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April 11, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald

01:10:26

Leaked Ukraine War Docs: What’s really going on? Plus: Dems Urge Biden to Ignore Court Rulings

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	Good evening, everyone.
	It's Monday, April 10th.
	Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
	Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
	Tonight, a very strange leak of top secret documents from the U.S.
	government has made its way onto the Internet.
	Though these documents have been on obscure corners online for at least a couple of months, U.S.
	media outlets, led by the New York Times and NBC News, have noticed them only now and continue to use quite dramatic language to describe them.
	NBC, for example, warns, quote, it could represent the most serious breach of U.S.
	intelligence secrets since a contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden, passed on thousands of classified documents to journalists about U.S.
	electronic surveillance in 2013.
	Despite that melodramatic language, almost nothing is known about who leaked this archive or why.
	Many of these documents pertain to the U.S.
	proxy war in Ukraine, though many pertain to other topics.
	And while corporate media outlets keep insisting that these materials contain embarrassing revelations for the U.S.
	government, none has really been identified, at least none that wasn't already widely known, leading some in the region of that war to speculate.
	that they may be intended as a disinformation campaign from American officials themselves.
	We'll examine all these competing theories and developments and some of the documents themselves to explain what can be known and what can't and how to think about this leak.
	Then, last week, a Texas federal judge ruled that the US FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, acted illegally when it approved use of the so-called abortion drug, used in more than half of abortions performed in the United States.
	While the Biden administration immediately announced it would appeal the ruling, which is what citizens and government entities do when they disagree with a court ruling, some leading elected Democrats, including Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Begin urging Joe Biden to simply ignore the ruling, just ignore the order of the court.
	What are the implications of National Democrats now advocating that the President of the United States simply ignore court rulings with which he disagrees on the ground as Andrew Jackson put it, the court has no army and therefore let them enforce it.
	Then finally, today Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy expressed his full-throated support for President Biden's policy of pursuing an endless proxy war in Ukraine.
	McCarthy, who sent signals before the 2020-2022 midterms that agreed with growing portions of the public that more constraints are needed on war spending by the United States, now basically says he didn't really mean anything by that.
	And instead says that it is of the greatest importance that Ukraine and the world win the war against Russia, and that the United States must do everything to make that happen.
	We'll look at those comments from the House Speaker today.
	As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast version 12 hours after we air live here on Rumble.
	Simply follow us at System Update on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform, and you'll be able to listen to the show That way as well.
	For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
	Large-scale leaks of documents have become really the only way for the American citizenry to learn what their government in general and what the U.S. government security state in particular is doing in their name.
	For decades now, but particularly in the wake of 9-11, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, the NSA have constructed such a large and impenetrable wall of secrecy behind which they operate that characterizes almost everything that they do.
	That American citizens, even members of Congress, really have very little idea, really no idea, what these agencies are doing in the name of our democracy, except when people inside these agencies decide to leak documents to journalists or others that enable those who get the documents to tell their fellow citizens what their government is doing in their name.
	The first of these modern-day large-scale leaks occurred in 1971 when Daniel Alsberg, who had worked inside the Defense Department and then for the Rand Corporation with very high levels of secrecy, leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
	And the purpose of the Pentagon Papers, which is the gigantic volume of top-secret classified documents, Was not to reveal, not to reveal specific war plans that the United States had in prosecuting its war in Vietnam.
	Such details were never published either by the papers or by Ellsberg because that wasn't the purpose of the leak.
	The purpose of the leak instead was to prove to the American people that the government, the Pentagon and the CIA had been lying to them for over a decade about their views of the Vietnam War in public.
	Leading Patagonian officials and leading officials of the Johnson administration were telling the public that they believed, and in fact knew, that the U.S.
	was on its way to winning the war in Vietnam.
	That all that was needed was another offensive around the corner, another 10,000 troop call-ups.
	They were constantly insisting that they were winning the war and believed that they would win.
	Internally, though, in private, they were saying exactly the opposite.
	They were admitting That the most that they could hope for was a stalemate, that they would never really be able to conquer Vietnam, to install the rule of the South Vietnamese allies of theirs in North Vietnam, that essentially the most that they could hope for was simply having the war continue on and on and on with no resolution in sight, that the Viet Cong would fight forever and there was no way American power could be brought to bear to win the war.
	In other words, they were lying to the American public by telling the American people the exact opposite of what they were saying in private.
	And Daniel Ellsberg, when he saw that, thought, I know I'm going to go to jail, probably for life, if I do this.
	But I, in my good conscience, cannot allow my fellow citizens to continue to believe this lie about the Vietnam War.
	I need to expose what Pentagon officials are really saying in secret so that Americans can decide whether they want to support this war or not based not on the lives they were being fed through the media, but based on the truth.
	And Ellsberg would have gone to prison for doing that had it not been for the fact that the Nixon administration broke into his psychoanalyst's office to try and steal his psychoanalyst's records to reveal his psychosexual secrets and discredit him and distract attention away from the leaks, which caused the court to rule that that misconduct warranted dismissing the espionage charges against him.
	But had it not been for that, and Daniel Ellsberg himself says that to this very day, he would have gone to prison for life.
	It's almost impossible to beat an espionage charge when the United States brings it under the Espionage Act of 1917, which was a law that Woodrow Wilson implemented to criminalize dissent of the US's participation in that first World War in Europe.
	Those are the kinds of leaks that illuminate and that allow us to know what the government is doing.
	Those are the kinds of leak that WikiLeaks has repeatedly published beginning in 2010, when they revealed the realities of what the United States government was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and as well as what its allies around the world were doing, particularly our tyrannical and despotic partners in the Middle East.
	And it's also what Edward Snowden did when he decided to leak documents to journalists, including myself, not that revealed the names of agents overseas, which none of those documents did, nor to reveal specific plans of how the U.S.
	was spying on its enemies like China or Al-Qaeda.
	That was something Snowden was adamant not be disclosed.
	Instead it was to reveal to the American people that the NSA, unbeknownst to almost every member of Congress and the American people, was spying not on Al-Qaeda or the Chinese primarily, but instead primarily domestically on our conversations and our telephone calls and our email activities on our browsing records and the like.
	A program that we were able to expose because Edward Snowden allowed us to do so and was ultimately ruled a violation of the American Constitution and relevant statutes by a circuit court of appeals.
	Those are the kinds of leaks that are constructive and that shed a gigantic light on the U.S. security state, even though they need to be done with care.
	You don't just dump all the documents onto the Internet.
	WikiLeaks never did that.
	They were dacted documents carefully.
	We certainly did the same in the Snowden case.
	We ended up not publishing a majority of the documents, only publishing the ones that were necessary to inform the public debate about what the NSA was doing in secret against their privacy and against people's privacy around the world.
	So these kinds of leaks are crucial to journalism because if you don't have them, what you have instead are leading media outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC News, CNN, doing the bidding of the U.S.
	security state.
	They get secrets passed to them all the time and they publish those.
	But they're secrets the CIA wants you to hear.
	They're the secrets the Pentagon wants you to hear.
	So it's basically just state media feeding you constantly leaks that seem like they're unauthorized because they come from anonymous sources.
	So they have that feel of something edgy and radical.
	But all that is, is feeding you lies and propaganda and deceit that they want to give the veneer of some sort of journalistic achievement to.
	That's how Russiagate was constantly propagated.
	The CIA would go to Ken Delaney on NBC News or Natasha Bertrand who worked at MSNBC and then worked her way up to The Atlantic and CNN and Politico.
	She's now at CNN.
	And every one of their reports would say, intelligence officials tell us.
	The Washington Post and the New York Times won Pulitzers for that kind of reporting.
	That in reality was just propaganda on behalf of the U.S.
	security state.
	The only counterweight to that is when we get these giant leaks of the kinds I just reviewed that allow us to shed light on what the U.S.
	security state is doing in secret.
	Now, there's a current claim that we have a similar leak of that kind, namely a kind where someone inside the U.S.
	government leaked top secret documents In order to expose secrets of the American government that supposedly are very embarrassing to the American government.
	Yet there's something extremely strange, many things extremely strange, about this claim that we have a new Snowden-type leak, or a new WikiLeaks-type leak, or a new Pentagon Papers leak.
	For one thing, we have no idea who leaked this material.
	We don't even know the category of person.
	It's not that we don't know their name.
	We don't even know where they supposedly worked.
	We don't have confirmation they worked inside the U.S.
	government.
	We have no idea who did that.
	We also have no idea what the motive is, because they didn't bring these materials to journalists and ask journalists to curate them and report on them, nor did they bring them to places like WikiLeaks, which might be willing to, in a very high profile and prominent way, leak them all or publish them all or most of them.
	Nor did they publish these documents in a way that would be noticed.
	They started instead appearing back in January or February on very obscure places on the internet, including Discord servers, which are used for people who play video games.
	They can often be private.
	The first time they appeared, reportedly, is on a Discord server used only by a dozen people or so.
	And only from there did they make the leap to more populated form on the internet.
	And then only in the last week, Did they start to appear in places like Telegram and more popular Discord channels and now the media has noticed them?
	But there's no guarantee that these would have leaked, nor was there any attempt to direct how they ended up being disclosed or even what kinds of information is being covered.
	And the way the media is talking about this is very odd.
	I think raises more questions than it answers.
	So let's first look at what the media is telling you about this leak.
	Let's look at some of the documents themselves.
	We've picked the ones that we think are worth looking at.
	And then let's try and examine it.
	So first of all, we have The first story, which is from the New York Times, that we're going to bring up in just a second.
	There you see it on the screen.
	It is entitled, How the Latest Leaked Documents are Different from Past Breaches.
	That's an article from the New York Times today.
	Quote, the freshness of the documents, some appear to be barely 40 days old, and the hints they hold for operations to come make them particularly damaging, officials say.
	This is how the New York Times frames so often what they do.
	They state something, and then at the end they add, official say.
	So they're not really technically affirming the veracity of this claim, but it sounds to the reader as though they are.
	They're stating something, namely, the freshness of the documents, some appear to be barely 40 days old, and the hints they hold for operations to come make them particularly damaging, comma, official say.
	So, the New York Times is not saying that anonymous officials are.
	Namely, U.S.
	officials want you to believe this, which is why they've told this to the New York Times.
	This is by David Sanger, today.
	He's a journalist who has all kinds of ties to the CIA, to the U.S.
	security state.
	Spent years, decades, publishing authorized leaks from sources inside the intelligence community.
	That's what he does.
	This is what the article says.
	Quote, when WikiLeaks spilled a huge trove of State Department cables 13 years ago, it gave the world a sense of what American diplomats do each day.
	The sharp elbows, the doubts about wavering allies, and the glimpse of how Washington was preparing for North Korea's eventual collapse and Iran's nuclear breakout.
	Now let me just stop there.
	It is unbelievable to describe the WikiLeaks disclosures that way.
	He's doing it on purpose to make it seem like it was a completely unjustified and banal leak that didn't really tell you anything about the world other than giving you a, quote, sense of what American diplomats do.
	These are just the business of diplomats.
	They throw sharp elbows.
	They have some doubts about laboring allies.
	And you got some glimpses about how Washington was preparing for North Korea's eventual collapse and Iran's nuclear breakout.
	So they picked the things that they know you're fine with the State Department doing in order to make this leak sound like it was something that told you nothing important, but at the same time was incredibly dangerous.
	Now, this eventual collapse of North Korea, I don't think we have that yet.
	This is 13 years later, so there's no collapse in North Korea.
	Maybe eventually means 100 years from now.
	And Iran has not broken out in the sense that it has nuclear weapons.
	Nobody claims that.
	But these are things that you would want the government to be doing and that's why the New York Times purposely described the WikiLeaks releases in this way, to make you think these WikiLeaks releases told you nothing but endanger the public.
	In reality, the exact opposite was true.
	They revealed all kinds of secrets about tens of thousands of people, innocent civilians that the United States government, the military had killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
	They had revealed a video showing the U.S.
	government, the U.S.
	military, gunning down innocent people, including journalists who worked for Reuters when they were on the ground and scrambling to try and leave.
	They revealed widespread and rampant corruption among all kinds of U.S.
	allies in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and Jordan and Egypt.
	And all kinds of lies about a whole range of issues that the US government told the public.
	But it's bizarre, although not really, that David Sanger, who's an ally of the intelligence services, would start off his article trying to demean WikiLeaks' releases, knowing Julian Assange is in prison.
	This is the way that a CIA agent who hates Julian Assange would describe those releases, not the way a journalist would.
	So already you know that he's surveying here an agenda That is the U.S.
	security state's agenda.
	That's what he always does, but this is the first clue.
	Now here's the second one.
	This article, this paragraph enrages me.
	It's full of eyes, as I will document in a minute once I show you what this article says about these new leaked documents, but I nonetheless want to note it now.
	He's now moving on to the Snowden leaks, and this is what he says about the Snowden leaks.
	When Edward Snowden swept up the NSA's secrets three years later, Americans suddenly discovered the scope of how the digital aid had ushered in a remarkable new era of surveillance by the agency.
	This is what he says the NSA's Snowden reporting revealed.
	Enabling the NSA to pierce China's telecommunication industry and to drill into Google's servers overseas to pick up foreign communications.
	So, in David Sanger's telling, the only thing that Snowden reporting did was reveal that the NSA was spying on China, something that every American would be okay with them doing, and drilling into Google's servers to pick up foreign communications, which most people would probably be fine with as well.
	That's a complete lie.
	The crux of the Snowden reporting showed how the NSA was spying on the conversations of American citizens, the telephone activities of Americans, to the point that courts were able to rule them unconstitutional, as I said earlier.
	But again, if you work for the NSA, this is what you would want people to think the Snowden reporting was about.
	He's counting on the fact that it's been 10 years and people don't remember.
	So he's just rewriting history.
	And I will show you that the only people who ever revealed any secrets about how the NSA spies on China is the New York Times itself.
	Not any of the other journalists who actually worked with Edward Snowden, so we'll get to that in a minute.
	Now, they go on, the New York Times does.
	The cache of 100 or so newly leaked briefing slides of operational data on the war in Ukraine is distinctly different.
	The data revealed so far is less comprehensive than those vast secret archives, but far more timely.
	Now, I'm not sure that that's even true.
	There were Snowden documents that we began reporting on in June that were only three months old.
	Snowden gave us the archive only a couple months before we began reporting.
	There were some that were only two or three months old.
	So that's not even true anyway.
	And it is the immediate salience of the intelligence that worries White House and Pentagon officials.
	Some of the most sensitive material, maps of Ukrainian air defenses and a deep dive into South Korea's secret plans to deliver 330,000 rounds of much needed ammunition in time for Ukraine's spring counteroffensive, is revealed in documents that appear to be fairly 40 days old.
	It is the freshness of the quote secret and top-secret documents and the hints they hold for operations to come that make these disclosures particularly damaging, administration officials say.
	On Sunday, Suprena Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said U.S.
	officials had notified congressional committees of the leak and referred the matter to the DOJ, which has opened an investigation.
	The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraine's success thus far.
	Did we not know that yet?
	has barred American troops from firing directly on Russian targets and block sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents made clear that a year into the invasion, the United States is heavily entangled in almost everything else.
	Did we not know that yet?
	That the United States is heavily involved in the war in Ukraine with everything except combat troops on the ground?
	I mean, the Biden administration boasts of how much it's done for Ukraine.
	Republican members of Congress, including Kevin McCarthy today, demanded that the Biden administration do everything possible to ensure Ukraine wins this war.
	So what exactly here is it that these documents have revealed that are so bothersome to the United States?
	Nothing really.
	I mean, you can look at them in a certain way and say, well, the United States doesn't want it.
	No, no.
	How they have secret, they have special services stationed and deployed in Ukraine.
	And there are some documents that reveal how the U.S.
	government even spies on its own allies, something that was widely known during the Snowden reporting.
	You may recall that a major controversy erupted between the United States and Germany when it was reported, not as part of the Snowden files, but a different source, that the United States is spying on Angela Merkel, and Obama had to call her and apologize, and she compared the United States to the Stasi of the East Germans, where she grew up in East Germany.
	So and there was a similar diplomatic scandal between the United States and Brazil when we did report based on the Snowden materials that the Obama administration was spying on the personal cell phone call of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian oil company Petrobras, all kinds of economic conferences.
	So all of this has been known for a long time.
	So I don't Even feel like, let alone can point to anything specific that makes this seem like it's the kind of leak like the Pentagon Papers or the Snowden reporting or WikiLeaks that is really bothersome to the United States in the sense that it would cause scandal and disrepute for American leaders.
	The Pentagon paper showed that the American government lied to the American people about the war in Vietnam for a decade.
	The Snowden reporting showed that the U.S.
	government was spying on its own citizenry in violation of the Constitution and the law.
	WikiLeaks showed all kinds of hidden war crimes.
	What did these documents show that are similar to that, that would really be upsetting and destabilizing to the United States?
	We keep hearing that they're like those other cases.
	We keep hearing from the US government about how disturbing this leak is that I haven't really seen anything in these documents yet that would be comparable.
	Let's look at NBC News' version of events.
	Of course it's very similar because we're talking to the same people and serving the same agenda.
	Quote, leaked secret Pentagon documents lift the lid on U.S.
	spying on Russia's war in Ukraine.
	NBC News obtained more than 50 of the leaked documents, many of them labeled top secret.
	I love how they say they obtained them as though this is their story, this is their work, when They're all over the internet.
	Everyone can just get them.
	That's all they did was they obtained them, not by having sources that gave them to them, but just going on the internet like everybody else and looking at them.
	They have four journalists on this story, including Ken Delaney, who's notorious for serving the agenda of the CIA.
	And there you see the framing, which is very similar to the New York Times.
	This is what they say.
	Quote, dozens of leaked Defense Department classified documents posted online reveal details of U.S.
	spying on Russia's war machine in Ukraine and secret assessments of Ukraine's combat power, as well as intelligence gathering on America's allies, including South Korea and Israel.
	NBC News obtained more than 50 of the leaked documents, many of them labeled top secret, the highest level of classification.
	The documents first appeared online in March, and a senior U.S.
	official said Saturday that the government's, quote, working theory is that they are real, although some of them could have been altered.
	Does the United States government, if these are government documents taken right from the files of the Pentagon or the intelligence community, they can't know whether they're real?
	They only have a working theory that they are real?
	Of course they can.
	Look at their own files and know.
	The full impact of the leak remains unclear, I would say so, but it could represent the most serious breach of US intelligence secrets since a contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden, passed on thousands of classified documents to journalists about US electronic surveillance in 2013.
	In this case, the scale of the disclosure is much smaller, much, much smaller, involving dozens instead of thousands of documents.
	The documents include repeated references to information based on secret signals intelligence, electronic eavesdropping, a crucial pillar of U.S.
	intelligence gathering.
	A former U.S.
	intelligence official said the disclosure of some signals intelligence reporting about Russia and its spy agencies could cause significant damage if Moscow is able to cut off those sources of information.
	So, Again, I see a lot of speculation about how this leak could be very damaging, but I don't see any specific revelations that are causing any problems for Joe Biden or the Biden White House or any leaders of America's foreign policy or its defense and intelligence communities.
	Do you?
	I don't.
	That has led, that fact, some in the region, in Ukraine, including some Ukrainian officials, some Russian officials, some prominent journalists in the region to speculate that this might actually be a disinformation campaign by the United States to demoralize Russia because a lot of it claims that Russia is suffering in the war, that Russia might even be losing the war.
	And by letting people in Russia, including potential troops, think this is a real leak from the United States government that shows intelligence that Russia is suffering grave losses in the war, it could be an attempt to demoralize the Russians.
	That is possible.
	I'm not at all affirming that that's true.
	But I do, again, think it's odd that US intelligence officials are so hell-bent I'm claiming to the public that these documents are real and that they're very damaging.
	They go right to their favorite reporters to do that.
	David Sanger at the New York Times, Ken Delaney at the NBC News, the media outlets that always serve their agenda and write down whatever they tell them to say.
	As I just showed you, they did duly and loyally.
	But I don't actually see anything that is so disturbing.
	Now, The Economist, Today has an article, quote, a leak of files could be America's worst intelligence breach in a decade.
	You see, they're all using similar languages.
	But they have a paragraph that called my attention because it supports that hypothesis that I just expressed that others in the region are claiming, namely that it's actually intended to suggest that the Russians are losing the war to embolden European governments to continue to provide aid and encourage the American public to be willing to do so as well.
	This is what this paragraph says from The Economist, quote.
	However, the leaked documents hardly paint a rosy view of Russia's armed forces.
	Though it has devastated the eastern city of Vakhmut, the situation there was, quote, catastrophic by February 28th, according to Ukraine's military intelligence chief, who was quoted in one report, its combat power is crippled.
	America's Defense Intelligence Agency reckons that 35,000 to 43,000 Russian troops have died, twice the number of Ukrainian casualties, with over 154,000 wounded, around 40 times the Ukrainian figure.
	The agency acknowledges that these numbers are ropey.
	Russia has lost more than 2,000 tanks and now fields only 419, quote, in theater.
	Another slide says that Russia's, quote, grinding campaign of attrition in the East is, quote, heading toward a stalemate.
	And that the result is likely to be a protracted war beyond 2023.
	So get ready.
	We're being told through these scary, unauthorized documents that Russia cannot win this war, that they're heading toward a stalemate, and we should expect a, quote, protracted war beyond 2023, and that's what the Russians are to understand as well.
	Now, I'm not at all suggesting this was a disinformation campaign planted by US operatives.
	I'm genuinely not suggesting that.
	But I'm also not ready to buy into this narrative that the media is feeding us at the behest of the intelligence community that these documents are confirmed to be authentic and they're somehow so destabilizing to the U.S.
	government.
	Let's look at the ones that would most plausibly be described as damaging to the U.S.
	government.
	These are the ones the media is Touting.
	Now here is a document that purports to show that NATO countries have special forces deployed to specific parts of Ukraine, and it actually details the specific countries that have special forces in Ukraine, including the United States, and purports to show their location.
	Again, we're not showing you anything that hasn't been all over the internet and that isn't being talked about in every journalistic outlet.
	So here you see on the side, let me just highlight that for you here, right here, the number of NATO special forces in Ukraine.
	And there you see it says the US has 14,000, Great Britain has 50,000, France 15,000, Latvia 17,000.
	I'm sorry, it's not 14,000, it's 14 units or 14 special forces.
	Germany 50, France 15, Latvia 17, the Netherlands 1 for a total of 97.
	And it purports here to show their locations in terms of what their bases are in those native countries.
	I guess that's supposedly something that's supposed to be incriminating to the United States as though people didn't know that the US likely has covert operations in Ukraine.
	Of course they do.
	We've given them all kinds of weapons they can't operate on their own.
	It's been repeatedly reported that we give them real-time intelligence on the ground that they use to target Russian forces with to activate their air defenses.
	It would be almost impossible for us not to have U.S. special forces on the ground.
	In fact, early in the war, one of the reasons the Biden administration gave for why it wouldn't provide some of these weapons systems to Ukraine is because they couldn't be operated without having special forces on the ground to show them how to do it and help them do that.
	Now, we've given those systems to them.
	They're in use in theater, so of course everybody already knew that special forces were on the ground in Ukraine.
	So if this is the big revelation that's supposed to be so incriminating to the Biden administration, I would suggest again this leak is nothing of the kind.
	Virtually everyone in Washington, with the exception of seven dozen Republicans or so, supports this policy.
	As we're about to show you, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House Speaker, came out today and basically said exactly that.
	We need to do everything we can to ensure Ukraine wins the war.
	No one in Washington is going to care that we have special forces in Ukraine.
	That's an open secret.
	This is not some shocking revelation of the kind of Daniel Ellsberg or WikiLeaks or Snowden.
	Here is a second document that suggests different ways that Israel might provide lethal aid to Ukraine.
	Israel has been very reluctant to involve itself in the war in Ukraine because their relations with Russia are an important part of their national security plan.
	They bomb Syria at will and need Russian assent to do that.
	They have all kinds of relations with Russia.
	There are a lot of influential Russian Jews in Israel.
	They have ties to that country and they've really tried hard to stay out of this war because they don't want to alienate the Russians.
	They obviously can't side with Russia because they would alienate their biggest benefactor of the United States either.
	So neutrality has essentially been their only option.
	That's the one they more or less have chosen.
	And yet this suggests different ways Israel might be able to provide lethal arms to Ukraine, although it doesn't suggest that Israel has yet done so.
	These are just ways that the U.S.
	government might propose to Israel that they would do so.
	I don't really consider these documents particularly interesting, let alone incriminating at all, but those are the second set of ones that are being cited as proof that this is some sort of devastating leak.
	And then here is the document that purports to reflect the, quote, status of the conflict as of March 1st, which is one of the things that they're so alarmed about, supposedly, that these documents are so new.
	March 1st is only 40 days ago, as the New York Times said over and over, and tried to convince you that this was something so damaging.
	And here's what they're pointing to as the thing that was just so damaging.
	Now, this is one of the documents, I believe the only one, where the claim is being made that it was altered.
	The original document, according to the US government, purported to show that the Ukrainians have lost double the number of soldiers as Russia, that twice as many Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in this war as Russians.
	This document here, the version that ended up online, purports to show that, in fact, Ukraine has suffered five times more killed in action.
	There you see it's something like six, Four times more, sorry, something like 65 or 61 to 71,000 troops, whereas the Russians are estimated to have lost 16 to 17,000.
	This is the document they claim has been altered that the original one shows double the number of Ukrainian troops killed.
	Again, the fact that Ukraine is losing a huge number of people in this war Is well known.
	In fact, Zelensky recently again had to increase the penalties for desertion because Ukrainian men actually don't want to fight in this war.
	They know they're being used as cannon fodder.
	So while Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden and Bill Kristol and David Frum feel proud and strong because we're fighting this glorious war, the people who are actually dying in the war and fighting in the war, as usual, don't actually want to be fighting and dying in this war.
	They're being forced to.
	Zelensky is using a conscript army, not a volunteer one.
	So if this, again, is the most incriminating document or the most destabilizing document, again, I just don't find this leak particularly threatening to the United States government.
	I find it very odd that they're insisting through their media outlets that they manipulate and control that it is.
	I can see how these documents might concern Russia and Russians and Russian troops.
	By claiming that this whole thing is a stalemate, they're never going to win, they have to fight at least another year throughout 2023.
	I can see how that would be unofficial to convincing the American public to get ready for another $100 billion in authorizations to support this war beyond 2023.
	As this document says, I just don't see what is supposedly so scandalous about this from the perspective of the CIA, the Pentagon, or the Biden White House.
	And in fact, there is no scandal being generated by these documents, even though we keep being told it's the most damaging leak in at least a decade.
	Now, I mentioned earlier, I do want to show you this because it's just such a perfect example of how the New York Times lies all the time.
	I showed you that paragraph.
	You know what?
	Let me look at that again.
	I want to just pull that paragraph up again.
	This is how they described the Snowden reporting.
	This is what they wanted you to think about What Edward Snowden, the reporting from Edward Snowden revealed.
	This is the David Sanger article.
	Quote, when Edward Snowden swept up the NSA's secrets three years later, meaning three years after the WikiLeaks disclosures, Americans suddenly discovered the scope of how the digital aid had ushered in a remarkable new era of surveillance by the agency.
	So we learned a remarkable new era of surveillance.
	What did they spy on?
	This is what the New York Times says.
	Quote, enabling it to pierce China's telecommunication industry And to happen to drill into Google servers overseas to pick up foreign communications.
	So according to the New York Times, the only thing you learned from Snowden was that the NSA spied on China and its telecommunications infrastructure.
	And that they were using Google to spy on foreign nationals and their communications.
	Now, that is just an outright lie.
	Here's the very first article that I published in The Guardian that kicked off the Snowden reporting.
	And there you see the headline, NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.
	That was on June 6, 2013.
	And the sub-headline was, and this is one of the articles cited by the Pulitzer Committee, Quote, top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows scale of domestic surveillance under Obama.
	Isn't it odd that the New York Times 10 years later wants to rewrite the history of what the Snowden story showed by claiming it was only about how they spied on China and how they spied on foreign nationals and not what it was actually about, which is NSA spying on Americans?
	And it wasn't just that they were spying on Americans.
	The highest court to rule on it ruled that that spying was unconstitutional, that it violated your constitutional rights.
	Quote, NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal.
	Court ruled seven years on.
	That's from the Guardian in 2020 reporting on a ruling from the Court of Appeals that that surveillance program I just showed you that we exposed But domestic spying was in violation of the Constitution.
	Here's what the Guardian reported about that ruling.
	Quote, seven years after the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of Americans' telephone records, an appeals court has found that that program was unlawful and that the U.S.
	intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.
	Why would the New York Times just lie about what this reporting showed?
	Now let me just Remind you of what actually happened here because it really sheds light into how these corporate media outlets behave when it comes to working with the intelligence services that they serve.
	The only people who ever had the full NSA archive that Edward Snowden provided that to when he met with us in Hong Kong were myself and the documentarian Laura Poitras who ended up directing Citizen Four about our work in Hong Kong that won the Oscar in 2015.
	That's it.
	Along the way, two newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, got a portion of the archive.
	They never had the full archive.
	Each of them had a separate portion of the archive.
	And they used it in a way completely contrary to Edward Snowden's instructions.
	When he gave us that archive, he told us very explicitly, I don't want you to ever reveal spying that is legitimate, meaning spying on American enemies, like foreign governments like China, Iran, or Russia, or North Korea, or on terrorists, or things that could put people in harm's way.
	And we very carefully curated the file never to reveal that.
	The people who actually revealed how the NSA was spying on China, the thing they don't want to blame on Snowden, was the New York Times itself as well as the Washington Post.
	Let me show you this article.
	This is an article from November 2014, eight months after we began the Snowden reporting.
	This is by the time the New York Times got hold of a portion of the archive.
	That the Guardian in the UK had given them, because the UK government was threatening the Guardian, if you don't give up your copies of the archive, we're gonna prosecute you.
	So they gave their portion, and it was just a small portion of the archive, to the New York Times for safekeeping.
	The New York Times then began working on the archive to report stories on it, because they were so angry they had been kept out of this reporting.
	And they used it not to show how the NSA was spying on American people, but instead how the NSA was spying on American enemies.
	Here, from David Sanger.
	The same person who wrote today's article claiming the Snowden reporting was about how the NSA spied on China, he's the one who did it, along with his colleague Nicole Perlroth.
	They published this article, NSA Breached Chinese Servers Seen as Security Threat, and it detailed how the NSA was spying on Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company.
	And Snowden was outraged about this.
	That the New York Times would go and use the files exactly the way he never wanted it to be used, which was to show not how American citizens were being spied on or how it was being used for improper ends, for economic gain, or for other diplomatic advantage, but instead to spy on America's enemies.
	It wasn't Snowden that did that, it was the New York Times that did that.
	And amazingly, David Sanger's colleague, who wrote that article with him, they are the ones who chose to publish those files from the archive without consulting Snowden, Nicole Perlroth, in 2016, when the New York Times and the ACLU and others were urging that Snowden be pardoned, were urging Obama to pardon Snowden, the Washington Post, which Wanted Pulitzer for reporting on the Snowden documents along with us and celebrated it.
	Great courage in doing so.
	Patted itself on the back.
	They had a ceremony inside their newsroom.
	They took pictures of themselves and put it on the front page of the Post.
	Look at how brave and courageous and intrepid we are.
	We do reporting that wins Pulitzers.
	After they did that, they published an editorial demanding that Edward Snowden not be pardoned.
	They advocated against their own source.
	They urged the imprisonment of their own source, Edward Snowden, even though they wallowed in these documents that he provided.
	Even though, and their argument was that some of the documents Snowden provided weren't legitimately whistleblowing because it wasn't just about how the NSA was spying on Americans, it also included how the NSA was spying on China and Al Qaeda.
	But the amazing thing about that is that it was the Washington Post and the New York Times which chose to reveal that.
	We never did.
	I never did.
	Laura Poitras never did.
	The Guardian never did.
	It was the New York Times and the Washington Post that used the archive that way to try and show Americans you should love the NSA because they're using it to protect you from China and from Al Qaeda.
	And after they did that and revealed those secrets, they then turned around and tried to say Snowden should be criminalized.
	Because he provided documents that the world would never have seen had these two newspapers not published it.
	Look at this.
	Here on Twitter is Nicole Perlroth, the New York Times reporter who wrote that article.
	Showing how the NSA spied on China.
	I don't think I've ever seen Edward Snowden angrier than on the day the New York Times published that article, but of course he never wanted the archive used to show how the NSA was spying on China.
	She went onto Twitter on the day the Washington Post published that editorial saying Snowden should be prosecuted, not pardoned, and said, quote, gotta say I agree with Washington Post.
	Snowden leaked tens of thousands of documents that had nothing to do with privacy violations.
	Then someone came and said he didn't leak them to the public.
	He leaked them to media outlets, including the Washington Post, for review.
	Big difference.
	Meaning, if you're angry that certain documents ended up in the public domain, don't blame Edward Snowden.
	He trusted journalists to curate it with instructions on how to do it.
	Blame the journalists like Nicole Perlroth.
	Who chose to publish, for some reason, why the NSA was spying on China.
	And she then responded, yes, and I was one of them, which is a lie.
	Snowden never chose to leak the New York Times.
	The Guardian, without Snowden's approval, gave a portion of the archive to the New York Times.
	And she said there were tens of thousands of docs that were leaked unnecessarily.
	She was the one who chose to publish them.
	Now, the Washington Post, as I said, published an op-ed urging Snowden not be pardoned, and they too cited Inappropriate disclosures that they themselves made.
	And I believe to this day, the reason the New York Times and the Washington Post did that, is in part because they wanted to reveal secrets that would make you angry, so that you could blame Snowden for it, even though they were the ones who chose to reveal them.
	And in part because they wanted to say, look, the NSA isn't your enemy.
	They spy on China, they spy on Al-Qaeda, they keep you safe.
	They're constantly serving the agenda of the US intelligence agencies.
	And so when I see this very same David Sanger lying about what WikiLeaks revealed, and lying about what the Snowden disclosure revealed, describing them in exactly the way that some NSA hack would, That's something that only revealed what diplomats should do, throwing sharp elbows, how the NSA spied on China and foreigners.
	They're lies.
	They're outright lies.
	This is disinformation on behalf of the intelligence agencies.
	When these are the same people trying to get you to really get up in arms about this leak and to believe this leak is real and is very destabilizing and dangerous for the Biden government and the NSA and the Pentagon, I'm immediately skeptical.
	Because I don't think these outlets I don't believe that they would reveal anything that the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon didn't want revealed.
	they're more tied to these intelligence services than ever because they know these intelligence agencies worked against Trump and therefore are their allies.
	They spent five, six years getting leaks about Trump from the CIA and the FBI and just publishing them all, even though so many of them turned out to be false.
	I don't believe that they would reveal anything that the CIA and the FBI and the Pentagon didn't want revealed.
	I don't think that's what this is.
	And in fact, if you look at polling, and I've showed you this before, American liberals who are overwhelming the people who read the New York Times love the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security.
	They are the biggest fans of these intelligence agencies, and that's who reads the New York Times.
	The New York Times is not going to be adversarial to these agencies.
	They are telling you what the CIA wants you to know about these leaks, and that's why the whole thing is framed, as U.S.
	officials say.
	They're not even really hiding that.
	So I don't trust the agenda at play here.
	I think there's a lot of questions raised by this leak, who did this leak, and with what motives.
	And I think whatever else is true, I think these documents should continue to be looked at, as we just did, not just described, but allow you to see them.
	We're going to publish these documents we just showed you on Locals, on our platform, because we don't believe that we should be the guardians of this information.
	We wouldn't publish it if it were really harmful, but all of this has been on the internet for months to the point where everybody has seen it.
	So we think you should see it too.
	And you can judge for yourself, but I don't, looking at the documents and the way the government and their media outlets are describing them, these things do not combine.
	And I think for whatever else is true, we need to maintain a high degree of skepticism, especially if more of these documents continue to surface in the future.
	So I mentioned at the top of the show that we are also going to cover a court ruling that came out of a federal court in Texas last week that invalidated a longstanding rule by the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, that approves the so-called abortion drug.
	Let's take a look first at what this ruling did.
	Actually, what it did is what I just said, which is that a Texas federal court enjoined the FDA approval of the abortion pill.
	It's obviously a very controversial ruling.
	Shortly after that, a separate federal court governing a separate part of the country issued a contrary ruling saying that the FDA approval was actually legal and therefore should continue in the 17 states that the court is entitled to govern, whereas the Texas courts did this for a separate Part of the country.
	Now, in response to this court ruling, Democrats did some very interesting things.
	First of all, Senator Ron Wyden, the Democrat from Oregon, came out and said, and here you see the Independent reporting this, every media outreported it, along with AOC, quote, they lead calls for the FDA to ignore the abortion ruling.
	And that's the word they actually used, ignore.
	Now, usually the way our system of government works is the federal government does something, the president and the executive branch do something, and then people who believe it's illegal, what they've done, or unconstitutional, go to courts.
	And they object in court and they say, our legal rights are being violated, our constitutional rights are being violated by what the executive branch is doing.
	That's how the Snowden NSA program got ruled unconstitutional.
	Citizens went to the court and said, the way the government is spying on me is unconstitutional.
	And the court said, I agree with you.
	The way they're spying on Americans violates the Fourth Amendment.
	And therefore, they are enjoined from doing that any further.
	And of course, the government then has to obey the court ruling like all citizens do.
	That's how the Constitution exists.
	We need a judiciary to rule when our political leaders are violating our constitutional rights.
	That's the purpose of the judiciary, is to pronounce the limits of the law.
	They do that all the time.
	That's called judicial review.
	It's been the cornerstone of the American Republic for 215 years.
	Since Marbury v. Madison, which is a Supreme Court ruling that said that it's the job of the Supreme Court to say when the president or executive branch officials violate the Bill of Rights.
	Otherwise, how do you have a Bill of Rights if there's no one to say that the president or political leaders has transgressed it?
	That's the role of the courts.
	And very early on in our Republic, People like Andrew Jackson tried to reject the authority of the court to do that, and when the court would rule against him in one case in Florida involving Native Americans, he very notoriously said, the court has made its ruling, now let them enforce it.
	Meaning, I have the army, I have all the men with the guns, so the Supreme Court can tell me I can't do this, but what are they going to do about it if I do it anyway, if I just ignore it?
	And we quickly realized we can't have a republic that way.
	There's no way to have a constitution, a bill of rights, if the president is empowered to ignore rulings from the court that he's transgressed those rights.
	And so for 220 years, that's been the framework under which we live, that presidents and everybody else are duty-bound to obey the court and judicial rulings, to be bound by it.
	If the court issues a Erroneous ruling or ruling you disagree with, you have every right to appeal it.
	That's usually what governments do if they lose cases.
	That's what the Biden administration announced it would do.
	But Senator Wyden and AOC said the Biden administration should do something different, which is ignore the ruling.
	Pretend it doesn't exist.
	And AOC went on CNN with Anderson Cooper and invoked the exact rationale of Andrew Jackson, which was, how's the court going to enforce this?
	They don't have an army.
	The FDA should just ignore them.
	Listen to what she said.
	This afternoon, a couple hours ago, what did you think?
	Well, you know, I think rulings like this, and I think we've seen from the FDA and also from activity in Congress, that some of these rulings, I think we've been preparing and anticipating for there being these egregious overreaches by members of the judiciary appointed by a right-wing Republican Party whose goal for a very long time was to just pass.
	Just to be clear, According to the Constitution, all judges are equal.
	The way federal judges get to be judges is a judge is appointed by the President, and then the Senate approves, gives advice and consent, and every member of the federal judiciary, including Trump-appointed judges, passed through the Senate and got approved, and then only then got appointed to the bench.
	A Trump-appointed judge has every bit as much of authority as a Clinton-appointed judge, or an Obama-appointed judge, or a Biden-appointed judge, or a Bush-appointed judge.
	The fact that this judge was appointed by President Trump is completely irrelevant to the question of whether his rulings are legally binding.
	And you don't get to ignore a court order because someone like AOC who never went to law school, never got near a law book, has likely never studied the Constitution.
	I would bet anything would be completely humiliated if you tried to discuss the Bill of Rights with her for more than 30 seconds just because she pronounces that the court ruling is legally baseless doesn't give the president the right to ignore the ruling.
	That's what she advocated.
	The federal judge in Texas was rated as qualified by the American Bar Association and by the relevant ratings agencies.
	There has been thought, I believe, given to...
	The federal judge in Texas was rated as qualified by the American Bar Association and by the relevant ratings agencies.
	There are judges that sometimes get appointed by presidents from both parties who are deemed unqualified, but this judge happens not to be one of them.
	by presidents from both parties who are deemed unqualified, but this judge happens not to be one of them.
	He went to a credentialed law school.
	He went to a credentialed law school.
	He has an impressive legal background, certainly more impressive than AOC's, and he's a fully empowered and impaneled member of the federal judiciary.
	Senator Ron Wyden has already issued statements, for example, advising what we should do in a situation like this, which I concur, which is that I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling.
	I think that we, you know, the courts have the legitimacy and they rely on the legitimacy of their rulings.
	And what they are currently doing is engaged in an unprecedented and dramatic erosion of the legitimacy of the courts.
	It is the justices themselves, through the deeply partisan and unfounded nature of these rulings, that are undermining their own enforcement.
	So you're saying the Biden administration should ignore this court, but what does that look like?
	What does that actually mean?
	You know, I think the interesting thing when it comes to a ruling is that it relies on enforcement and it is up to the Biden administration to enforce, to choose whether or not to enforce such a ruling.
	Do you hear that?
	It's so important to understand what she's saying.
	The courts don't enforce their rulings.
	The people who enforce the rulings are the Biden administration.
	It's not up to the courts whether their rulings are honored or enforced or not.
	It's the Biden administration that decides whether they want to enforce the court ruling or not.
	So it's like the Biden administration is like this uber court that sits above the judiciary.
	And when the judiciary rules in favor of the Biden administration, the Biden administration accepts the rulings.
	But when a court rules against Joe Biden or his executive branch agencies like the FDA, Then, Joe Biden, sitting up here, on top of everything, has the power to ignore the courts.
	That's what she said, ignore the ruling.
	They have no enforcement.
	It's true, this federal judge has no army underneath him.
	These are the people who claim that they are defenders of democratic norms and our traditions And want a government that works in accordance with democratic values.
	This is like banana republic tyranny stuff.
	That presidents should ignore court rulings because they don't have any enforcement power and only the president does.
	Even Anderson Cooper was kind of surprised.
	Do we want to live in a world where a government can decide to ignore a federal court ruling?
	Well, no, of course.
	I mean, I do think that this, that it raises these important questions.
	And I do think that when we look at, and there are serious questions that the FDA and the Biden administration is going to have to figure out and how exactly we map this out.
	On the other hand, what we are also seeing is a power grab over our courts in which the laws passed by Congress and the rules and policies passed by the executive branch now are going to require unanimous consent from 650 district court judges, many of which are appointed with even, you know, the American Bar Association saying that they're completely unfit for the role.
	Okay, again, that wasn't the case for this judge, and the American Bar Association isn't a constitutional body.
	They advise the Senate, and when the Senate decides, well, we don't agree with you, we think this person is qualified, and they vote on the judicial nominee of the president, that's the end of the story.
	That's a federal judge and his rulings are constitutionally valid and binding and you don't have the option whether to abide by them or not.
	If you want to keep a constitutional republic.
	She is, first of all, it's not just her ignorance that bothers me or her tyrannical impulses that are disturbing, although those are.
	It's also just how incredibly dishonest she is.
	She spent three minutes saying Biden should ignore the court ruling because they have They can't force the president to ignore it, to abide by it.
	And when Anderson Cooper said, do you really want to live in a country where the president just ignores court rulings?
	She said, no, of course not.
	That's not what I'm saying.
	Even though she had just spent three minutes saying it.
	And then 10, 15 seconds later, she said, on the other hand, and then went back to advocating it again.
	Now, if it were just AOC, I'd probably ignore it.
	But the fact is, it was also Senator Wyden.
	And I haven't seen a single Democrat, not one, Anyone in the media, anybody, say this is extremely disturbing.
	You saw Anderson Cooper kind of shocked.
	Now AOC went back on CNN, and I will give credit to Dana Bash, who tried to get AOC to understand this seems extremely radical and a violation of everything Democrats have been claiming they're fighting for for the last six years since Trump, which is a restoration of democratic values when you're telling the president he should just ignore court rulings.
	Watch her try and slime out of this.
	You just heard me ask the secretary about was something that you called on the Biden administration to do, which is just to simply ignore the court ruling.
	That's a pretty stunning position, if you think about it in the in the abstract, about the notion of just ignoring a judge's position.
	So my question is, when this case is resolved by the Supreme Court, Should the administration follow that decision if that decision ends up banning this abortion drug?
	Well, you know, I want to take a step back and dig into the grounds around ignoring this preliminary ruling as well.
	There is an extraordinary amount... Okay, this idea that it was a preliminary ruling, I mean, in one sense it's called a preliminary injunction, which is what courts issue all the time, but there's nothing provisional about it.
	It's a ruling from the court.
	If you go into a court and you're a party to a lawsuit, And a judge issues a preliminary injunction in joining you from doing something and you ignore that ruling and do it anyway because you believe it's legally baseless or whatever because you went to the AOC School of Law and have concluded based on your in-depth study of the Constitution that the judge got it wrong and you decide you're not going to appeal that ruling.
	Instead, you're just going to ignore it and violate it and do exactly that which the judge said you're not legally allowed to do.
	You're going to go to prison!
	You're going to start off with monetary fines and contempt of court, and then you're going to get held in criminal contempt of court.
	That's what she's saying.
	But she's saying, you can't do anything about it.
	You don't have an army.
	You can't fight.
	They'll just send the federal marshal and arrest you.
	So you have to obey the court order.
	But Joe Biden, he has an army behind him.
	Who's going to go and arrest Joe Biden?
	If he, how's the federal district judge gonna force Joe Biden to abide by the judicial ruling?
	Now, even, again, even CNN recognizes this is insane.
	This is like the immediate unraveling of the entire Republic.
	Listen to what she says.
	There is a term known as agency non acquiescence and this has been used for folks saying this is a first, that this is a precedent setting.
	It is not.
	The Trump administration also did this very thing, but also it has happened.
	Oh, so apparently, and I haven't heard a single example where this occurred, where the Trump administration came out and said, we're going to ignore this court ruling.
	They appealed court rulings, which they have every right to do.
	I've never heard anyone in the Trump White House say we think we can ignore a court ruling.
	But that's what she's saying.
	So her reason why this is reasonable is because Adolf Hitler did it three years ago in 2018 or 2019.
	Remember, these people think Trump was a fascist.
	They claim that they're the only thing standing between you and Nazi concentration camps.
	So to justify why she thinks the president can ignore a court ruling, she's saying, well, Trump did it.
	I would like to hear the example of where Trump said, I'm going to ignore the court ruling.
	I think there would have been a major media uproar, at least, had he done so.
	But it's very odd to watch her cite Trump as her example of what she's copying.
	But this, in reality, is not that surprising because, as I'm going to show you, it's the mentality of Democrats.
	That everything that they claim Trump was, everything they claim Trump was, they can do because their cause of stopping Trump is so important.
	They can censor, they can lie, they can engage in disinformation, they can ignore court rulings if they want because they're on the side of good.
	That is really how they think.
	Before.
	The idea of consistency in governance until there is a higher court ruling is not an unprecedented thing to happen.
	In fact, when the Trump administration did it, it was arguably through a much, you know, a very grave issue when it came to DACA.
	The Trump administration was ordered to fully reinstate DACA, the DACA program.
	And they, in a complete defiance, did not do that.
	They rely on, the courts rely on the legitimacy of their rulings.
	And when they make a mockery of our system, a mockery of our democracy and a mockery of our law, as what we just saw happen in this Mifepristone ruling, then I believe that the executive branch, and we know that the executive branch has an enforcement discretion, especially and we know that the executive branch has an enforcement discretion, especially in light of a contradicting ruling coming out
	Okay, so apparently AOC has discovered, buried in the Constitution, something called an enforcement discretion that allows the president to ignore court rulings.
	That example she gave about DACA was a question that people had about whether the Trump administration was complying with the order quickly enough.
	That worked its way through the courts.
	That was not a case where the Trump administration simply declared the power To ignore court rulings as she's trying to do.
	And again, she has the support of Ron Wyden.
	And the only reason why I think this is important to note is because it really does illustrate the core mentality of the Democratic Party, which is to me the thing that has made the most dangerous, the thing that repels me the most about them, is that they don't recognize limits on their own power.
	They do not.
	It's the Sam Harris video that we've talked about many times.
	The reason why it went mega viral is because Sam Harris accidentally but very candidly expressed the mentality that governs them.
	Namely, Trump is such a singular evil that anything we do in the name of stopping him, censoring the news, lying about the news, like claiming the Hunter Biden laptop is misinformation based on CIA lies, ignoring court rulings, anything and everything is justified because we have to maximize our power.
	Now what's so amazing about this is a lot of times people argue about what my ideology is or what my politics are.
	Am I on the left?
	Am I on the right?
	Am I a Democrat?
	Am I a Republican?
	And the reality is that What I really am, above everything else, the only label I really accept is a civil libertarian, which means an anti-authoritarian.
	I hate when political factions start to claim that they can exercise unlimited power because they're so righteous that nobody can limit what they do, which is exactly how American liberals now think.
	It's why they chase speakers into locked rooms and threaten them like they just did with the Swimmer-Riley games because she was arguing that trans women don't belong in women's sports competitions.
	They threaten with violence people who disagree with them.
	They censor, they lie, they ignore court rulings.
	And when I first started writing about politics, which was in 2005, the primary impetus that caused me to do so was my perception that the Bush administration, in the name of the War on Terror, was adopting a model that AOC is now advocating of limitless executive power.
	Here's an article I wrote less than two months after I first began writing about politics on December 22, 2005.
	There you see the headline, which was a question I was posing to Republicans, quote, do Bush defenders place any limits on his, quote, wartime power?
	And this, above everything else, was what caused me to start practicing law, stop practicing law, and start writing about politics, was the fact that in the wake of the war on terror, the Bush and Cheney administration adopted a view of the world that said that our cause of fighting terrorism and Al Qaeda is so overarching and so paramount that nothing can limit what we do.
	And they got caught spying on Americans without warrants, even though there was a law in place that made it illegal.
	And they immediately unveiled a theory that said Congress cannot restrict what we do in the name of keeping the American people safe.
	It doesn't matter that Congress said it was illegal.
	And they began as well talking about the possibility of ignoring court rulings.
	Charlie Savage now at the New York Times and at the Boston Globe won a Pulitzer for his reporting on quote-unquote signing statements where George Bush was signing laws, signing bills into law that were passed by Congress but then signing and accompanying signing statements saying I don't have to abide by this part of the law, I don't have to abide by this part of the law.
	They had really a view that their power was unlimited, that the other two branches couldn't restrict what they were doing.
	That was what Causing me to find them so dangerous.
	And here you just see, remember, this is 17, 18 years ago.
	And I'm saying the same things about Democrats now that I was saying about the Bush and Cheney Republicans back then.
	Quote, virtually no serious Bush defenders claim any longer that the administration's warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens was authorized by FISA.
	To the contrary, FISA expressly prohibited such surveillance.
	Thus, to defend George Bush, they must literally claim that the president has the right during, quote, wartime to violate congressional statutes which relate to national security.
	And that was exactly the view of the Bush-era Republicans, which is that the president can do whatever he wants because his cause is so just that nothing can stop him.
	And the reason why so many of these Bush-era Republicans and the neocons that supported them have now migrated to the Democratic Party, the reason that Bush-genie spokespeople like Nicole Wallace Or Joe Scarborough who ran for Congress supporting that wing of the Republican Party is now at MSNBC along with Bill Kristol and David Frum and all the rest is because this is their core mentality that they now have taken to the Democratic Party because this is the mentality of the Democratic Party as well.
	That there can be no limits of any kind placed on their power including AOC and Senator Ron Wyden with very little controversy explicitly advocating that they can ignore rulings of the court when the court says that what they are doing is either unconstitutional or a violation of the law.
	And if you don't think that's incredibly dangerous, Then nothing that anybody has been saying about what Trump is doing over the last five years and the reason why it poses such a threat to democratic norms has any credibility at all.
	This is infinitely more dangerous than anything Trump even proposed to do, let alone than what he did do.
	And it's amazing to watch them explicitly advocate it without any realization of why.
	That is an example, that is an illustration of how wallowing and drowning they are in their own self-righteousness.
	Now let's turn to one last story, which I mentioned at the top of the show.
	We're just going to show it to you briefly.
	It is an interview that Kevin McCarthy gave this week that was featured on MSNBC's Chuck Todd.
	He was interviewing Michael McFaul, who is the head of the House Intelligence Committee.
	He's also a Republican.
	And essentially, you'll hear what they said.
	They are adamant I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said because it seemed to at least shift a perception of where he is on the issue of Ukraine.
	$100 billion to the war in Ukraine.
	Listen to what both Kevin McCarthy and Michael McFaul, both Republicans, said about Biden's war policy in Ukraine.
	I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said, because it seemed to at least shift a perception of where he is on the issue of Ukraine.
	Let me play it.
	I think what's happening in Ukraine is an atrocity.
	And I think Ukraine, not just Ukraine, the world has to win there.
	What Russia has done is wrong.
	I think not just Ukraine, but the world has to win there.
	That's what he said.
	The phrase that I use, a blank check, I use that for anything.
	I look at every dollar of taxpayers that we would use, but the one thing I know that in Ukraine we have to win, because it also would save Taiwan at the same time.
	Okay, so you may recall that before the 2022 election, we actually covered this.
	Kevin McCarthy, looking at polling data, showing that Americans are increasingly reluctant to support the war in Ukraine with unlimited amounts of funds, started sending noises that the days of giving Ukraine and Zelensky a blank check were over.
	That was his phrasing.
	And that was intended to convince you that he was on your side, that he didn't want to keep sending your tax money, $100 billion, to Ukraine.
	I just interviewed today Norman Finkelstein.
	We put him on earlier in our show a few weeks ago about academic freedom.
	And he talked about how he just became a senior citizen.
	He's now eligible for Medicaid, or rather for Medicare.
	And he tried calling Medicare to activate his eligibility.
	And he couldn't get anyone on the phone because there's no working phone service for American seniors for Medicare.
	It just doesn't exist.
	And he was saying, but we spend a hundred billion dollars, we're sending that to the Ukrainians.
	When we don't even have basic services here in the United States, we couldn't clean up the chemical explosion in East Palestine, but Kevin McCarthy wants to send all your money to Ukraine, supports Joe Biden completely in doing that, even though he tried to pretend before the midterms that he was on your side and no longer wanted there to be a blank check.
	Now he's saying, oh, when I said no blank check, that didn't mean anything.
	I said that about everything.
	All that means is I kind of want to be careful about the money.
	And yeah, we're being careful.
	So that phrase that he knew misled millions of people, and to think that that signaled a change in the Republican Party posture on the war in Ukraine actually was meaningless.
	It was a joke.
	It was intended to deceive you to vote for Republicans thinking they supported something that they don't.

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