privately admitting”. 

 

A cache of behind-the-scenes messages included in the legal filing showed Fox Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch called Trump's claims “really crazy stuff” and the cable network’s stars – including Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham – brutally mock the lies being pushed by the former president's camp asserting that the election was rigged. It also showed attempts to crack down on fact-checking election lies.

 

On one occasion, Carlson demanded that Fox News White House correspondent Jacqui Heinrich be fired after she fact-checked a Trump tweet pushing the election fraud claims. Tushnet said that in all of her years practicing and teaching law, she had never seen such damning evidence collected in the pre-trial phase of a defamation suit. “I really don't recall anything comparable to this”, Tushnet said. “Donald Trump seems to be very good at generating unprecedented situations” (CNN. Feb.24, 2023).  

 

I'm sure that this First Amendment law professor at Harvard Law School who is saying all of that and holding that Donald Trump is very, very good at creating unprecedented situations is just a very nonpartisan and ideologically free First Amendment expert who just so happens to be telling CNN what they most want to hear, namely, that this is the most devastating defamation case she's ever seen in her very long life as being a First Amendment expert. 

Congress's most brazen pathological liar, California Democrat Adam Schiff, removed from his seat on the House Intelligence Committee for exactly that attribute, explicitly accused Tucker Carlson of endorsing the voting fraud claims while privately repudiating them. 

Weak men peddle false election lies while privately dismissing them as absurd. Weak men use fear and hate to motivate their followers. Weak men value money and notoriety over truth and decency. Tucker Carlson is a weak, weak man (March 3, 2023). 

 

On Wednesday, the two leading Democrats in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries did something infinitely worse and more dangerous than anything they're accusing Fox of doing. Namely, they wrote a letter to Fox executives full of demands about what Fox News must now say and do. That senior political leaders in Washington are now issuing orders to media outlets of this kind did not, needless to say, bother many employees of media corporations. After all, if they're not bothered by the FBI and the CIA dictating to Big Tech what should and should not be permitted on the Internet, then, of course, they're not going to be bothered by decrees from political officials about what media outlets must say. But the letter from these Democratic leaders also repeated the same central allegation, namely that Fox primetime host endorsed the election fraud claims of Trump despite admitting they were false. 

 

Dear Mr. Rupert Murdoch et all. As noted in your deposition released yesterday, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and other Fox News personalities knowingly, repeatedly, and dangerously endorsed and promoted the big lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election. We demand that you direct Tucker Carlson and other hosts on your network to stop spreading false election narratives and admit on the air that they were wrong to engage in such negligent behavior.

 

As evidenced by the January 6 insurrection, spreading this false propaganda can not only embolden supporters of the big lie to engage in further acts of political violence but also deeply and broadly weakens faith in our democracy and hurts our country in countless ways (Letter to Fox from Dem. Leadership.  March 1, 2023).  

 

Meanwhile, The Intercept, a media outlet I founded back in 2013 to serve as an adversary against the intelligence community – partisan talking points in the corporate media – but which has instead become the exact opposite of that – namely, a carbon copy of CNN and MSNBC in its service to the Democratic Party – echoed, as it now always does, the CNN narrative, along with the Democratic talking points under this headline “Tucker Carlson Deserves A Raise For His Shameless Lies.” This entire article rests on the assumption that is implicitly assumed but never proven, namely, that Tucker Carlson told his audience that Trump's claims of election fraud were valid at the same time he was privately ridiculing those same claims.

 

Carlson's concern was that Fox viewers simply wouldn't accept the facts and, if presented with them, would flock to competitors who would tell them the comforting lies for which they yearned. At about the same time, Carlson texted his producer that, “We're playing with fire for real… an alternative like Newsmax could be devastating for us.”

 

It's easy and fun to jeer at Carlson for his hilarious deceit, and I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from doing so. It's especially enjoyable to find out Carlson believes Trump is a “demonic force” (p.43 of the filing) yet has never told his audience this. In fact, Carlson still enjoys sharing a hearty guffaw with the demonic force at Saudi golf tournaments. 

But once we're done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about […]

 

This person, by the way, who has no audience, whom nobody knows, who has never published a single thing that has made any impact, he's pointing and laughing at Carlson, the most watched and influential host on television. And he says, 

 

[…] once we're done pointing and laughing at Carlson, we have to think more seriously about this if we'd like to have a society that's based – at least a little bit – on rationality and evidence. Because in the society we have now, Carlson should logically be rewarded for everything he's done… 

 

In fact, seen from this perspective, the only thing Carlson did wrong was foolishly expressing his views in forms that were discoverable in a lawsuit. On Wall Street, the smarter executives are sophisticated enough not to do this and message each other “f2f” – i.e.,  face-to-face – to indicate to their co-workers when they need to discuss something that wouldn't look good if written out and cited in court… 

 

For-profit news outlets can do great investigative reporting, but that reporting is itself generally not profitable and is subsidized by their cooking apps or sports coverage that actually do make money. By itself, telling the truth is generally not just unprofitable, it's also actively anti-profit. The lesson of the Dominion lawsuit isn't that Fox is extremely bad, although it is.  It’s that to have a news system that works, we have to take profit out of the equation (The Intercept. Feb. 26, 2023). 

 

Leave aside the nauseating irony that all of these lectures about truth are coming from people who work at media outlets, including The Intercept, that spread lies on a daily basis – they're all the same outlets, for example, that told Americans (because the CIA told them to) that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation so that everybody would ignore the reporting about Joe Biden before the election and vote for Joe Biden instead. – leaving that aside, it's always amusing when employees of billionaire-funded nonprofits like The Intercept lecture everyone else on how journalism can only succeed if the profit component of the equation is removed. 

It is true that dependence on corporate advertisers can place pressure on journalists not to alienate their audience but it certainly is equally true that people who work at nonprofits funded by a single billionaire are likely to feel great pressure to avoid angering that billionaire funder. Lest the funding disappears and their inflated salaries – meaning people like this with no audience or accomplishments and nonetheless receive very large salaries – will disappear along with that funding. 

One of the key points in all of this is that all news organizations need a funding model unless one is from one of the nation's wealthiest families, which happens to be the case for at least several of the journalists who have worked over the years at The Intercept, then one needs a way to pay a livable wage to the journalists, editors, studio technicians, lawyers, technologists, camera crews, and the rest of the team necessary to produce high-quality journalism. And each of those funding models, including ones that depend on audience donations, does have the potential to carry with it various pressures to stay within certain lines or avoid alienating one's audience. All of that is true. The claim now is that Fox's primetime hosts endorse Trump's voting fraud claims, even though they privately admitted did not believe them because they were afraid that they would lose their audience to OAN or Newsmax if they did not do so. 

Beyond the fact that as we're about to show you, nobody can point to a single Tucker Carlson segment or Laura Ingraham segment, from late 2020 or early 2021, where they endorse this election fraud theory, namely, the entire allegation central to this claim can't be proven. In fact, Tucker Carlson vehemently condemned those who are making the claim of election fraud without evidence, as we're about to show you. Liberal outlets such as CNN back then in late 2020 and 2021, were making the exact opposite claim about Fox. Namely, they were gloating about the fact that Fox was losing their audience due to their refusal of late-night hosts to endorse Trump's election fraud claims. 

Here was CNN back then, saying exactly the opposite of what they're saying now, namely that Fox's integrity was starting to destroy their ratings. 

 

Fox News is taking action to stave off newfound competition from Newsmax TV. Producers on some Fox programs have been told to monitor Newsmax’s guest bookings and throw some sand in Newsmax’s gears by encouraging guests who appear on both channels to stop saying yes to the upstart.

 

Up until Election Day, Newsmax barely had a pulse on Nielsen's TV ratings reports, which showed that the channel only averaged 34,000 viewers at any given time in August and September. A slight uptick in October became a groundswell of viewership after November 3. One of the obvious causes was Fox's projection that President Trump would lose the state of Arizona, drastically narrowing his path to reelection. Newsmax criticized Fox and gave viewers false hope about Trump's chances. 

 

This tactic continued when Fox and all the other major networks called the election for President-elect Biden on November seven. Newsmax insisted that the race wasn't over and that the major networks were acting irresponsibly, when, in fact, Newsmax was the irrational actor. A subset of the Fox audience flock to Newsmax for shows that hyped voter fraud allegations and harangued the rest of the media (CNN. Dec. 8, 2020). 

 

In other words, at the time they were mocking Fox for losing their audience to Newsmax and OAN as a result of the refusal of Fox hosts to tell many of their viewers what they wanted to hear – namely that the real winner of the 2020 election was Donald Trump, and that the only reason why it appeared that Joe Biden won was due to election fraud. Everybody knows – who watched Fox during this period – that the prime-time hosts of Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity were not endorsing – were not endorsing – Donald Trump's claims of election fraud. There were hosts on Fox News like Lou Dobbs, who got fired for it, and Judge Jeanine and Maria Bartiromo, who did endorse those claims, but the Fox primetime hosts did not. And that's why every single one of these news reports – that I just read you – that is implicitly asserting or even explicitly claiming that Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham endorsed and supported and told their viewers valid Trump's election fraud claims, cannot point to a single instance in which they did that, because at the heart of this theory is a fabrication, the fabrication being that these Fox hosts were endorsing a theory of voter fraud that they secretly repudiated. In the case of Tucker Carlson, he didn't just secretly repudiate the election fraud claims, he went on the air and publicly did so in a particular episode that I remember because it caused enormous amounts of rage against Tucker Carlson from the Fox audience. 

In other words, Tucker Carlson went on the air and did a segment that he knew would anger his own audience, and he did it anyway, something which not a single host of CNN or MSNBC can ever point to themselves doing, namely going on the air and scolding their audience for believing things that were untrue or for buying into the conspiracy theories of the Democratic Party, even though there was no evidence for it. All of these journalists are demanding of Fox hosts that they do something that those journalists themselves never have the courage to do, which is tell their viewers something they don't want to hear. But that is something that Tucker Carlson did. So, while nobody can point to him going on the air at this time and endorsing the idea that this election was won by Joe Biden due to fraud, we can watch this segment as I'm about to show you, in which he did exactly the opposite. 

 

(Video 00:19:52) 

 

Tucker Carlson: Which brings us to the bombshell at the center of today's press conference that was delivered by former prosecutor Sidney Powell, who also served as General Mike Flynn’s lawyer. For more than a week, Powell has been all over conservative media with the following story: this election was stolen by a collection of international leftists who manipulated vote tabulating software on to flip millions of votes from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The other day on television, Powell said of Trump that when the fraud is finally uncovered, “I think we'll find he had at least 80 million votes”. In other words, the rigged software stole about 7 million votes in this election. Here's some of what Powell said today about the software. 

 

Sidney Powell: One of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden, which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system. And that's what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in. 

 

Tucker Carlson: That was a few hours ago but Sidney Powell has been saying similar things for days. On Sunday night, we texted her after watching one of her segments. What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history – millions of votes stolen in a day, democracy destroyed, the end of our centuries-old system of self-government. Not a small thing. 

 

Let me just stop there. You can see the tenor of this segment, which is that Tucker Carlson says this theory is a theory that Sidney Powell is endorsing. She is all over conservative media making these claims. He then goes on to say, if she's right in what she's saying, this would be the single greatest story, the single most important story, the grievous crime ever committed in American political history. You notice what he is not doing, very clearly not doing, endorsing those claims himself. He continues to distance himself from those claims by saying these are claims that she believes, these are claims that she is asserting. And he then goes on to explain that if this were true, this would be the biggest story in all of American history. Now, let's hear the rest. 

 

(Video 00:22:26) 

Tucker Carlson: Now, to be perfectly clear, we did not dismiss any of it. We don't dismiss anything anymore, particularly when it's related to technology. We've talked to too many Silicon Valley whistleblowers. We've seen too much. After four years, this may be the single most open-minded show on television. We literally do UFO segments, not because we're crazy or even been interested in the subject, but because there is evidence that UFOs are real and everyone lies about it. There's evidence that a lot of things that responsible people use to dismiss out of hand is ridiculous are in fact real. And we don't care who mocks it. The louder the Yale Political Science Department and the staff of The Atlantic Magazine scream “conspiracy theory”, the more interested we tend to be. That's usually a sign you're over the target.

 

A lot of people with impressive sounding credentials in this country are frauds. They have no idea what they're doing, their children posing as authorities and when they're caught, they lie and then they blame you for it. We see that every day. It's the central theme of the show and will continue to be. So, that's a long way of saying we took Sidney Powell seriously. We have no intention of fighting with her. We've always respected her work. We simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them? So, we invited Sidney Powell on the show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually. That's a big story. But she never sent us any evidence, despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page. When we kept pressing, she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell was never given them any evidence either in order to provide any.

 

Today at the press conference, Powell did say that electronic voting is dangerous. And she's right. We're with her there. But she never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another. 

 

Okay. He just got done saying over and over that not only did Sidney Powell refuse to provide evidence in support of her theory – that Donald Trump is the real winner of the election and Biden won only because millions of votes had been switched – he told his audience she has never provided that evidence to anyone. He said, ‘We would love to have her on our show. We would give her the entire night, in fact, the entire week, because if she has evidence, we would want to hear it. But clearly, she doesn't have that evidence because she refuses to show it to anybody when asked’. 

This was at the peak of this controversy – it was November 19, two weeks, two and a half weeks after the election, while Trump was going around every day accusing the Biden campaign of having stolen the election through voting fraud and using Sidney Powell as the primary spokesperson for that theory. I'm asking you to leave aside for the moment your view of whether or not this is true or not. That's not relevant at the current moment. What I am instead interrogating is whether or not the narrative that has been universally adopted by the media that Tucker Carlson has no journalistic credibility because while he was privately expressing skepticism about the voting election theory, the voting fraud theory, he went on his show and endorsed it, I'm asking you to look at what he actually said and ask yourself if that is even viable. If anybody who has an iota of integrity could actually maintain that claim that Tucker Carlson went on the air and told his viewers that the election fraud theory was true. What I just showed you – three minutes of him carefully, though emphatically, doing exactly the opposite – making clear that there's no evidence at all for that claim. Let's watch the rest. 

 

(Video 00:26:30)

Tucker Carlson: Why are we telling you this? We're telling you this because it's true. And in the end, that's all that matters. The truth. It's our only hope. It's our best defense. And it's how we're different from them. We care what's true, and we know you care, too. That's why we told you. Maybe Sidney Powell will come forward soon with details on exactly how this happened and precisely who did it. Maybe she will. We are certainly hopeful that she will. What happened with the vote counting this month and at the polling places in Detroit and the polling places in Philadelphia and so much else actually matters. It matters no matter who you voted for. It matters whether or not you think this election is already over. Until we know the answers to those questions conclusively and we can agree on them, this country will not be united. 

 

The whole title of the segment, as you can see on the bottom of the screen, was “Voter fraud: separating fact from fiction.” And what he told his viewers is, look, you may feel real strongly about this. You may want this to be true. You may even believe that it's true. But what separates us from them – meaning the liberal outlets that will lie at the drop of a hat and not apologize when they get caught like it's happened so many times just in the last three weeks alone – what separates us from them is that we will not tell you things that we know you want to hear if we don't believe that they're true because there's no evidence for them. And in this case – meaning the case that Sidney Powell was making – we will not tell you it's true, because we have not seen evidence for it despite repeatedly asking. 

And as I said, before showing you this clip, at the time that all of this was happening, the liberal parts of the corporate media – CNN, ABC News, the networks, The New York Times, The Washington Post – were saying the exact opposite of what they're trying to convince you of now. They were mocking Fox for losing their audience, for not endorsing these theories because it was true that their main hosts were, in fact, not endorsing these theories. To the extent they were opining them at all, they were telling their audience there was no evidence for them, as I just showed you. 

How anybody can look at that four-minute segment with a straight face and claim that Tucker Carlson went on TV and endorsed the voting fraud theory is mystifying to me. That shows exactly what he just said, how willing and casual and frequent those sectors of the media lie. 

Beyond that, I think it's extremely important to note that all of these claims that are being made about what happened here come from a single source, just one source. They come from a legal brief that was filed by the lawyers for Dominion. It's a request for summary judgment. 

I just want to explain the legal standard that is at play here, because it's so relevant to how this document should be understood versus what the media is treating it as being. I don't think I have ever seen in my life the media take a legal brief in litigation, filed by one side, the lawyers for one side, and pretend that it is designed to – let alone that it actually does – reveal the objective truth. I've never seen any journalist take as gospel what is in a legal brief filed by one side in the lawsuit, which is exactly what they're doing. 

The reason why this document in particular is so meriting of extreme skepticism is because it is extremely difficult when you're suing a news outlet, like Fox, about a matter obviously in the public interest – such as whether or not the voting machines are secure or whether or not there was fraud in an election – it is an extremely difficult task not just to win a lawsuit against a media outlet for defamation, but even to allow the judge, even to convince the judge to let you get to trial. 

So, what happens is when you want to sue a media outlet for defamation about a public matter, you file the lawsuit, the other party responds, the media outlet, and then you have discovery, meaning the discovery of the facts. Discovery is where the lawyers for each side are allowed to ask each side for documents. So, the Fox lawyers asked Dominion for various documents in their possession, the Dominion lawyers asked for documents in their possession. That's how they got all these emails and group chats among all the Fox hosts and everything else that they're citing. During this process, they take depositions of each witness. So, they sit down with Rupert Murdoch, they sit down with the Fox CEO, Suzanne Scott, the Fox lawyers get to ask questions of Dominion and you produce a transcript with everybody's answers. And then what happens is the plaintiff in the lawsuit - the person or the company suing the media outlet - has to convince the judge that there is evidence that could allow a jury. If you looked at all of the evidence in the way most favorable to the plaintiff, if everything that was looked at by the jury was looked at in the most favorable way, then it's possible for a jury to rule in favor of the plaintiff, and only then will the judge allow there to even be a trial. The vast majority of lawsuits, the overwhelming majority of lawsuits brought by people claiming they were defamed by media organizations are dismissed before there's even a trial because the judge says that under the very stringent legal standards that you need to meet in order to win a case against a news organization, the evidence simply is not there. Even if the jury read everything in your favor, there still would not be enough of a case to allow a rational jury to rule in your favor. 

What the lawyers in this brief are trying to do is to take every piece of evidence turned out of its context and give it the most biased and favorable interpretation to Dominion. By definition, you cannot have a more biased document than this legal brief. I'm not suggesting at all by saying that the lawyers have done anything wrong. They're doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be distorting, in the favor of their client, the evidence, by giving it it’s most biased and favorable rating possible, which means ignoring evidence that would negate the claims they're making, leaving that out of the brief, oftentimes taking evidence out of context. There are some limits on what a lawyer can do, some ethical limits when doing that, you can't go so far as to explicitly lie. But lawyers have an enormous license in terms of their ability to twist and interpret facts in the most biased way possible.

In a sense, you could really say that a legal brief like this is the exact opposite of what journalism is supposed to do. Journalism is supposed to look at the facts in the least biased way possible, in the most objective way possible. Whereas these lawyers’ job is, is the opposite of a journal. They're not trying to show the truth. They're trying to make the case in the most biased way they can that a jury has the ability to read the evidence in a certain way in order to decide that trial in favor of their client so that the judge will allow there will be a trial in the first place. What is amazing is to watch a journalist take a legal brief like this and treat it as though it's dispositive of the truth. What makes it especially egregious that all of the media is treating this legal brief as though it provides the answers, as though it tells the story in an unbiased way, is that Fox hasn't even responded yet to this legal brief. They haven't even told its side of the story. Imagine if you were a journalist in a very controversial case wanting to report a story, and the only thing you did is go to one side of the story and wrote the entire article by interviewing that person and never even trying to interview the other side to hear the other side's arguments, to hear why certain things were taken out of context, to hear what the answers were. This is exactly what these journalists have done with this legal brief. And as I just showed you in so many ways, what they are actually doing is distorting the evidence, including the central claim that the Fox host, whom they want to destroy most, namely the primetime hosts, endorsed that theory. 

In fact, if you look at the legal document, even if you look at the one that the whole thing is based on, you will find that what's in the document contradicts in the most fundamental way the story the media is telling you. There is no place in this legal brief where the lawyers for Dominion claim that it was Tucker Carlson or Laura Ingraham who went on television and endorsed the voting fraud theory. To the contrary, they are citing Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham as proof that the voting theory was false and then saying the people were allowed to go on TV and support it weren't the prime time hosts Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and those people. 

Let me just show you a couple of excerpts where the Dominion lawyers are relying on Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham to make their case that it was the other hosts who supported the voting fraud theory, but not the primetime ones. So, here's one quote where they say, 

 

Indeed, multiple Fox witnesses called the allegations and the people making and repeating them, such as Sidney Powell and Jeanine Pirro – reckless at the time. Tucker Carlson told Sidney Powell on November 17 – this is what he told Sidney Powell directly in those e-mails he referenced: “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were changed by the software. I hope you will prove that very soon. You've convinced them that Trump will win. if you don't have conclusive evidence of fraud at that scale. It is a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying ex 177. And on November 21st, Carlson texted that it was shockingly reckless to claim that Dominion rigged the election if there's no one inside the company willing to talk, or internal Dominion documents or copies of the software showing that they did it and “as you know, there isn't” (Dominion Lawsuit Filing. Feb.16, 2023).

 

In other words, Carlson was berating Sidney Powell, exactly as he told his viewers that he was, about the fact that she was making claims for words, that she knew, there was no support. The legal brief also makes clear that Fox executives had confirmed with both, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham that they would not go on air and support the voting fraud claims precisely because they didn't believe them. 

 

On November 6, after Cooper received the forwarded email from Rupert Murdoch stating it was very hard to credibly cry foul and warning of Trump becoming a sore loser, Ex 151, Cooper and Fox Executive Ron Mitchell discussed whether their primetime hosts, Hannity, Carlson and Ingraham would push false claims of election fraud: “I feel really good about Tucker and Laura. I think Sean will see the wisdom of this track eventually but, even this morning, he was still looking for examples of fraud” (Dominion Lawsuit Filing. Feb.16, 2023).

 

All of the evidence, including this legal brief, make clear that Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham were refusing to go on air and endorse this voting fraud claim. And, in fact, they were working as hard as they could to ensure that the Fox audience understood that there was no evidence for it. In other words, the legal brief and the videos, all negate the story that the media is telling you, which is why they can't point to anything on Tucker Carlson Show or on Laura Ingraham Show that supports their claim that they were endorsing what Adam Schiff and what these Democratic leaders are calling the big lie because they didn’t. 

Let me address a couple of critiques of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, that I think to deserve some more consideration. What it seems as though the anti-Fox part of the media is saying is that Tucker Carlson basically should have engaged in self-destructive behavior. He should have put on this Superman's cape and he should have gone on the air and done way more than what he did in that segment that I just showed you, which is to tell his audience there was no evidence for this fraud, that he instead basically should have mocked his audience. He should have called them idiots. He should have told them they were stupid, that they were believing a deranged theory, and that essentially he should have destroyed his relationship with his Fox audience by using language that he was using in private instead of using language a bit more respectful of that audience. 

Let me ask again, when is even a single time, just even once, that any member of CNN or of NBC News or CBS or ABC was willing to do what they seemed to be insisting Tucker Carlson should have done – which is go on the air and tell their audience that they're all a bunch of idiots who have been convinced of insane conspiracy theories. I suppose if you really hold up somebody as this kind of Superman figure and demand that they act as such, you can make the claim that what he did in that segment that I showed you wasn't enough. He should have really assaulted his audience. But that is bizarre to demand of Fox hosts if you can't show that you've been willing to do that yourself. 

The reality is that the hardest thing for a journalist to do – sometimes if you have integrity, you have to do it – but I'm speaking from experience, the hardest thing for a journalist to do is to go and tell their audience things that they know their audience doesn't want to hear and does not believe. And when you go and do that – as I've done many times, as I'm about to show you – the effective way to do that is not by telling your audience that they're all a bunch of idiots or deranged maniacs but to show the audience – your viewers, your readers – that you have respect for their views, that you understand why they've reached that conclusion but you, nonetheless, are here to convince them through evidence that what they believe is misguided and wrong. 

One of the times I've done that – I've done this many times on this show, for example, I have, many times, for example, expressed my support for narratives that I knew this audience did not believe. I did a whole segment once on why Lula was not a Communist, and why I didn't think he won due to voting fraud, even though I knew a lot of my audience believed that was true. I've oftentimes criticized the right for essentially using manipulative claims of anti-Semitism to shut down debate over Israel, much like the left uses racism accusations to shut down debate – even though I know a lot of my audience doesn't want to hear that. 

The very first time I’ve ever done that and I had to do it, was way back in 2010 before I was even an established journalist. I was writing at Salon and I had what I knew was largely a left-liberal audience. Not entirely. I've always had support from a lot of independents and libertarians, but by and large because I began by writing against the War on Terror and critiquing the Bush-Cheney administration, most of my audience, back in the early days of my writing, were Democrats, leftists and liberals. And, in 2010, the Supreme Court issued this ruling against Citizens United by a 5 to 4 ruling that held that certain laws of campaign spending finance laws were unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. And when Citizens United was issued, there was an absolute consensus, among everybody from the center all the way to the left, that this is one of the most evil decisions on the planet. And because I was someone who wrote a lot about free speech and the First Amendment, which was the ground on which Citizens United was issued, I was getting all kinds of pressure from my readers to tell them what I thought about Citizens United. People started complaining, “Why haven't you written about Citizens United?” And the reason was that I agreed with the majority. I agreed that these campaign finance laws were a violation of the free speech clause. Remember, the case arose because this advocacy group, Citizens United, spent money to produce a film critical of Hillary Clinton before the 2008 election, and they were told they weren't allowed to spend their own money to produce an anti-Hillary film. And to me, that was a clear violation of free speech. I agreed with the conservative majority. And I was not going to lie to my audience and tell them that I disagreed because I knew, the minute I did that, I would no longer have any integrity at all. I would just be kind of a performing seal for liberals, and I had no interest in doing that. Instead, I had to tell them that, in fact, I agreed with the majority. 

The 2010 article I wrote was entitled “What the Supreme Court got right” and the headline says, “It's best for the government to stay out of the business of restricting political advocacy.” So, I had to tell my audience what I knew they wouldn't want to hear. And believe me, they were enraged with me. I had to spend at least a month going back and writing four or five different articles, answering all their different attacks on my view. You see, I'm going to just show you the first paragraph that I wrote, that the tone of my article was not to say you're all a bunch of tyrannical censors for wanting the government to prohibit people from spending their money on political messaging. I instead showed respect for my audience, look, I understand where you're coming from but, nonetheless, I want to explain to you why you're wrong. And this is the tone I used:

 The Supreme Court yesterday in a 5-4 decision declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds), campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for “electioneering” purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I'm deeply ambivalent about the court's ruling. There are several dubious aspects of the majority's opinion (principally its decision to invalidate the entire campaign finance scheme rather than exercising “judicial restraint” through a narrower holding). Beyond that, I believe that corporate influence over our political process is easily one of the top sicknesses afflicting our political culture. But there are also very real First Amendment interests implicated by laws which bar entities from spending money to express political viewpoints (Salon. Jan. 22, 2010). 

 

That is how you go to your audience and instead of alienating them on purpose by telling them they're all a bunch of idiots or censors, you reason with them and you speak to them in a respectful tone and you say, ‘I understand where you're coming from, but here's why you're wrong.’ That's what Tucker Carlson did. As I said, he could have gone about it in a much more aggressive way and essentially destroyed forever his relationship with his audience. I understand why CNN and MSNBC wanted him to do that. They've been jealous for years of the fact that Fox has a gigantic audience and they have none. They would love for the Fox host to burn down their relationship with their audience. But they're demanding something of him that they never would have done themselves and that wouldn't have been smart to do anyway. 

The one critique that I think people have made of Tucker Carlson in this entire controversy that merits an answer that we don't yet have is an email where he seemed to suggest that the White House correspondent Jackie Heinrich, should be fired for having fact-checked a Donald Trump tweet. And I want to ask you, any of you who believe that there is validity to this criticism, what is Tucker Carlson's answer to that critique? What is Fox News’ explanation for what it is that he's saying in that email? You don't know the answer. You don't know the explanation. Because, again, Fox News hasn't even responded to this legal brief yet – this legal brief where lawyers are not only entitled, but often do take things wildly out of context. And if you really dig deep into that email – and I'm not trying here to be a lawyer for Tucker Carlson – maybe what he said in the heat of the moment deserves a lot of criticism. We’ll find out once we hear all the explanations. I have not talked to anyone at Fox News about any of these issues, nor did I talk to anyone at Fox News before putting this program together. I just used what was in the public domain, knowing that Fox is prohibited from talking about it because of the lawsuit. But if you look deep into those emails, what you will find is that what Fox hosts were concerned about was not that Jackie Heinrich and other Fox reporters were fact-checking Trump's claim of election fraud and lacking evidence, as I just showed you. Tucker Carlson himself was doing the same thing. So, anyone who is going to claim that Tucker Carlson wanted Jackie Heinrich fired because she pointed out that there was no evidence to Trump's election fraud claim would have to reconcile that accusation with the fact that Tucker Carlson went on his own show and did exactly the same thing. What they were concerned about was that. the tweet she chose to fact-check from Trump was a tweet in which Trump implied inaccurately that Fox primetime hosts supported his election fraud theory. And so, what Jackie Heinrich's tweet seemed to be doing was fact-checking not so much Donald Trump, but the primetime hosts on Fox by saying the primetime hosts on Fox were spreading false theories about the election fraud, when, in reality, none of them had been doing that. That's what they seemed angry about. But we should hear from Tucker Carlson, we should hear from Fox News, in response to that accusation, something that we have not yet done to date, which is why it's so irresponsible for media outlets to assume they know the entire story. I'm open to the idea or the possibility that what he did, in that case, was wrong and I'd like to hear his explanation – and once we do, we can discuss it. But until then, if you look at what actually was being said, it is what I just described. 

Obviously, Tucker Carlson has an open invitation to go on his show, to go anywhere else, including my show, to explain that. The reality is that as long as this lawsuit is pending, Fox will only speak through its lawyers. But I presume in this legal brief that they will soon file, they will have an explanation or a response, and we will then be able to adequately judge it. 

The bottom line is this: if there is another case where journalists decided to assert an entirely devastating, accusatory framework based on nothing more than the accusations of a lawyer and a lawsuit, I'd like to know what that is. But they're doing it here for obvious reasons, which is they have always wanted to find a way to destroy Fox – they've never been able to find that way, and they think that they've now found it by concocting this theory. The problem is that the theory, in order for it to work, requires them to prove something that is blatantly untrue, which is that the Fox host themselves, the primetime ones, went on the air and told their viewers that Trump lost only because of voting fraud, when, in fact, none of them ever said that, which is why they can't ever point you to a segment where they did and to the extent they spoke on it at all, it was to warn their audience that there was no evidence for it. 

So, the lying here, as usual, is coming from the part of the media that always holds itself out as the protector of the public against disinformation, when, in fact, as usual, they're the ones who disseminate it most aggressively. 


So, to conclude our show, as I indicated at the top, this is the 50th episode of System Update, which I have to say may not seem like a huge and incredible number to you but – having been the person who was working with my team every day to put it together – it's been really quite a kind of an adventure to have – to figure out from scratch what it is that we want to do this year with this show, what we hope to accomplish and figure out the best way to do it. 

I just wanted to take this moment to reflect a little bit on how this show has grown very rapidly beyond all of our wildest expectations and the way in which Rumble has become so crucial not only to the ability of our show to reach a large audience but the ability of so much in independent media to be able to do so without really any constraints of any kind. 

We on our show have already created an audience size that every single night exceeds 200,000-250,000 people watching in various ways, which is starting to approach what the corporate media shows on primetime at CNN and MSNBC are able to attract for people under 65, despite the fact that we're only two months old, that we have no large corporation behind us supporting us, that we rely entirely on ourselves and on our audience to promote our show. That has become incredibly, incredibly encouraging. 

There are shows, like Russell Brand's program, that air daily as well, that have been around for a few months longer than ours, that have an audience size even larger. I just want to show you some data that I think is incredibly encouraging about the future of independent media and the ability of Rumble to really foster it here. 

Here, for example, from a Pew Research poll in May of 2022, which is now eight months ago, the numbers have almost certainly grown. You see here that 20% of Americans say that they've heard of Rumble, which is incredibly exciting, that we're able to build audience sizes this large when only 20% of Americans have yet to hear of Rumble. And it also means that the potential for growth is so enormous, given that 80% of Americans have yet to hear about this platform. As I said, my guess is that's much higher already since Rumble is spending a lot of money on national campaign ads, but the ability to construct an entirely different part of the media ecosystem – one that answers not to any demands for censorship or corporate advertisers – or the ability for people to demand that Rumble censor things or de-platform is very, very encouraging. 

Rumble has already proven – when they defied the government of France’s demands to depart from RT – that they would rather lose the market than obey censorship demands. They are in lawsuits with Google over Google's manipulation of the algorithms. They have really demonstrated a commitment to not just independent media, but to the core values of free inquiry and free speech that I believe are absolutely vital to building a genuine alternative to Big Tech. 

Equally interesting are some of these demographics about who is watching Rumble. Here you see that despite the media claim that it's just for the far-right, it's just for MAGA – notwithstanding the fact that the two hosts who have been the most promoted here on Rumble with live nightly shows are me and Russell Brand – you see that one of the five viewers of shows on Rumble identifies as Democrats, and the demographics are skewing very young –you see at least 80% of the people under 65 with a fairly sizable number being between 18 and 49. There is a very diverse range of viewers who are watching our show. It's to the point where even mainstream media outlets, very begrudgingly, are starting to acknowledge Rumble’s success. 

Here, in October 2022, there's an article from The Atlantic entitled “What if Rumble is the Future of the Social Web” and it says It's the most serious of the all-tech social media platforms. 

There's another article that actually was very surprising to me, in its honesty, from New York magazine that's headlined “The Only Success Story in Right-Wing Social Media”. And it talks about Rumble’s success and it even acknowledges, despite this headline, that, as I just said, much of the content on this platform is not right-wing at all, nor are many of the viewers. And as Rumble begins to diversify its programming to gain an even better reputation for being a place that guarantees free speech and free inquiry to everybody, not just people of a certain ideology, this will only continue to grow. 

I think one of the things that we've been doing is experimenting with different ways that our show would work. The kind of conventional wisdom is that in the Internet era, people have very short attention spans and as a result, in order to attract viewers and keep viewers, you need to kind of keep this kinetic, frenzied pace where you're constantly changing stories and constantly bringing on new gas that people only can pay attention for five or six or seven minutes at a time. And one of the things we set out to do early on was disproved that view. We respect the attention span of our audience. We sometimes take the entire show, as we did tonight, to delve very deeply into just one topic, which oftentimes is crucial for telling the full story, especially if what you're trying to do is tell a story that is different from the conventional wisdom on the rest of media. If, for example, all I wanted to do was to say, Oh, this legal brief shows that Fox host got caught lying, I would need about 3 minutes. Everybody would understand what I was saying. Everybody would nod their head. But since the narrative I wanted to present to you, since the story that we wanted to show you as true, completely contradicts what virtually every other media outlet is saying, it's necessary to take the time to delve in an in-depth way to show you the evidence that uproots those core assumptions. 

It's very similar to when I began writing about politics in 2005 as blogs were starting to really emerge, the conventional wisdom back then was the only way to attract an audience was if you spoke in one or two sentences. Blog posts had to be this short and you had to constantly post 20 or 25 a day changing topics at all times, or else the people wouldn't want to read them. And I would write every single day 3,000 to 4,000-word very detailed posts about one topic containing all kinds of evidence and hard evidence of documentation and statistics and all that happened is my audience size continued to grow because I really believe, and I've always believed, that there is a real appetite for actual journalism. 

It is true that if you're just feeding people superficial tripe if you're just talking about the news gossip of the day, people don't want to hear much of that. They're willing to give you three or four minutes of a trivial topic but if you're creating a show that has a high enough quality, that is designed to inform people and to illuminate – not based on my assertions, or in my words, but with evidence – people are willing to give you their time because it is something nutritious and provocative and thought-provoking and ultimately real journalism. 

The fact that our audience size continues to grow, the more we continue to follow this format, is something that's very encouraging and we expect, as I said early on, that within a year, we strongly believe that the audience size for our show, for the other shows that Rumble is investing in as a nightly live show will have not just an audience similar to but greater than the standard audience that the largest news corporations in the country have for their nightly shows that have been around for many years, then they have a much greater budget. 

We strongly believe we will soon equal and then surpass that audience size and continue to grow. This is the part of the media that is really thriving, the independent part of the media that operates with no constraints, that is not captive to any dogma and that is not susceptible or vulnerable to censorship of every kind. That continues to be the kind of mentality and driving framework of our show. We're thrilled that it has continued to work for the first 50 episodes, and we look forward to continuing throughout the year in building the show even further. 

 

So that concludes our show for tonight. Thank you so much for watching and staying with us through our first 50 episodes. We really could not have done it without your support. The fact that it continues to grow is what enables us to keep doing what we're doing. 

I hope you have a great evening, everyone. Have a great night, everybody. 

 

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I just want to thank your staff for keeping the show going during whatever the heck kind of issue was going on last night. I'm obviously not much of a techie, but it seemed like some kind of attack to me. Plus, the live chat was full of a bunch of weird pro-Israel trolls, who veered from quoting the Bible at us, to bragging about Israel's fighter jets.😲 I imagine the staffers were just as annoyed as we were, while trying to both run the show, & keep it on the air.
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Zelensky Rejects Trump's Ukraine Proposal; What Happened to the Epstein Files? Plus: Richard Medhurst Facing Criminal Charges in UK for Israel Reporting
System Update #442

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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Before I get to the plan of the show, I want to expel a little bit of frustration and irritation with the fact that every day now, there is a new assault on press freedom on American campuses and elsewhere in American society in the name of protecting Israel – so many of them, in fact, that we cannot possibly report on them all. We can't possibly keep up with them. 

Earlier today, it was reported, for example, that a singer who had been invited to perform at Cornell University had her invitation officially rescinded by the school administration because she had in the past criticized Israel in a way that was, of course, deemed pro-Hamas or antisemitic or whatever. Remember all the right-wing grievances about cancel culture? This is actually continuous cancel culture. 

There have been other pro-Palestinian speakers or other people who have come to speak about the war in Gaza who have been similarly uninvited because the climate has already been successfully created where people are afraid now to have speaking on campus anyone who might criticize Israel because they know that the hammer of the federal government will come smashing down upon them. 

In the course of all of this reporting I've been doing, I've been appearing in a lot of places, doing a lot of interviews and, as usual, having exchanges with people online in good faith, trying to explain what it is that's happening. I spent a lot of time during the Biden administration talking about and denouncing the Biden administration's pressure on Big Tech to remove dissent from the internet, which was an extremely grave assault on free speech and what we have here in so many ways is so much worse. 

We’re seeing people being swept up off the street by plain clothes agents and put into prison for the crime of writing op-eds that are critical of Israel, having our most important and our finest academic research institution stripped of funding, including people trying to find treatments and cures for diseases if they don't sign loyalty pledges saying they won't boycott Israel, or if there's a perception that they aren't loyal to Israel.

We have the Trump administration imposing expanded hate speech codes on campuses just to protect Israel and American Jewish students – and nobody else – and even demanding that Middle East studies programs and their curricula be put under receivership so that the Trump administration is satisfied that there's enough pro-Israel content being taught as part of this curricula and not too much pro-Palestinian content. We’re talking here not about third grade; we're talking about adults in colleges where academic freedom is supposed to reign. 

And watching the number of Trump supporters who have spent the last 10 years pretending to believe in free speech and being outraged by censorship – I know I've said this before. I'm just kind of venting a little bit – hearing from them so often with the most obscene justifications for why this censorship is permissible or just making up outright lies about the people who are being deported, saying they harassed or attacked Jewish students, vandalized buildings or occupied buildings, none of which is true for the cases that we're discussing, I don't even have the words for it any longer for the level of fraud that this movement is guilty of from having branded themselves in a certain way for a full decade only to switch on a dime in the face of one of the most systemic censorship regimes I've ever seen in my life, one that threatens academic freedom and free speech throughout the country, it is really quite nauseating, really quite sickening. 

And it doesn't seem like it has any end in sight because the more the Trump administration does it, every day new measures are being announced. Yesterday, of course, we talked about the new NIH guidelines designed to deny funding and grants to medical researchers if they don't sign a pledge saying they don't participate in the boycott of Israel. 

Every time a new measure is announced, Trump supporters feel even more compelled to support their leader, and they invent new theories all the time, which, by the way, aren't really even new. They sound exactly like the left liberal censorship theories that they spent the last decade mocking. 

You have more censorship being fortified every day from an administration that just three months ago was ushered in, based on an explicit promise to end censorship. JD Vance went to Europe to castigate them for not sharing American values or free speech, by imposing political censorship, and yet the censorship against people who are critical of Israel could not be any greater. 

We're going to have on the show a journalist, Richard Medhurst, who is actually under a very serious and active criminal investigation in the EU for having reported negatively on Israel. That's something, of course, JD Vance submitted when he went to the EU to scold them about their censorship. So, it's just really remarkable to see. 

We're not going to report on it specifically tonight, of all the venting that I just did on it, but it was something that I had to remark upon. 

Before having Richard Medhurst on, we’ll talk about the war in Ukraine – remember that? There have been some significant, if not encouraging, new developments in these negotiations, which we want to tell you about and break down the significance of. Then, we’ll review the relevant facts on these ample Epstein files, which seemed to have disappeared from the news cycle, I think, by intention. 

Let’s get back to the plan.

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 War in Ukraine, even though we don't talk about it anymore – and I don't mean we specifically on the show, sometimes we do, but I mean, we collectively, we as a country – it’s just a war that goes on. People are still dying every day, people are being bombed, people are being chased with drones and there are all kinds of missiles being launched continuously. The dangers of escalation continue to unfold. 

And I have to say the Trump administration, despite my many critiques of much of what they're doing, deserves a lot of credit because they really are following through in a very aggressive way in an attempt to bring about an end to this war diplomatically.

 The reality of the war, whether people like it or not, is that Russia is winning. Russia has been dominating the war; Ukraine has far more of a reason to end the war than Russia does and, of course, whatever diplomatic resolution is achieved will be more favorable to Russia than to Ukraine.

 Yet, we're already seeing people accusing Trump of capitulating to the Russians because the proposals that they're talking about, which are the only ones that have any chance of ending the war, have terms that are favorable to Russia in them for the obvious reason that Russia is winning and Russia would never accept terms not favorable to it.

It seems as though many of the terms that Zelenskyy is going to end up having to accept are ones he's refusing to accept. Trump's frustration with Ukraine is growing and growing and we'll see where that leads. 

First of all, here from CNN earlier today:

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Now, as you might recall, Crimea had for centuries been part of Russia. It ended up being part of Ukraine through a series of complicated transactions that Putin regards as an error. In 2014, when the United States government with Victoria Nuland, John McCain and Chris Murphy, the whole gang, went over and helped overthrow the democratically elected government in Kiev that was more leaning toward Moscow than to the EU – and that was the reason we overthrew them and instead installed a much more pro-EU, pro-U.S. Government. In response to having the EU and the U.S. now dominant inside Ukraine, on the other side of the Russian border, even changing the government, the Russians took Crimea, an extremely geostrategically important spot. It's what gives them access to the Black Sea. The reality is, is that the people of Crimea, nobody doubts this, overwhelmingly, I'm talking about 90%, identify as Russian, not as Ukrainian. They are far more loyal to the Russians, they want to be governed by Moscow and not by Kiev. There's no possibility that the Russians will ever give back Crimea, especially with NATO so involved in Ukraine. 

And so, what the Trump administration is doing is simply saying that we, the United States, will recognize that Crimea is part of Russia. Not that the Ukrainians have to, not that the Europeans have to, just that we, the Americans, will, because the reality is that Crimea is never going back to Ukraine. Yet, that's something Zelenskyy refuses to accept. 

I have news for Zelenskyy. Russia is occupying and controlling Ukraine and those other provinces in Eastern Ukraine, whether he likes it or not. He may wish there were a fantasy world where Ukraine was going to control it, but there is no world in which that will ever happen. And so, obviously, the Americans are trying to work within the Russian reality and the Ukrainian reality when you try to negotiate a war. 

 Steve Witkoff, by all accounts, has been doing an excellent job of genuinely trying to foster an end to this war. What Witkoff and others have been saying is that you need to understand things from the Russian perspective and the Ukrainian perspective to understand what's possible in a deal, which is basic diplomacy. The Biden administration wouldn’t even talk to Russia. The EU won't even talk to Russia. The Trump administration is doing so in a way that will advance this diplomacy. 

The real Russian objective was never to take over all of Ukraine. That might've been their view at the very beginning, I even doubt that. Their concern was what these Eastern provinces of Ukraine, where the vast majority of people are Russian speaking and ethnic Russian and the perception was that the Kiev government had become increasingly brutalizing and abusive of their rights, had disregarded their cultural history and their religious traditions – that was why there was a low-grade civil war, basically a war for independence going back to 2014 between these provinces in Eastern Ukraine and Kiev. 

The Russians, on top of wanting to preserve and protect the rights of the people who live there, also wanted that as a buffer zone. So, if they have these four provinces, it's not as easy for NATO to go up to the Russian border. And that was always the solution: NATO doesn't go in Ukraine, and Crimea stays with Russia, and these four provinces have some sort of semi-autonomous or autonomous status, depending on what they want in a referendum, or join Russia and become part of Russia. That gives the Russians the buffer zone and the security that they need and Ukraine won't be a NATO member as well. And then Ukraine gets some sort of ambiguous security guarantee from some combination of Europe and the U.S. 

This is what the kind of negotiation looked like at the beginning of the war back in March and April 2022, when the two sides were very close to negotiating an agreement that could have averted this war. That was when Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland swept in and told Zelenskyy that under no circumstances could he agree to that resolution and they would promise to give him all the money and weapons he needed to fight the Russians until the very end. And those are the people who have all this blood on their hands. 

Now, it is always strange that Zelenskyy is in this position where he depends upon the United States, depends upon the Trump administration to fund his war effort, to give them the weapons he needs, to even be able to stay competitive in this war.

 And when that happens, when you're dependent, kind of a vassal state, and that state tells you, “Look, we're not going to continue to support this war, here's an agreement that we think is fair for you” as Trump told Zelenskyy in the White House, “you don't have that many cards to play” and yet Zelenskyy continues to act as though he's the one dictating the terms

The peace plan put forward by the Trump administration didn't even require Ukraine to acknowledge that Crimea belonged to Russia, who cares if Ukraine acknowledges that or not? The peace plan was that the United States would recognize Crimea as being Russian. But the defiance of Zelenskyy, yet again, when he depends upon the Trump administration, of the United States and the American taxpayer to fund his war, was something that, to put it mildly, did not sit well with Trump, and he had one of those reactions he's had to Zelenskyy in the past. 

This is what he posted on Truth Social earlier today:

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Again, it is true that the United States, independent of who you think is right or wrong or what you think the right outcome is, has a very strong interest in ending this war. We're paying for the war (not all of it, the Europeans are paying for a lot of it as well); our stockpiles are being depleted, especially when we also have to feed the Israelis arms and now, we're using a ton of arms ourselves to bomb Yemen. We have this rapidly depleting stockpile. 

The American government should have as its primary concern the interests of the American people and the United States and it has never been in the interests of the American People. I've said this from the very start: to fight a war with Russia, even a proxy war, over who rules various provinces of Eastern Ukraine – whether they stay under the governance of Kiev, whether they end up autonomous or semi-autonomous from the land up with Moscow, where most of the people prefer – what impact does that have on the American people and their material well-being at all? 

The Trump administration seems to be reaching the end of its rope in terms of their willingness to allow Zelenskyy to act as though he has equal leverage in any of this when he clearly doesn't. 

Here's The New York Times yesterday:

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Given all the various conflicts taking place – the green light that the Trump administration gave to the Israelis to destroy Gaza even further, the occupation of the Israelis of increasing amounts of territory both in Syria and Lebanon, their ethnic cleansing taking place with very little attention being paid in the West Bank, the resumption and escalation of the Biden bombing campaign by Trump in Yemen, and the threats that are being issued on a daily bases now to Iran, ones that we covered at length last night, it's absolutely imperative to American national security that this war come to an end to financial security, and economic security and military national security as well. 

If the Trump administration continues to perceive that Zelenskyy simply doesn't want to end the war because he has been told repeatedly by the U.S. that they will give him whatever he wants, at some point, the only solution is to withdraw that funding, withdraw that arming of Ukraine, something the Trump administration hasn't wanted to do yet, because if they did that, it would make a negotiation impossible, Russia would have zero incentive to do so. However, at some point, if the perception continues to be accurate that the impediment to ending this war is Zelenskyy, that will become the only outcome. 

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Remember the Epstein files? As Donald Trump spent 2024 promising to release, the Epstein files were supposedly released back in February when Pam Bondi invited a bunch of right-wing influencers to the White House, handing them big, flamboyant notebooks that said on them “Epstein's files” and they were all smiling thinking that they had an exclusive on all this good stuff that was for the first time going to be publicly revealed. As it turned out, the whole thing was a sham; all these documents had been long ago made public in a whole variety of ways through various litigations and FOIA requests on the part of media outlets. There was absolutely nothing new in any of them. 

The whole issue of the client list and the like, I understand why that gets people interested and excited, but the reality is that we've already seen so much evidence of the people with whom Jeffrey Epstein was cavorting. People of the highest status and wealth throughout the world, who basically brought down Prince Andrew of the British royal family. We know Bill Clinton and Donald Trump both had extensive relationships, social relationships, with Jeffrey Epstein, which doesn't mean that they were on his island or having sex with underage girls, but we know all the people who have been associated with Jeffrey Epstein for a long time. There may be some client list, although Pam Bondi says I haven't seen anything shocking so far.

To me, the much more interesting question is the geopolitical one. Obviously, when you have the most powerful people on the planet being put into compromising positions on Jeffrey Epstein’s island, on his plane, in his mansion in Palm Beach, in his mansion in the middle of Manhattan – and we know that all kinds of tapes and recordings have been made that gives enormous amounts of blackmail power over these people – but the questions of whether foreign governments, whether intelligence agencies in our country or others, in some way, exploited that information… 

There’s always been a question of what the real source of Jeffrey Epstein's massive wealth was. We're talking here about a multibillionaire wealth. He wasn't just somebody who was extremely wealthy. There are zillions of people like those. There are all sorts of ways to become wealthy on that level. We're talking about somebody who had just the kind of wealth that only billionaires have, massive jets that were private, that he took everywhere; $80 to $100 million properties all over the world, the ability to purchase a private island, to donate massive sums of money. Where did that money come from?

 Nobody has ever been able to answer that. We know a couple of things, including his relationship with somebody named Les Wexner, who himself is a multibillionaire with whom Jeffrey Epstein worked. But there's no identifiable expertise that Jeffrey Epstein had. He never did anything on Wall Street that was particularly impressive. The question has always been, was there some government, some intelligence agency behind him with whom he was working, or for whom he was working to create, essentially, a honey trap? That would give these intelligence agencies knowledge of and therefore power over what a lot of people were doing. 

That, to me, is the answer that we don't have any resolution on. Maybe the answer to that is no, but we really haven't had any sort of documentation providing guidance on that one way or the other. 

We know for certain that these files are in the custody of the U.S. government, which has repeatedly promised to release them, pretended to release them back in February, although they didn't. Where are the answers to those questions? When will we get the answers to the questions, if ever? 

What we're being told right now is that the reason we can't have them is that there are redactions that need to take place for national security purposes. I understand that some of these files would need to be redacted before being released. You don't want to release the names, for example, of victims who haven't been identified, who don't want to be identified, of some of the girls who were sex trafficked. That makes sense. Perhaps you don't even want to release the names of the people who were Jeffrey Epstein's associates, but you have no evidence they engaged in any wrongdoing because that can harm their reputation. I understand that as well. 

But why would there be national security redactions unless Jeffrey Epstein had relationships with foreign governments? If Jeffrey Epstein had a relationship with a foreign government, it seems like we could probably narrow down which ones are the most likely and then that leads me to the question of whether or not it's possible that, if those answers exist within the files of the U.S. government, under the Trump administration, we will ever actually see those at all. At the very least, we ought to keep up the pressure. 

Trump has been asked about this on a couple of occasions, including on April 22, which was yesterday. He was in the Oval Office, and he was asked, “Hey, what about those Epstein files?” And here's what he said. 

Video. Donald Trump, C-SPAN2. April 22, 2025.

He's absolutely right about that. There was a full disclosure of the JFK files. Now, there are still some files within the CIA and other places that haven't quite been released. But the documents they released were in unredacted fashion. And that's why I have those questions about the Epstein files. Why are all these redactions necessary for this, but not for the JFK files? 

Again, the thing that concerns me the most is when they start saying that their redactions are for national security purposes. What possible national security implications are there to the Jeffrey Epstein case, unless we're talking about relationships with domestic intelligence agencies or foreign intelligence agencies? 

We do have some clues about some of the people, the extremely wealthy people who surrounded Jeffrey Epstein, who seemed responsible in some way for his ability to construct this very powerful network of highly connected people and what their connections are. 

The Middle East Monitor published in January 2020: “Jeffrey Epstein was blackmailing politicians for Israel’s Mossad, new book claims.” The article said: The claims are being made by the alleged former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Menashe in a soon-to-be-released book “Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales” in which he said that he was the handler of Ghislaine’s father Robert Maxwell, who was also an Israeli espionage agent and was the one who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Mossad.

Now, let me make clear, I'm not endorsing all this or any of this. This has been out in the ether for a long time. These are very sketchy figures. But we do know for sure that Robert Maxwell, the British publishing tycoon who died under very mysterious circumstances, who was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is Jeffrey Epstein's right-hand person who is now serving a long time in prison for helping him traffic young girls, was a huge supporter of Israel, had all kinds of connections to Israel as well. 

In The New York Times, in 1994, there was this headline:

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That was the end of the lawsuit heaping this kind of praise on Seymour Hersh as an author of great integrity after he had accused Robert Maxwell of having very close ties to Israeli intelligence: “In yesterday's proceedings, a lawyer for the Mirror Group, which was controlled by Mr. Maxwell before his death in November 1991, said it acknowledged that Mr. Hersh "is an author of excellent reputation and of the highest integrity who would never write anything which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in writing what he did." (The New York Times. August 19, 1994.)

The person who was closest to Jeffrey Epstein was Les Wexner, a big-time Wall Street tycoon and investor, a multibillionaire who unquestionably gave massive amounts of money to Jeffrey Epstein nobody really understood why. He claimed, once it became a scandal, that it was because Jeffrey Epstein had developed these extremely innovative techniques to help Les Wexner save huge amounts of tax money. Even if that were true, the amount of wealth Jeffrey Epstein amassed would be nowhere near any kind of rational relationship to that sort of claim. Les Wexner had a very close relationship to Israel as well. 

The Vanity Fair, in June 2021, had an article, “The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With His Biggest Client,” investigating the many mysteries that still surround the life and crimes of the notorious financier.” “His long-standing business ties with his most prominent client, billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner, hold the key.” n 2019, The Times of Israel’s headline is “Netanyahu again goes after Barak for ties to accused billionaire Jeffrey Epstein” (The Times of Israel. July 9, 2019.)

 So, we have a lot of information here that clearly shows that people closest to Jeffrey Epstein themselves were heavily involved with the state of Israel and supporting the state of Israel and having very close operative relationships with Israeli intelligence. There's also reporting, people claim, that Jeffrey Epstein had relationships with Gulf states’ intelligence agencies, including the Emiratis, potentially the Qataris and the Saudis. 

But there's certainly enough here to wonder – and again, I'm not in any way suggesting that this is dispositive. What's dispositive are the records in the possession of the Trump administration and what concerns me, aside from how long it's taking, is that we're being told that they need redactions for national security. And for me, if there's some secret client list that we haven't seen before that contains a bunch of names of people who had sex with Jeffrey Epstein's girls, of course, I guess we should see that, especially if it contains the names of powerful people. I don't think that's the sort of thing that has been concealed, given all the litigation, but I do think what is substantive and what is very possibly out there in documentation is the extent to which Jeffrey Epstein had ties to intelligence agencies, our own or others, and to what extent these operations were part of those intelligence agencies. 

I guess I should say that I have some doubt, given everything we've seen in the Trump administration about the first three months and the importance of Israel and the Gulf States in everything that they're doing, that if such documents exist, they would actually ever see the light of day. 

But given that people have basically stopped talking about the Epstein documents, we thought it was time to remind people that they're still out there, that they have not been released, that there was that fake showing of releasing them at the beginning of the administration that resulted in nothing, the only way to make sure that these documents get released and get released in a form that is actually meaningful is to keep the pressure up. 

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The interview: Richard Medhurst

Richard Medhurst is a truly independent journalist and political commentator born in Damascus, Syria. He regularly hosts live broadcasts discussing all sorts of political controversies from around the globe, U.S. politics and international relations in the Middle East, rooted in an anti-imperialist worldview. In my view, he has become one of the most knowledgeable journalists on a wide variety of issues, including multipolarity. He covered the Assange trial as well as anybody I know. He's also been someone who has covered the civil war for the last six, seven years, the dirty war from the United States in Syria, where he obviously has ties. And for the past several years, two years at least, his focus primarily has been on what a lot of our focus has been, which is on the Israeli war in Gaza. I reached out to him. We've had him on our show several times and we're here to talk about a particularly disturbing case: he is now facing not just the threat, but the very real possibility of criminal prosecution in the EU and in the U.K. as a result of the reporting that he's been doing on Israel, and not just prosecution, but prosecution under terrorism laws. 

G. Greenwald: Richard, I wish we were sitting under better circumstances, but we really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us. We had you on back in August, I think it was when you were actually arrested at Heathrow Airport. Of course, there's always a little personal resonance for me because, as you know, my husband was detained at Heathrow under these anti-terrorism laws. I really got to understand how chilling they were, although his case never went nearly as far as yours have. 

For people who haven't, who haven't been following your case, before we get to the most recent developments, which are even more chilling, talk about, just as a reminder, a kind of summary way, what happened back then and why. 

Richard Medhurst: Yeah, thanks Glenn for having me on and when that happened to David, that was the first time that I also got to understand what this Schedule 7 was, what these terrorism laws were and yeah, so, I landed at Heathrow and they didn't let anyone just embark, they like called me to the front of the plane and I thought it was a Schedule 7, which is when they detain you and it turned out to be like a full arrest, like they put me in cuffs, they jailed me for 24 hours. 

They didn't use Schedule 7, they used section 121A. So, that was like the first time they've ever used that against a journalist. The reason it's so chilling is that if you look at the law, it's very broad, it's very, very broad, so if you give the impression or, you say something that could be completely factual but makes it sound like a lawyer can twist into you supporting X or Y, they can arrest you and charge you and put you in jail for it and that's why it's so chilling for someone as a journalist to be arrested because then you're basically being in prison for doing your job.

They questioned me for about two hours the next day, so I had no idea why I was even there. I was put in this like nasty cell, and then they released me on bail, and I’ve been on bail ever and they've been extending it every three months. 

So, I have to go back on May 15 for now, unless they decide to charge me, to extend it again, or to drop it. And that's almost nine months now that I've been under investigation for so-called terrorism. And it's really stifled my work, and it's stopped me from being able to do my job, because if reporting is now a criminal offense, what's next? And we saw what happened with Julian. Julian was also attacked and put in jail under a different political charge, which was espionage and I feel like they've decided to now use terrorism, which is also political, against me and try to make an example out of me because of my reporting on the genocide in Gaza. 

G. Greenwald: So, there's an important distinction. I want to emphasize that you alluded to it, which is in the case of my husband, who was detained in Heathrow during the Snowden reporting when he was passing through on his way back from Germany to come to Rio, he was detained under Schedule 7. So, he wasn't officially arrested. 

This was a provision that says, if you come to the airport and you have some suspicion of terrorist activity, you can be detained and questioned. They seized his electronic devices.  It was supposed to be nine hours of detention; you can go to the court and convert it to an arrest, and they kept threatening that they would, but they didn't. They ended up letting him go primarily because it became such a big diplomatic scandal. But because they let him go and they didn't arrest him the way they did with you and yours became a more serious case, he was able to sue and in the course of suing, they were forced to say why they detained him and they said it was because of his work with the Snowden reporting. In other words, they had accused him of somehow being a suspect in a terrorism case as a result of the work he was doing, with me, Laura Poitras and the Guardian when it came to journalism. 

Have you had any sort of clear explanation about what the basis was for your arrest and for this ongoing investigation? Do you know for certain why this is? 

Richard Medhurst: No, I really don't. I mean, they obviously hinted at things that they were upset about during the questioning, which I'm not allowed to talk about. But honestly, I can't tell you 100% why I was arrested. I still think that they kind of just got mad at me because of my job. They even made a point that I have a large number of followers, and they were showing me my YouTube channel and my Twitter and commenting on how big my reach is. And making it very clear that basically this was the reason I was a menace, why else would you bring this up? 

So, the point is basically that I'm a bad influence on society or something, and so I think this was really the basis of it. But I'm sure there are other things that they couldn't necessarily arrest me for that annoyed them. For example, a few weeks before I got arrested, I did this massive investigation on Israeli athletes, the football teams, the national football team, the Olympic team, because the Russians had been banned within four days of the Ukraine war, but the Israelis hadn't. And so I showed through the whole social media how all of these athletes were saying genocidal things. 

So, I thought maybe that angered them. Maybe the fact that I covered this gang rape that was happening in the state’s man detention facility. I think it was all of those things. But again, it doesn't mean I deserve to be arrested, but I think in general, my reporting on that and perhaps my reporting on Julian Assange's case as well may have angered the U.K. and U.S. authorities. So, I think it's a mix of these things. And yeah, they certainly escalated it to an arrest. 

I think everybody else who had come through Heathrow, even other journalists, had “only”, in quotation marks, been detained with Schedule 7, as they did to David, they forced you to answer all the questions and hand over your electronics. With me, I was able [to no comment the interview] and they nevertheless made me give my electronics. As a matter of fact, I might face a second case because I've refused to give my password. 

So, this is another law, it's called RIPA [Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000], and it's just as oppressive as the Terrorism Act. If they go to a judge and they get a court order, and you still refuse to give them the passwords, you can go to prison for like two to five years automatically. And I refused to give them the passwords because they took my phones. These are journalistic tools. I'm not going to compromise the safety of sources, acquaintances and other people. I just can't. It's an ethical obligation. So, that's why I refuse. 

G. Greenwald: One of the reasons I'm asking is because, well, I remember, I think I really did start watching you on YouTube, I found your show, when you still had something like 5,000 subscribers. It was really at the beginning. I mean, sometimes people come and say, “Oh, I've been reading your work since your Unclaimed Territory blog, way before Snowden, way before Salon even,” and I always feel like, oh, this is like one of the hardcore original viewers of my show. I kind of feel like that with you, and one of the things that attracted me to your show is that you are extremely passionate, you don't hold back at all, but it's always very, very fact-based. But especially on the topic that people consider sensitive, like Israel and Gaza, you use language that a lot of people would regard as intemperate, you don't really dilute what it is that you're feeling and when you were talking about something like the Israeli destruction of Gaza in particular, I think that is what is appropriate, but it means that you probably do stand out to a government like the U.K., as opposed to a bunch of other people who are speaking critically of Israel and Gaza in sort of more restrained tones. 

But what's really concerning me about your case is that there is this kind of increasing tendency to equate criticism of Israel with support for terrorism. I can't tell you how often, for example, in these cases in the United States, where the students are being arrested and snatched off the street and deported, the only thing they're “guilty” of is protesting the war in Israel and in a lot of people's minds that instantly becomes equated with support for Hamas or support for terrorism, which itself is a crime. And I'm wondering whether, and I know there are some legal constraints that you're operating under because you really do have a serious criminal case pending. 

But whether the theory seems to be that by being so out there, and you've now grown your audience, you have a hundred thousand subscribers, it seems to me that by being so vocally denouncing and condemning the Israeli state, that in some sense it amounts to support for terrorism. 

Does it seem like that's a theory that is being used to justify your criminal prosecution? 

Richard Medhurst: It is. It absolutely is. What they did to me in Austria afterward, where they continued this case, so they ambushed me again, not on a plane, but they lured me to immigration. And you know this thing they've been doing with Mahmoud Khalil in the U.S., where they threatened to rescind his green card? So, about a month before that, they started it with me in Austria. They told me to come to the immigration authorities, and I'd never been summoned there in my life. 

So, I knew something was up. They threatened to take away my permanent residency because of my reporting. If that wasn't enough, they then had these intelligence agents ambush me with a search warrant. I asked them what unit they were; they told me very explicitly that they're the equivalent of MI5 in Austria. 

They served you with a search warrant and they accused me in the warrant of being a Hamas member and not just like a member, but in the military wing. They specifically cited the Kassan brigades and again, when I heard that, I couldn't help but burst out laughing. I was like this must be a dream or something, this is madness, and they're not only – you'll be familiar with this, Glenn, within the U.S. legal system, I think it's called “alleged conduct.” So, when you add like a bunch of narrative in a prosecution to kind of paint someone as a villain, they're not additional charges, but they make you look bad and they could lead to harsher sentencing, that's what they did in the warrant, they added these things like about rape on October 7 and like trying to connect me to those things. 

So, yeah, they basically equated all of my reporting with not just terrorism, like all of the crimes that they said happened on October 7, and they not only threaten to take away my residency, but they also accuse me of being an actual member of the organization of Hamas. 

So yeah, it's actually gone that far and I'm shocked that they can even subject me to two investigations in two countries. I mean, just because of my reporting. Again, it has 100% to do with my reporting, nothing else. The examples they've cited are also outlandish. Like, one of the things the prosecutor in Vienna says in the warrant is, like, I allegedly showed a video of Hamas fighters eating triangle-shaped desserts. I don't even know what to say to all this, but I'm really starting to understand that they have a target on my back. 

And just to underscore your point about the way that I'm reporting things, I think that they really just want to stop me from doing my job, put me behind bars, or just kind like wage lawfare and psychological warfare against me because I expose… 

G. Greenwald: We lost Richard briefly - It just seems to be a sketchy internet connection. 

But a lot of this has become normalized in the sense that I can't even count at this point how many people we've had on our show, who report critically on Israel, searched and seized; they've had their devices taken. Obviously, part of this is to create a climate where people are afraid, where they know that if they criticize Israel too, they might end up in these kinds of situations, but in your case, it seems to have really gone a lot further in that it wasn't just that you had this kind of intimidating moment at Heathrow, it is now continuing to the point where you are facing the real prospect that you could be forced to go back to the U.K. and have to actually confront an indictment and potentially a trial under terrorism laws based on a very kind of vague theory about what you might have done that might have prompted the view that you're in some way supporting Hamas. Where is the current situation and what are the choices that you are facing? 

Richard Medhurst: They keep extending the investigation every quarter, every three months. The police apply for that, and they always get permission, of course. So that's one option for them is to keep me in a permanent state of limbo where I can't work properly and they still get to benefit from me being silent and them not having to take it to court and deal with the drama of an attack on press freedom and everything that would ensue. 

I tried to explain that I'm Christian, they don't allow Christians in Hamas. And their response is, “We're just following orders, it's not up to us, we're just executing the warrant. And they came in here in my studio, in my home, they ransacked the place. I mean, they did everything but rob me. They took thousands of euros worth of gear, every computer I've owned, every piece of gear I've bought since I started this job. And I think that was another attempt to kneecap me, similarly to how, in Heathrow, they took my microphones, like analog wired microphones. What are you going to investigate with an analog microphone? It's just a screw with you to stop you from working. So, I think there was a very clear sequel to what they’d done in Heathrow. And now they're trying to corner me so that they either put me in jail in England or they put me in jail here or make my life hell in both countries and it's beyond an escalation. It's just madness, frankly. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, even if it doesn't end up going to those extremes and there's by no means a guarantee that it won't, just the intimidation alone, the fact that you have to constantly have this on your mind automatically detracts from the work that you're able to do. But it also, again, is intended by design to send a signal to other people who are similarly critical of Israel in a similar way within the EU that if you think you can say what you want about Israel, you better think again, because we will use the criminal force of law to harass you in very serious ways and even threaten you with imprisonment. 

It's actually amazing how quickly these things get normalized and the fact that it's gotten this far in your case with very little mainstream media attention, of course, needless to say, it just gives you a kind of sense for how decayed things become on the press freedom front when it comes to this issue. 

In terms of people who might want to help with your work, I'm sure you have defense costs, I'm sure you have other costs in terms of the things that they've taken, how would it be that people can help you and follow your work as well? 

Richard Medhurst: I have a GoFundMe set up, I don't know the link exactly, but patreon.com/richardmedhurst, that's where people can also donate and I'll have updates about my case on my Twitter, so just look up Richard Medhurst on Twitter and you'll find my account. 

And yeah, just a short parenthesis on press coverage, the British press, like six months later, haven't said a word about what happened to me. They didn't report on the U.N. letter that was sent to Keir Starmer as well, signed by four U.N. special rapporteurs. The Austrian press at least covered the raid that happened to me, and they covered it in a more or less balanced or neutral way. So, I just thought I'd say that because I think it once again underscores how sold out the whole U.K. press establishment is. 

G. Greenwald: Yeah, no question about it. 

All right. Well, we’re here for you whenever you need to come on, want to come on and want to talk about anything. We're definitely here for you. We are rooting for you and supporting you. I really regard your case as a serious threat to press freedom, but one that, unfortunately, is becoming increasingly common. I wish I could say it's so aberrational and so extraordinary, but it really, really isn't. And it's always great to see you. I hope you take care of yourself and stay in touch, and we'll talk soon. 


Follow Richard Medhurst on X: https://twitter.com/richimedhurst

Contribute to his GoFundMe Campaign: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-for-richard-medhursts-journalism

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Pentagon in Turmoil Over Iran Policy as Israel Pushes for War; Lee Fang on New NIH Censorship Policy Threatening Medical Researchers
System Update #441

The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.  

System Update is an independent show free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!

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There is a highly unusual and consequential purge of some of the highest national security officials taking place. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in particular, has had his long-time and most trusted confidants, whom he chose just two months ago for the most influential policy-making positions reporting directly to him, now fired. 

While this sort of bureaucratic intrigue is often opaque in Washington – and Hegseth, the ultimate team player for Trump, is insisting that there is nothing out of the ordinary taking place – one cannot help but notice that several of his fallen advisors are among the most vocal skeptics, if not outright opponents, of a U.S. military conflict with Iran, beginning with his long-time friend and former marine Dan Caldwell. 

We'll examine what is clear in all of these events, and whether the war drums beating more and more loudly every day in Washington against Tehran can't really be stopped. 

 

Then, the independent investigative journalist, Lee Fang, has written today on his Substack about the new NIH regulations. He'll be with us tonight to discuss them, but also the broader implications of the censorship campaigns that they represent. 

 

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One of the things that you realize for the first time if you live outside of the United States is just how aberrational it is for a country to constantly spend its time talking about which country it ought to go to war with next. 

It's usually unheard of for most countries to even consider the possibility of a war with another country or bombing other countries or attacking other countries, let alone to actually do so. In the United States, we have an endless array, a really, literally endless array of military conflicts, bombing campaigns, wars, invasions, and all kinds of covert actions in other countries as well. 

Poll after poll constantly demonstrate that people are eager for an end to endless wars, that these wars are not in the interest of American citizens or American interests. Candidates who run on a platform of being anti-war, of avoiding war, as Barack Obama did, as Donald Trump did, tend to do extremely well because they are telling the American people what they already want and believe, which is that these wars are being fought in a way that not only doesn't benefit their lives, but in so many ways undermines and subverts and prejudices it. 

The war in Iraq is something that should have put an end to this forever. It was the supreme expression of a war begun and sold based on falsehoods and lies, not just about the cause of the war, but also how the war would end up being prosecuted. We were told it'd be over in a few weeks. “We're so much more powerful than Iraq. We're just gonna remove the Saddam Hussein regime. We're gonna be welcomed as liberators. It's gonna be quick in and quick out. And then we're gonna have freedom and democracy spreading throughout the Middle East.” Absolutely none of that happened. 

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