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Our guest was Jefferson Morley, who testified today in front of Congress about the significance of the newly released JFK documents, along with others who have long followed the JFK investigation, including director Oliver Stone. We'll have Morley here to talk about his testimony today.
We'll then break down what the guardians and saviors of Democracy are doing in banishing their most popular opponents from running as opposed to trying to defeat them democratically. Marine Le Pen, Bolsonaro and Calin Georgescu are some of the examples.
The Interview: Jeff Morley
Jefferson Morley is a best-selling author and a veteran Washington journalist known for his investigative books which expose the covert history of American power. His most recent book is “Scorpion's Dance: the President, the Spymaster, and Watergate,” which explores the secret relationship between CIA director Richard Helms and President Richard Nixon. He is, as well, a leading authority, I believe one of the top two or three journalistic authorities on the JFK assassination. He has spent decades prying loose the CIA's deepest secrets and challenging the official narrative.
He testified earlier today at Congress about what these newly declassified documents from the Trump administration add to our understanding not just of the assassination but the clear cover-up that took place as part of the investigation, as well as the potential CIA role in all of this. We're delighted he took the time to join us.
G. Greenwald: Jeff, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Jefferson Morley: Thanks for having me, Glenn. I'm very glad to be here.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I'm glad to have you. I recommended the interview that you recently did on Breaking Points, about 30 minutes with Saagar Enjeti and Ryan Grim. I found it one of the most illuminating interviews in recent times, especially on these documents. But I want to explore some other things beyond what's in that interview as well.
You testified earlier today before the House Task Force on Declassification, which is chaired by Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, the Republican of Florida. I know that you and everybody else interested in not just the JFK assassination, but the role that the CIA has played in our politics and our history, were very interested in these documents and more broadly interested in getting to the bottom of this case, whether we ever learned the truth. What was your sense, having testified before the committee, about whether that interest and excitement is shared by most members of Congress?
Jefferson Morley: Let me talk about chairwoman Luna first because I've gotten to know her over the last couple of weeks when she launched this House Task Force on Declassification and I've been very impressed with her attitude. She's a can-do person. When I said, I said we needed to get these documents from the CIA, she said, “Give me a memo and I'll call Ratcliffe's office today.” So, she's very proactive. I think her leadership has been very strong. We had some partisan politics in the hearing today, which I think was unfortunate because it's not really a partisan issue. I mean, I'm a pretty liberal guy. That's why I wanted to be on your show, you know? And so, I'm hopeful that the task force is going to do serious work. The most encouraging sign is she says we're going to have another hearing on JFK. We're hoping to get some more firsthand witnesses to explicate the new history of JFK's assassination.
G. Greenwald: So, I want to spend most of my time with you on the substance of these documents and the investigation, but just before I get to that, just along those same lines, I don't want to make it a partisan issue either, but there is a palpable shift in how our political spectrum thinks about the U.S. Security State, the CIA, the nefarious role they've often played. As you said, you're a liberal Democrat and it used to be foundational to American liberal and left-wing politics to distrust and view the CIA and the Security State as quite sinister, as needing reform. It was more typical that conservatives would defend them though. These are patriotic organizations, we need them, we love them. They have to operate in the dark and there's been so much change I mean it was Donald Trump who finally declassified these documents as he promised to do; it’s Chairwoman Luna, a very right-wing member of Congress who's leading the way, as you say, very proactively.
I just want to show you a clip from today that involves Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of the Democratic Texas, who has become in a lot of ways one of the leading faces of the Democratic Party, the American liberalism, and here's what she had to say about the JFK documents and the hearing itself and the possibility of the CIA involvement.
Video. Jasmine Crockett, C-SPAN3 Pronto. April 1, 2025.
There is more of that, but she's essentially saying, “Look, these new documents vindicated the CIA, it had no role to play in any of this. Anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorist.” And in any event, it doesn't really even matter. There's no reason for us to know we should focus on a Signal gate or whatever. As somebody who's been aligned with the Democratic Party for a long time, do you think that's become a more common sentiment?
Jefferson Morley: Absolutely. And it's really unfortunate, I mean, to bring up something totally unrelated about what's going on, with the current controversy. The JFK files are something that there is broad support for across the political spectrum, and there's no need to drag partisan politics into this issue. It's just not an issue. Representative Luna did a good job of leading this, in kind of reflexive – you know, Jasmine Crockett hadn't even read the documents. She didn't even listen to what I said about the false testimony of three top CIA officials, and like, facts don't register anymore, which is a problem universally. But it's especially a problem when we're actually making progress on the JFK story. President Trump's order was a breakthrough, and it's one of the few things I agree with him about, a very positive measure. We obtained, on March 18, a lot of important information and we're getting more as we proceed.
Remember Glenn, they released 80,000 pages of documents on March 19. I might have seen a thousand pages of those. I've talked to researchers who've seen a few thousand more, but we're just at the beginning of this process of really getting our hands and our minds around these new records. And so, that's the positive thing. Luna's talking about having another hearing. I think that's a good idea to bring more JFK witnesses and educate people about what really happened.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean I thought it was bizarre, the day that it was released, everybody ran to their social media accounts or their programs to tell everybody what these documents show. We focused only on one document which was the unredacted Schlesinger memo and only to the extent that it revealed things about the CIA in general, not necessarily their role, if any, in the JFK assassination. And I want to get to that memo in a second because I do think it's of profound importance. But before I do, I think some of this is generational. I mean, I didn't live through the JFK assassination, I wasn't born yet. Obviously, Congresswoman Crockett wasn't. She was born, I believe, in the 1980s or even 1990s. So, I understand why some people might say, “Oh, this is kind of old and ancient history that we don't need to go excavating through.” What is your answer to that? Why do you think it matters so much to kind of continue with the investigation?
Jefferson Morley: Let me explain. My readership at the JFK Facts newsletter is very diverse from MAGA, Christian nationalists on the right, libertarians, anti-imperialists and liberals on the left and we don't have a big culture war on the site. People want to talk about this. People want a real debate. And the idea that people are coming reflexively to the defense of the CIA without even acknowledging or incorporating these records… We're going to talk about the Schlesinger memo in a second. Why should people care? What we're missing right now in American politics is what President Kennedy talked about in 1963. He's talked about how we need a strategy for peace, not peace in our time, peace for all times, not a Pax Americana enforced with America as the world's policeman, but peace for everybody. And that's the vision really that died in Dallas. So, when people say, “Why does it matter now?” You don't hear that voice anymore in American politics, not from Democrats and not from Republicans, and that's what's missing, and that's why it's important to understand what died when President Kennedy died.
We've lost something very real and I would say, the most aggressive factions in the American security establishment after President Kennedy's assassination, because there was no real accountability, there was no real investigation, that faction has had impunity ever since and that's led to a much more militarized, aggressive interventionist foreign policy, which Kennedy was trying to steer the country away from. That's what's important about the Kennedy assassination. We lost something when we lost President Kennedy.
G. Greenwald: So, let me dive into these details now and let's start with the Schlesinger memo. For viewers who might have seen it, I think when it was released, I believe two weeks ago, we delved very deeply into what this memo is and what the newly released material demonstrates.
For those who don't know him, Arthur Schlesinger was a very respected historian, especially among the kind of Kennedy circle, and after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the firing of Alan Dulles, who was sort of the father of the CIA, JFK was very interested in getting a hold of the CIA and asked Arthur Schlesinger to write this memo, and he wrote this long memo detailing all of the abuses and dangers of having this kind of runaway, unaccountable secret agency off on its own, making foreign policy, engineering coups away from the State Department, and also offered a lot of plans for how to rein it in – pretty serious and severe plans.
So, I want to hear what your thoughts are on the newly released portion of that, but before you get to that, do we have evidence that the CIA was aware of the conversations taking place in the JFK White House about the need to rein in the CIA?
Jefferson Morley: Absolutely, Dick Helms, Richard Helms, the director of the CIA, said in his memoir that this period after the Bay of Pigs was a stormy…
G. Greenwald: Sorry. Wasn’t he the director of the CIA, not in the '60s, but later on with Nixon?
Jefferson Morley: He was deputy director right at the time of the Bay of Pigs and later became director. At the kind of Kennedy’s assassination, he was deputy director and Helms said in his memoir “This was a stormy interregnum for the agency” where they understood that their continued existence was in the balance. Ultimately, Kennedy decided not to do the reorganization – it was just too big a left, I think, for him in terms of politics – but the Schlesinger memo shows that he was talking about it very seriously, and the key thing there was what Schlesinger called the encroachment of the CIA on the president's foreign policymaking authority – and you've talked about the Schlesing memo. You recall some of those details: 47% of State Department officers at the time of Kennedy's assassination were in fact CIA officers. So, the CIA is taking over the political reporting function of the State Department, and of course, that limited the president's ability to make foreign policy. That's what Kennedy was concerned about and that's the problem Schlesinger was trying to solve.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, I mean, in that memo, he, I think quite famously and quite pointedly and importantly, called it “a state within a state,” which is kind of ironic since now the term deep state has become this source of liberal mockery as though it's some bizarre, unhinged conspiracy theory. And you knew you had Dwight Eisenhower coming out of the '50s, serving two terms as president, warning about the military-industrial complex on his way out and then you have Arthur Schlesinger calling it a state within a state when writing to JFK about it. So, this memo has been out for a while, I think for a few years or even longer, but what we have now thanks to President Trump's declassification order is the full unredacted memo. So, are there things that we have learned that are important in the unredacted parts that we didn't previously know?
Jefferson Morley: Yeah, I mean, there was a whole page that was redacted. So, like the statistic that I just quoted to you, 47% of State Department officers were actually CIA officers, which was redacted by the CIA for the past 60 years. The fact that the CIA had 128 people in the Paris embassy, was redacted. And when you look at it, that's not national security information, no American would be threatened or harmed by that information.
It's only the reputation of the CIA and so what you see in these redactions -- these redactions are justified in the name of national security, right? You need to protect us from our enemies. Our enemies aren't fooled the only people that were fooled were the American people and that's why we need this full declassification because we're the only ones that are in the dark about the way the CIA is operating.
G. Greenwald: About your argument that the reason the CIA or other parts of the government perceive JFK to be threatening, perhaps threatening enough to want to kill him, is that he was talking about this radical transformation of our foreign policy, of finding a way to get out of endless wars and become a nation of peace. There are people very knowledgeable who are also on the left, one of them is Noam Chomsky, who has said over the years that he finds that unpersuasive because – and I guess this is a very Chomsky way of looking at things – although there was a little bit of resistance here and there on the part of JFK and his administration to the military-industrial complex, the intelligence community – obviously they had an argument after the Bay of Pigs, they fired, as I said earlier, Alan Dulles – that essentially JFK was a militarist and was a Cold Warrior. He was the one who oversaw what Chomsky calls the invasion of South Vietnam by the United States and if you were a militarist or a Cold Warrior, you'd have no reason to look at JFK and find him bothersome. What do you think about that?
Jefferson Morley: I mean none of Kennedy’s enemies on the right ever said that at the time. They said that he was a weakling if not a traitor. The idea that Kennedy was a Cuba hawk or a Vietnam hawk – no Cuba hawk or Vietnam hawk in 1963 ever said that. The problem with Chomsky’s argument is he hasn't really familiarized himself with the debates.
CIA Director Richard Helms was trying to pressure Kennedy into a more aggressive Cuba policy and four days before the assassination, Richard Helms brought a machine gun into the Oval Office as a way of convincing President Kennedy to take a more aggressive stance. And when you read Kennedy's account of it, it's hard not to believe that he understood that he was being threatened. I mean, think about that. The CIA director or deputy CIA director is demonstrating to the president your security perimeter is not secure, right? That was four days before President Kennedy was killed. So, the idea that there weren't profound conflicts at the top of the U.S. government, I mean, I know Noam Chomsky is a smart guy, but he needs to pay attention to the historical record. There were profound conflicts between Kennedy and the national security establishment in the fall of 1963. Nobody who pays attention, especially to the new records, thinks that wasn't the case.
G. Greenwald: Yeah, and obviously Chomsky is not here to defend himself, but he's obviously talked many times about this so people interested can go to YouTube and find that. I think he has a propensity against what he calls conspiracy theories and just kind of dismissing them out of hand and nobody's perfect.
Yeah, but let me ask you this. This is one of the things I learned from your work. I remember growing up in the '70s and '80s and my understanding of the JFK assassination was that Lee Harvey Oswald was just sort of this weird loner who had like a couple of appearances here and there in some public and political sectors, but that by and large he was kind of a nobody, sort of like what they're depicting the person who did the first assassination attempt against President Trump in Pennsylvania, like just a guy, a weirdo, not really connected. And it was only really through following your work and the work of a couple of other people that I actually learned things like, no, the CIA had a lot of interest in Oswald prior to – I thought nobody knew of him before this all happened and in fact, the CIA had a big, long, large surveillance file on him. What interest did the CIA have in Oswald prior to Oswald's alleged role in the JFK assassination?
Jefferson Morley: They were interested, first of all, in recruiting him as a possible source or contact behind the Iron Curtain. And that was one of the key documents that emerged on March 18, a document where Angleton talked exactly about who he targeted for that type of recruiting. The second thing that they were interested in was his pro-Cuba activities. That was something that the CIA denied at the time. They pretended they didn't know anything about this. When you talk about a big surveillance file – this is what I showed to Representative Luna today – they had 198 pages on him on November 15 when President Kennedy was getting ready to go to Dallas.
So, Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut in the eyes of the CIA. He was a known quantity who top CIA officials, top counterintelligence officials, knew everything about him, as President Kennedy was preparing to go to Dallas. Of course, there are suspicions, and people say, “Oh, well, that's incompetence” or “They didn't know,” or “Oswald didn't present a threat.” Wait a second, part of the reason you have a counterintelligence staff is to protect you against assassinations, and that clearly didn't happen. Angleton failed to do his job. But nobody knew anything about this. The CIA imposed a cover story, the lone gunman, and Angleton, instead of losing his job, he kept it for another decade.
G. Greenwald: Well, I know you have to go in just a few minutes, so I want to just respect your time. I just have a couple more questions briefly.
This is one of the things that I think that you grow up and you're kind of bombarded to believe the established narrative about everything. I mean, that's why it's the established narrative because they have control of the institutions that shape your thinking and the more you kind of look into these things, the more basis you have for skepticism, including the fact that Alan Dulles, who led the CIA, gave birth to the CIA, directed the CIA, was controlling almost everything in there until Kennedy fired him and then Kennedy fired him and he was put onto the Warren Commission where naturally as being Alan Dulles, he had immense weight on conducting the official investigation. I've always said it's kind of like putting Ben Shapiro in charge of an investigation to find out who's at fault in Gaza. You know what kind of outcome you're going to get if you put Alan Dulles on the Warren Commission. You're putting, like, a chief suspect on there. What are the best reasons we have to distrust both the process and the conclusions of the Warren Commission?
Jefferson Morley: I mean the fact that Allen Dulles was on it, the fact that the Warren Commission was deceived about the surveillance of Oswald – they had no idea that the CIA had 198 pages of material on Oswald. The Warren Commission was told that they had only minimal information about Oswald so the Warren Commission was fed a false story about Oswald. Glenn, I'm going to have to go soon.
G. Greenwald: Okay, I know, all right, I have one more question, but I'm going to let you go. One more question. Okay, well, I'll just ask you briefly. James Angleton, who was this senior CIA official, has been central to your work. You said today in your testimony that he was one of three senior CIA officials to have lied to the Warren Commission about the investigation, that that was sort of a tipping point for you. What did Angleton lie about, and how did he deceive the commission?
Jefferson Morley: Well, actually what we learned last month was that Angleton lied to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, in 1978. He never had to testify to the Warren Commission. In 1978, he testified, and he was asked, “Was Oswald ever the subject of a CIA project?” and the answer was “Yes.” Angleton had personally put Oswald under mail surveillance. They were intercepting his letters to his mother from the Soviet Union. He was under mail surveillance from 1959 to 1962. When Angleton was asked by the HSCA, “Was Oswald ever part of a CIA project?” he said “No,” and what we know now is that that was a lie and that he was lying under oath about what he knew about Oswald before the assassination. So, that was the tipping point for me, because until March 18, we never knew that.
G. Greenwald: All right, Jeff, thank you for your great work. We're going to definitely have you back on as you work your way through these documents. Really appreciate the time. I know you're busy tonight after your testimony, so we're going to let you go, but thanks once again.
Jefferson Morley: Thanks a million for having me, Glenn.
G. Greenwald: All right, talk to you soon.
One of the ironies, I think, in Western politics, or throughout the democratic world over the last, let's say, decade or so, has been, that there is a group of people, a very powerful faction, you could say the kind of establishment faction that's composed of both the center-left and the center-right in most Western democracies that have engaged in all sorts of highly classically anti-democratic measures in the name of saving democracy.
The reality of politics in the democratic world over the last decade has been that of a variety of factors. In the U.S. you can go back to the War on Terror and the lies of the Iraq War, but more recently the 2008 financial crisis, whose repercussions are expressing themselves to this very day, jeopardizing people's financial security, the policies of free trade and deindustrialization.
And then all the deceit and crackdowns around COVID have turned huge portions of the population into vehement anti-establishment warriors. These people hate these establishments. They hate whoever they perceive as defenders of the status quo. It started to express itself in 2016 with things like the British people voting to leave the EU out of hatred and contempt for EU bureaucrats in Brussels, and then obviously followed a few months later by what was, for most people, the shocking victory of Donald Trump over the ultimate establishment maven, Hillary Clinton. And ever since then, it's been one after the next.
Historically, when establishments feel threatened by some new event or some shift in political sentiment, their tendency, being the establishment, is not to assuage it, not to persuade it but to crush it. The establishment today, unlike, say, 400 or 500 years ago are not monarchs in name, they're not churches in name, with some sort of absolute say the way the Catholic Church had over a lot of countries. They have to pretend to be Democrats, people who believe in democracy, that's how they pitch themselves and so they have been just openly doing things like censoring their political opponents, creating an industry designed to decree truth and falsity that nobody can deviate from with this disinformation industry.
More disturbingly, and I think more desperately, showing how desperate they really are because, in so many countries, the establishment is in deep trouble, typically because of an emerging right-wing populist movement, occasionally because of left-wing populism as well, both of which manifest as anti-establishment movements. Their solution has just been to basically bar democracy, limit democracy, prevent the most popular opponents of the establishment, typically right-wing populists, from even running on the ballot, just saying you're banished from the election – the thing we're told is what Putin does when he has fraudulent elections because his opponents can't run. These are just theatrical elections that are very stage-managed.
That's exactly what has been happening throughout the democratic world in multiple different countries over at least the last decade. A lot of people are noting that even more now because of what happened in France.
Here from The New York Times yesterday:
Marine Le Pen Barred From French Presidential Run After Embezzlement Ruling
The verdict effectively barred the current front-runner in the 2027 presidential election […] (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)
[…] from participating in it, an extraordinary step but one the presiding judge said was necessary because nobody is entitled to “immunity in violation of the rule of law.”
Jordan Bardella, Ms. Le Pen’s protégé and a likely presidential candidate in her absence, said on social media, “Not only has Marine Le Pen been unjustly convicted; French democracy has been executed.”
The verdict infuriated Ms. Le Pen, an anti-immigrant, nationalist politician who has already mounted three failed presidential bids. (The New York Times. March 31, 2025.)
Notice I have not uttered a syllable about what I think of Marine Le Pen or her politics or anything like that because it's completely irrelevant.
If you actually believe in democracy as the premier way to select our leaders, which I do, it should be disturbing if it has actually become a weapon to exploit the judicial system or use lawfare to defeat your political opponents, not at the ballot box, not by giving the people in the country the choice to vote for, but by prohibiting them from becoming on the ballot. If it were just one case, then you'd have to spend a lot of time debating Marine Le Pen's case.
We're going to have somebody on this week who has been following Marine Le Pen's case closely and understands the intricacies of French law in a way that I don't, so I'm not sitting here propounding on the validity or otherwise of her conviction, just the fact that it has now become part of an obvious trend where politicians like her, especially when they become too popular, are being banned.
[…]
In the United States, of course even if you're convicted of a crime, then it doesn't mean that you can't run. The socialist leader, Eugene Debs, ran for president as a third-party candidate, during the Wilson administration, from prison. Had the Democrats succeeded in convicting and imprisoning Trump before the election as they were desperately trying to do, that would not have resulted in his being banned from the ballot. He could have run even as a convicted felon. In fact, they did convict him of a felony charge or multiple repetitive felony charges in New York and he still was permitted to run and the American people decided. We know he was convicted, we don't trust that conviction, we think it's politically motivated and in any event, we want him to be our president. That's what democracy means.
The Democrats tried other ways to get him banned from the ballot, as we'll get to, and they almost succeeded. That was clearly their goal. But in the United States, at least, it's left to the people to decide and that's what a lot of French politicians across the political spectrum are saying.
Here is the most recent polling data on the French presidential election from the International Market Research Group, on March 31:
INTENTIONS TO VOTE IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Two years before the next presidential election, a [I.F.O.P.] poll for the Journal du Dimanche reveals the voting intentions of the French for the next presidential election. In the most favorable scenario, the National Rally candidate would collect 37% of voting intentions, nearly 14 points more than her score in the first round in 2022.
Edouard Philippe appears to be the best-placed candidate to qualify for the second round against Marine Le Pen. His score ranges between 20 and 25%, depending on the different configurations tested. (International Market Research Group. March 31, 2025.)
So, she's not just leading in the polls, she's leading the polls by far. Not enough to avoid a runoff, she's made the runoff twice now and lost to Macron. But the question is not, “Is Marine Le Pen going to be in the second round?” She for sure will be. The question is: who can get just enough to make it with her? And unlike in the past, in France, where that party was considered toxic and off limits, where everybody would unite to prevent it from gaining any power, that's not really the case anymore. I mean, you did see that in the subsequent parliamentary elections in France that Macron called after Marine Le Pen's party won the EU parliamentary elections, and he called new elections for the parliament. So, the parliament called new elections and the left-wing coalition came in first, Macron's party came in second, and Le Pen’s party came third, but it was very closely disputed.
So, there's the possibility that there could be a coalition to defeat her. We're likely never to find out because the French establishment is too afraid to let her run for the ballot for fear that she might win. As I said, if that were an isolated case, we could just sort of say, “Well, is Marine Le Pen guilty?” That's the French law, but it's by far not an isolated case. It has become a common scenario.
Here the BBC, on March 26, is reporting on the case of Brazil and the ex-Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing populist who actually shocked the country, shocked Brazil when he won the presidency in 2018 over the Workers’ Party of Lula da Silva, which had dominated Brazilian politics, had occupied the presidency from 2002 when Lula first won until 2016 when his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached and her vice president took over. But he didn't even bother running again. He was widely hated. So, in 2018, that was the first election that the Workers' Party didn't win since 2002, 16 years earlier. They dominated Brazilian politics.
Ironically, in 2018, Lula was intending to run again and he was leading in polls early on and he ended up being imprisoned, convicted and imprisoned on corruption charges and so he was not allowed to run on the ballot and that opened the path for Bolsonaro. What actually happened there was the center-right has always wanted to dominate Brazilian politics, they're the party of the Brazilian media, the big media conglomerates, kind of like a Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell type party, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney-like, classic center-right figures, even right-wing figures, but who are very pro-establishment and hate the way those figures hate Donald Trump. The center-right in Brazil despises Bolsonaro, but they thought that impeaching Dilma and then imprisoning Lula, would be an easy path to victory because they were always the party second to Lula, kind of like Marine Le Pen and Macron. They just couldn't ever beat the Workers' Party.
So, they thought once they got rid of Lula and impeached Dilma, they had a clear path to power instead. Nobody wanted them, nobody ever liked them. So, once they got rid of Lula, instead of winning, they got Bolsonaro, who they hated more than Lula. Bolsonaro won by a sizable margin against the Workers' Party in 2018 in the runoff. And then in 2022, everyone knew that there was only one person who could beat Bolsonaro, and that was Lula, who was in prison. So, the Supreme Court of Brazil invalidated his conviction. After upholding it many times, they actually used the excuse of the reporting that I did with my colleagues there that showed prosecutors and judges had cheated. But that was just their pretext. They wouldn't have let him out, no matter what we reported, had they not wanted to. They only allowed him out because they knew that only he had a chance to beat Bolsonaro. But even with everything that happened to Bolsonaro, the entire establishment against him, COVID, ruining the Brazilian economy, shutting down the economy, all of those scandals about vaccines and masks and lockdowns and countless corruption charges, and running against what had been the most popular politician in Brazil, Lula da Silva, that election was extremely close, decided by about one point.
All night Bolsonaro was leading, kind of at the last minute, Lula overtook him, but it was an extremely close election. Now Lula's popularity is plummeting, his presidency has unraveled, he's about to be 80 years old. Bolsonaro's not young himself. He's about four or three years younger. But the country is not happy at all with Lula, and people are very afraid of his chances to be re-elected. There's a high likelihood he's going to lose, especially if he runs against Jair Bolsonaro. Fortunately for the Brazilian establishment, Bolsonaro can't run because two years ago, he was declared ineligible, and now they're about to convict him before the Supreme Court on charges that he engineered a coup or tried to engineer a coup, which probably sounds familiar to the American ear since that was a charge against Trump as well.
[…]
Now, let me just be clear there. He is now criminally charged with planning and plotting a violent coup once Lula won, that would reinstall Bolsonaro.
We haven't had the trial yet. All we have are media leaks and now the police report under the control of Lula's government and Moraes. I don't find the evidence particularly persuasive, but that will be decided as it should be in a trial. Unfortunately, he's unlikely to get a fair trial, but that isn't why he's banned from running. He was already banned from running, completely independent of these allegations of a violent coup. And that's due to the fact that before the election happened in 2022, and then after he lost, he alleged that there was voting machine fraud. And for that and that alone, the Supreme Court decided he's now ineligible to run that that was an abuse of power, an attack on democracy.
And I should also say that during that 2022 campaign, when Biden was president in Brazil, that 2022 to campaign, Biden dispatched the CIA, he dispatched Jake Sullivan, his national security advisor and other top officials to go to Brazil and interfere in that election by essentially saying that Bolsonaro's claims of voting fraud are completely invalid, threatening Brazil with punishments or consequences, warning Bolsonaro not to raise the issue of election fraud. At the same time, USAID was funding the censorship groups, the disinformation groups that were systematically censoring Bolsonaro supporters in countless ways that we've reported on many times before.
So, his banning from the ballot, similar to the way Marine Le Pen was banned happened not because of these criminal allegations of a coup, but because of those allegations that he made of voting machine fraud.
Here from the Brazilian outlet UOL on March 29, the headline is:
It's a 15-point lead that Bolsonaro has among the people of Brazil who should decide who they want as their president.
Here from CNN Brazil, yes, Brazil has a CNN, is contaminated and infected with CNN, the Brazilian version, a separate poll shows this:
So even Bolsonaro's wife, who's never been elected to public office, was the first lady of the country, has a 9-point lead over Lula. But obviously, they'd much rather run against her than run against Jair Bolsonaro, who has already proven that he can become, can win a national election.
Here's why the establishment is so scared of him. They threw everything at him during his first term. And remember, I'm not commenting on my views of Bolsonaro. As I said, I did the reporting that ended up being the pretext for the Supreme Court to allow Lula out of prison to invalidate his convictions. And when I did, Bolsonaro threatened me several times, explicitly, with prison. I ended up criminally indicted for that reporting, although the Supreme Court had a press freedom ruling that required the dismissal of those charges.
I've had a lot of acrimonious history with Bolsonaro, but just like Marine Le Pen, that has nothing to do with any of this. Again, I actually believe in democracy. I think the president should be determined by who wins.
So, like in France, the Bolsonaro problem is solved. Who cares if he's leading in the polls? Who cares if a majority of Brazilians want him as president? Nope, banned from the ballot in the name of saving democracy.
Obviously, everybody remembers that Trump faced four felony indictments in four different jurisdictions, two state and two federal, and that was the Democratic strategy, to imprison Trump before the election. They never were able to do that, but they tried. But beyond that, they also just wanted him banned from the ballot independently of criminal convictions by claiming that the constitutional provision banning people who led an insurrection from running for high office should apply to ban Trump, even though he had never been convicted of insurrection, actually never even charged with it. Congress hadn't declared him ineligible, but the Democrats got a four to three majority on the Colorado Supreme Court for democratic judges to say that Trump is ineligible to run again.
And then in Romania, I think we might even have actually the most flagrant and glaring case because there, they actually had an election. The first round was won by a previously obscure right-wing populist, with the EU and the U.S. The Romanians invalidated the election: let's just have another election. They saw that that candidate was likely to win again, they were, like, “This time we're going to ban him so he can't win.”
Here from Politico EU in November 2025, this is December 2024, I think:
Georgescu won with 22.94 percent of the vote. He was followed by liberal reformist candidate Elena Lasconi on 19.18 percent in second place, after she edged ahead of center-left Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu on 19.15 percent — a difference of just over 2,700 votes.
An early exit poll suggested that Ciolacu and Lasconi were set to qualify for the presidential runoff but Georgescu surged into the lead as vote counting continued Sunday night, heralding a result that is set to upend Romanian politics. (Politico EU. November 24, 2024.)
So, they have this populist right-wing candidate, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, not wanting to adopt the European view that Europe is at war with Russia and candidates like that have won throughout the EU. Even in Slovakia, which had long been an ardent opponent of Russia because of the history of the Cold War, Robert Fico, a former prime minister, ran on a platform, in late 2023, of stopping aid to Ukraine, and he won. He was then almost killed in an assassination attempt, but he's still running the country. He miraculously survived that. So here's another right-wing populist in Europe, hostile to the EU, opposed to the war in Ukraine, that the establishment hates, who shocked the establishment because they had two candidates they were happy with when he came in first in the first round of voting.
As a result, because they didn't get the outcome they wanted, here's what happened from Politico EU, December 6, 2024:
Now, look at what they did there. They basically concocted their own Russiagate. They said, “Yes, this candidate that we hate won the election fair and square, came in first. But there were some ads on TikTok that helped him that we think came from Russia. So, our election is invalid, the Russians interfered.” Just like they tried to do in 2016, like, “Hey, we found some Facebook pages and some Twitter bots that seem like they came from Russia” and that makes Trump an illegitimate president. That's the theory that they used.
Leaving aside the fact that the so-called interference by Russia – quite small in the context of millions of people going to vote – does anyone believe that the U.S. and the EU don't interfere at least as much in these elections to ensure the outcome that they want? You think it's only Russia interfering in the Romanian election and not the EU and the U.S. despite how strategically important Romania is to them, despite the fact that the EU and the U.S. took the position that the election should be nullified, that that candidate should be banned. EU and the U.S. have their fingerprints all over these countries, manipulating and funding opposition groups and demanding certain outcomes.
And then Russia puts some TikTok videos, supposedly, in support of the candidate they want to win and the whole election has to get validated. “We didn't get the candidate that we wanted. In the name of democracy, we have to cancel that election because the candidate we hate won.”
[…]
The view of the guardians of democracy, the safeguards of democracy, the people fighting anti-democratic forces is that you can have all the elections you want, just keep voting as long as the candidates most likely to win that they fear and hate most are barred from the ballot so that you cannot vote for them. That's what the democratic world now means, that’s what democracy in Europe, the United States and parts of South America, that's what it means.
And that is to say nothing of the censorship regime that they impose to accomplish it. EU officials are also very upfront about the fact that they need this censorship regime, under these laws, they passed the Digital Services Act, in the EU, the Online Safety Act, in the U.K. and various laws in Canada and Brazil. They claim they need those because with elections imminent, they have to prevent the spread of disinformation, meaning they have to censor views that they are most afraid of, that they think will help sink them in the election.
These center-left, center-right, neoliberal establishment orders are justifiably hated by their populations – hated, despised. Even when, on a rare occasion, one of them wins, it's a total fluke, like what happened in the U.K. where the Labor Party under Sir Keir Starmer won. They won with a small percentage of the vote, 34%. It was largely a backlash against the corrupt leadership of the Conservative Party, of the Tories under Boris Johnson and people like that. And they were never popular, this center-left party. As soon as they win, Kier Starmer is hated across Britain.
So even when they win, it's only a very kind of fluke election. In general, they're so despised, even in the U.K. where they won they're despised, but usually they're so despised now, they know they're despised and in a free and fair election, they cannot win. They cannot win with free speech permitted. And they're cracking down on all of the defining core ingredients of what democracy means and telling you in the most Orwellian way possible that they're doing it because they're the ones who have to save democracy, by which they mean they have to stay in power at all costs.
