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July 13, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:25:52
Republicans Grill FBI Director Over Rampant Misconduct—As Indignant Democrats Defend the Bureau. Plus: Interview with Judiciary Committee Member Rep. Mike Johnson (LA) | SYSTEM UPDATE #114

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Good evening, It's Wednesday, July 12th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee where he testified for more than six hours earlier today.
He was grilled by House Republicans about a wide range of scandals and controversies plaguing the Bureau, from how the FBI is pressuring and coercing big tech to censor the political speech of American citizens online, to the politicization of law enforcement investigations, including recent accusations from two senior to the politicization of law enforcement investigations, including recent accusations from two senior IRS whistleblowers that the DOJ intervened in the Hunter Biden investigation to protect the president's son, to domestic spying programs in which the FBI purchases comprehensive and extremely
to domestic spying programs in which the FBI purchases comprehensive and extremely invasive data about the lives of American citizens to enable them to create dossiers on the citizens they are supposed to be protecting, to the role the The FBI director's posture for most of the day was one of evasion and feigned ignorance.
He routinely refused to answer even the most basic questions by playing obvious semantic games with the questions or claiming he did not have information when it is simply impossible that he was telling the truth, such as when he refused to say how many FBI informants and undercover agents were among the crowd on January 6th by insisting
More than two years after those events, that the Bureau still describes as an insurrection, that he does not know the answer to that question of how many FBI assets were on the ground or if there were any.
To say that Wray misled and obstructed the committee is an understatement.
In cases such as that one, he clearly lied.
But what else should one expect for the leader of an agency with a long history of lying and weaponizing law enforcement powers for purely political ends?
But the primary reason Director Wray was able to get away with this behavior is because he had a small army of lawyers and defenders with him who participated in the hearing calling themselves House Democrats.
The Democratic Party has become the party of the U.S.
security state.
The faction that most venerates, protects, and defends the FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, and the rest is a common theme of my reporting and of our program.
Polling data that we've repeatedly analyzed proves that not just party leaders, but now also their liberal followers hold these agencies in very high esteem.
Left liberal media discourse is almost entirely bereft of reporting or discussions about the abuses of power by these agencies.
Such discussions barely exist because the left-wing faction of the Democratic Party perceives correctly so that in the Trump era, these agencies have become their political allies.
Even with that understanding of mine, the extent to which Democrats today so flagrantly wag their tongues and heap praise on the FBI, even repeatedly expressing rage that House Republicans would dare question the FBI, even though that kind of oversight is the legal requirement of the Congress, surprised even me.
There were a couple of notable exceptions.
Congresswoman Priscilla Jayapal, the head of the House Progressive Caucus for instance, demanded answers about the FBI's program of buying data about Americans on the open market.
Data which, as we reported, they would be barred by the Constitution from collecting directly.
But for the most part, House Democrats completely disgraced themselves today.
As one after the next read scripts about the nobility and integrity of the FBI that would have made J. Edgar Hoover blush.
And by the way, the building in which they work still bears his name.
I haven't seen an FBI director fetid with such mindless worship since Saturday Night Live sung songs about former Bush-Cheney FBI Director Robert Mueller being the nation's savior.
We will show you the key parts of today's hearing, which was quite revealing.
We will also speak with a member of the Judiciary Committee who participated in the hearing and posed some of the most pointed and important questions to Director Wray.
He's Republican Congressman Mike Johnson, who has represented Louisiana's 4th Congressional District since 2016.
Then in 2021, David Miller was a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol in England.
Miller is a longtime defender of the Palestinian cause for statehood and as such is a very vocal critic of the Israeli government and even of the theory of Zionism on which the Israeli state is based.
Miller has long used academic freedom the way it is intended to be used, to question and challenge rather than affirm establishment pieties and even venture into topics and issues that the establishment decrees taboo.
He is, for example, a vocal critic of the US and British proxy war in Ukraine.
But a lecture he gave on Israel and comments about pro-Israel student groups led to complaints of anti-Semitism, and, quote, inciting hatred against Jewish students, first from British politicians, and then the students they commandeered into making those complaints.
That was followed by a formal investigation by the university into this professor.
Though that investigation cleared him of charges of anti-Semitism, he ended up nonetheless being fired by that university on the ground that, as the BBC put it, quote, he did not meet the standards of behavior it expects from its staff.
This case, needless to say, raises exactly the kinds of concerns about free speech and academic freedom we often cover on this program.
Professor Miller has appealed his decision and is fighting to win back his job.
He will be here tonight to talk about his case and the implications of his firing, both for free speech and for academic freedom.
As a reminder, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and every major podcasting platform.
Each episode airs and is posted there 12 hours after its first broadcast.
Live here on Rumble, you can rate and review each episode, which helps spread the visibility of the program.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There is a large and significant part of the U.S.
government that operates in secrecy and that has all sorts of vast powers that now they often use not only against foreign threats but against U.S.
citizens as well.
And one of the reasons that part of the government has been allowed to exist is because there is a promise made, not just verbally but in the law, That the way in which they use those powers will be subject to extensive oversight by our elected officials in Congress.
Specifically in the mid-1970s when the Church Committee conducted the first ever investigation into the abuses of the U.S.
security state following Watergate, there were created specific committees including the Senate and House Intelligence Committees designed to exercise oversight over the CIA and the NSA and related agencies, but the House Judiciary Committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee have always had oversight responsibilities and still do to this day over the Justice Department and the FBI.
And as part of those oversight responsibilities, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee today summoned or subpoenaed the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, to appear before them.
There are all sorts of very live and vibrant controversies involving the FBI and their use of power for political ends that the committee very rightly wanted to question the FBI director about.
And yet a very extreme, even if it were predictable, dynamic immediately emerged.
Which is that the only people on the committee interested in actually subjecting the FBI and its director to oversight, with very few exceptions, were House Republicans.
House Democrats seem to be there for little reason other than to defend and heap praise upon the FBI director, shield the Bureau from any kind of interrogation or investigative oversight, which is the function of this committee, and specifically to express rage Over the fact that House Republicans were doing their job in exerting oversight over the FBI.
Now, the fact that the FBI is involved in all sorts of live controversies is, of course, a major topic of this program.
Just last night, we reported on a new investigative report that came from the House Republicans that detailed the fact that the FBI had been working hand-in-hand with Ukrainian intelligence agencies, whereby the Ukrainians would submit content on social media that was about the war in Ukraine that Ukrainian intelligence agencies dislike or believe is disinformation.
They would send it to the FBI.
The FBI would then do what the Ukrainians asked, which is send it onto Facebook and Google and Twitter, implicitly demanding this information be removed.
And often it was, even though, in many cases, it was being expressed by American citizens and by American journalists.
There are all kinds of questions about the role the FBI played in the events of January 6th and the fact that they have stonewalled all sorts of questions.
And of course, just last week, there was a federal district court ruling that found that the Biden administration, the FBI, and numerous health agencies, as well as the Biden White House, had been applying unconstitutional pressure and coercion on Big Tech So to say there's a lot to ask the FBI director is an understatement.
content, and political viewpoints that the Biden administration disliked.
And the federal court, in an extraordinary ruling, ordered the FBI and the other Biden officials who were named in that case to immediately cease this conduct.
So to say there's a lot to ask the FBI director is an understatement.
And one of the members of the Judiciary Committee who actually did his job in asking about a lot of these issues is Congressman Mike Johnson, who represents Louisiana's fourth congressional district.
And I just want to show you a couple of excerpts because we have the congressman with us tonight to speak with him about the events of today, the concerns about the FBI, as well as other issues.
So one of the topics on which Congress is going to be talking about the FBI is the Congressman Johnson focused, and it's not surprising given his background as a former constitutional lawyer, was this court ruling that we reported on extensively.
We walked you through the rationale of that ruling, the order that it resulted in, which is really unprecedented.
The court essentially said that the findings of the court demonstrate one of the gravest attacks on the First Amendment.
In many years, if not decades, a systemic effort on the part of the Biden administration to control the flow of information and the expression of viewpoints by American citizens on the internet about our core political controversy.
So here is Congressman Johnson asking the FBI director about that court ruling and the related controversy surrounding it earlier today.
We had this explosive, explosive 155-page opinion from a federal court in my home state of Louisiana.
It explains in detail that the FBI has been directly involved in what the court says is, quote, arguably the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.
The court ordered the White House, DOJ, and FBI, among others, to immediately cease colluding with and coercing social media companies to suppress American speech.
Of course, conservative speech in particular.
Director Wray, I find it stunning.
You made no mention of this court opinion either in your opening statement today or in this lengthy 14-page report that you prepared on July 12th, which is eight days after the court ruling.
Have you read the ruling, sir?
I am familiar with the ruling and I've reviewed it with our Office of General Counsel.
Are you deeply disturbed by what they've told you about the ruling if you haven't read it yourself?
Obviously we're going to comply with the court's order, the court's preliminary injunction.
We sent out guidance to the field and the headquarters about how to do that.
Needless to say, the injunction itself is a subject of ongoing litigation and so I'll decline to comment further on Let me tell you what the court concluded, because it should be the first thing you think about every morning and the last thing you think about at night.
They said that, quote, the court found, apparently the FBI engaged in a massive effort to suppress disfavored conservative speech and blatantly ignored the First Amendment's right to free speech.
The evidence shows the FBI threatened adverse consequences to social media companies that they did not comply with its censorship request.
The court found that, quote, this seemingly unrelenting pressure by the FBI and the other defendants had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.
As a result, the court states, for example, millions of citizens did not hear about the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the November 3rd, 2020 election.
Page four of the court ruling lists some of the important subjects that the Biden administration and the FBI forced the social media platforms to suppress.
The evidence shows you, your agency, the people that directly report to you, suppressed conservative-leaning free speech about topics like laptop, the lab leak theory of COVID-19's origin, the effectiveness of masks and COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines, speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election, security speech about election integrity in the 2020 presidential election, security of voting by mail, even parody about the president himself, negative posts about the economy, the
The FBI made the social media platforms pull that information off the Internet if it came from conservative sources.
So that alone is remarkable.
Just the court ruling itself, whether you agree with it or not, is an extraordinary indictment of how the FBI is using its power.
And I defy you to go find your favorite left-liberal YouTube programs or political podcast and see if there's any substantive discussion of that court ruling at all.
To the extent that large media corporations talked about it, it was to malign it, to mock it, to insist that because it was a Trump-appointed judge, even though it was a judge that, like all federal judges, had the approval of the Senate, it was somehow inherently illegitimate.
The Biden administration, of course, is appealing that.
But just that issue alone merits enormous amounts of scrutiny and journalistic attention, and it received very little.
And the same was true of most of the issues presented at this hearing today, which we will analyze and review and report on as soon as we are done with our discussion with Congressman Johnson, which we are appreciating About to conduct right now, Congressman Johnson has represented Louisiana's 4th Congressional District since 2016.
He is a member of House Leadership, currently the Vice Chair of the House Republican Conference, and prior to being elected to Congress, spent most of his life as a constitutional lawyer, engaging in litigation and other forms of activism.
To secure the Bill of Rights, we are delighted to welcome the Congressman to his debut appearance on System Update to discuss today's hearing and related issues involving the FBI.
Congressman, good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.
Hey Glenn, glad to be with you.
Yeah, absolutely.
So let's just dive right into this hearing today, which I found very compelling.
I watched it from start to finish and I was thinking the whole time that I wished as many Americans as possible could.
Before we get into some of the specific issues and the exchanges that you and your colleagues had, just please tell me your general impression about the hearing and about the posture of Director Wray and how he was providing or not providing a lot of the information that was requested.
I tell you, Glenn, we're very frustrated.
He was evasive.
He seemed either unprepared or unwilling to answer some very important, very legitimate, long overdue questions.
And I feel like that's what people came away with.
I'm talking to constituents this afternoon who watched it.
Many of them watched it from start to finish, as you did.
And they're just so discouraged.
They're so frustrated because they feel like we can't get any accountability from this Department of Justice and its leadership.
And it's of great concern to all of us.
One of the dynamics that really struck me, and I think it's one of the reasons he felt entitled to behave in the way he did, this kind of evasive and non-responsive way, was there was a very schizophrenic feel to the hearing because the Republican members on the committee had five minutes to ask questions, and then there was alternating that with your Democratic colleagues, and with a couple of exceptions, including Congresswoman Jayapal, who's
Questioning I thought was necessary and impressive and we're going to cover that in just a little bit.
Most Democrats were there essentially just to heap praise on the FBI and this is something I wanted to ask you about.
My own history is growing up and kind of coming of age in the 80s and 90s where criticism of and skepticism of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA was a staple of left liberal politics, of Democratic Party politics, for decades coming out of the Cold War.
There's also been a kind of right-wing strain that's been concerned about that as well.
If you look at polling data now, overwhelmingly people who identify as Democrats no longer have skepticism of these agencies.
They regard them with almost a kind of reverence.
And there was anger that you weren't even daring to question the FBI.
Is this something, as a member of Congress since 2016, you've been noticing?
And what do you make of that?
How do you explain what seems to be a pretty radical change?
It is a radical change.
I have the same memories of the 80s and 90s as well.
But I think this radical change is easily explained.
Certainly the elected Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee understand full well that the FBI has been co-opted by the executive branch.
They've been co-opted by the Biden administration.
This began in the Obama administration.
I think the seeds of this were sown and then it's taken To its full fruition right now.
And so it's effectively a political arm in so many ways of the White House.
The DOJ that is supposed to be administering and enforcing the law blindly, where everyone has equal justice under the law, that used to be the way this worked, it doesn't work that way anymore.
Under Merrick Garland as the Attorney General, under Director Wray on his watch.
We've seen the Biden administration use the DOJ to do its bidding.
And so they're censoring and silencing, not all Americans, conservative viewpoints, specific Americans.
They're raiding the homes of political opponents.
They're labeling concerned parents at school board meetings as terrorists.
Everybody knows the laundry list.
It's piled up so high now.
And there's no other conclusion you can draw but that it's a political operative operation.
If you go back and look at the real-time writings in the late 1940s when this national security state was created in the wake of World War II with the National Security Act of 1947 and the like, people were very aware that they were doing something rather radical.
They were creating a part of the government that was going to operate with great secrecy.
Obviously, the FBI predates that, but the rest of the U.S.
security state was created, especially the CIA, during that time.
I think a lot of the powers and postures of those other agencies began to kind of contaminate and infiltrate the FBI.
But even if you talk to the people who work in these agencies, they will tell you that what was always inculcated first and foremost in their brains is that you do not use these powers against the American people.
The FBI, of course, is a domestic law enforcement agency.
But even there, the idea was always the worst possible thing the FBI could do was to use those powers for political ends.
You have a lot of these kind of whistleblowers, obviously the one I work with, Edward Stone at the NSA, others from the NSA who say the reason they're coming forward is because that has been abandoned.
That these agencies are now more political actors than they are anything else.
What do you make of that critique?
I think that's exactly right.
And that is what keeps us up at night, Glenn.
We're worried about what has become of these agencies that have such broad and expansive powers.
You know, the top law enforcement agency in the country that is supposed to be protecting and serving the American people is being used against them.
It's violating the privacy of Americans.
It is trampling upon their fundamental constitutional rights.
And it goes without check.
Because, you know, what so many people are frustrated about is, you know, they asked me today, why can't you guys get accountability?
Why can't you bring some order to this?
Well, you know, the political reality is here that people sometimes forget is we only have the majority in one house of Congress right now.
And it's a bare majority at that.
We don't have in Congress the ability to.
You know, indict someone for violating the law or to put them on trial in a court.
All we can do is put them on trial in the court of public opinion.
That's what the hearings are.
And then bring legislative reforms to do our best to ensure that these abuses cannot happen again in the future.
Ultimately too, and this is important, we have the power of the purse.
And so the FBI, for example, wants this multi-billion dollar new headquarters.
I don't think they deserve that.
If they can't even show us that they can respect the constitutional rights of the people they're supposed to be serving, it's gotten out of control.
And I think the evidence shows that.
I was really struck by what seemed to be the contempt that Director Wray had for those of you on the committee who wanted to ask him questions.
He's obviously a very smart person, and yet the ignorance he was feigning about so many issues was so striking.
And of course, if he's expressing contempt for you, it means he's expressing contempt For your constituents and ultimately for the constitutional order.
I wanted to ask about one specific issue on you which you focus and I was glad you did which was this extraordinary courtroom and that came out of from a judge in your state in Louisiana.
The magnitude of this ruling seems so enormous to me, especially when set next to the virtual lack of media attention it has been given.
Not just because of the order itself, but because of the findings.
Why did you decide that judicial ruling was so significant that you wanted to spend a good part of the five minutes you had with the director today?
Look, I encourage my colleagues to use their five minutes on it as well.
I think this ought to be the headline in every newspaper and every news organization in the country.
I mean, this judge wrote 155 pages to issue a preliminary injunction.
That's rare.
I used to be a federal court litigator.
I litigated constitutional law cases.
This is not done often, and the reason Judge Doty did that is because he wanted to methodically lay out here Exactly what the evidence has showed in his courtroom and the evidence and what it has shown is stunning.
And he uses words that sound like it's political talking points from us.
This is a federal judge who says that arguably this is the most massive attack.
On the First Amendment freedom and the right to free speech in United States history, and he is not overstating it.
The implications of this are gigantic.
The court lays out the facts, how the FBI was regularly meeting with the social media platforms and basically coercing them under threat of negative consequence to take down voices they disagreed with.
And it wasn't, you know, foreign malign actors, as Director Wray feigned there.
He knows what was going on.
This was American citizens.
It was conservatives online talking about their concerns over election security, over, you know, vaccine mandates and the effectiveness of the vaccine itself.
And, you know, even parody about the president, jokes about President Biden, negative content about the economy.
The FBI had agents meeting with the social media platforms And basically ordering them to take this stuff down.
Now, this is in the record of the case.
They sent Agent Chan to go and testify.
Elvis Chan, who's now an infamous figure, because he was in charge of this.
He works in the San Francisco district office of the FBI, the field office, because that's the head where all the social media companies are headquartered.
And he was meeting with him regularly and having this great success because he testified under oath in the litigation.
That he had a 50% success rate.
When he brought a concern and said, these conservative voices need to be silenced, censored, taken offline, it was done at their behest.
Of course, if you're the social media platforms, this is the FBI.
You're not going to mess with them.
So they did their bidding.
And the effect of it is profound.
I mean, the court pointed out, just by way of example, he said, millions of free speech postings of American citizens were never seen because the FBI had them taken down.
And one effect was that, for example, the court notes, millions of Americans never heard about the Hunter Biden laptop story.
prior to the November 2020 election.
We know now post election polling says that had they known of that, it might well have affected many, many votes.
And we'll never know.
We can never unwind history to know what an effect that had.
That's just one example of so many.
You know, I've been stomping my feet about this for a long time.
Before becoming a journalist, I was also a constitutional lawyer.
And the thing that is so striking to me about this is most of this was being done very much out in the open.
I have listened to your colleagues in the House, especially House Democrats, but also Senate Democrats.
Be very explicit about the fact that they would summon the executives of these big tech companies and they would say to them, if you don't start removing even more political content than you're removing now, we will start punishing you with legal and regulatory reprisals.
It wasn't something that was hidden.
And then, of course, the Twitter files kind of gave the specifics of seeing Elvis Chan and other FBI agents, you know, having this pipeline into these big tech companies.
You said earlier that it's only conservatives.
I agree it's largely conservatives.
I think there are some cases where you kind of have the real leftists, you know, kind of the anti-democratic party, anti-establishment leftists, who sometimes are targeted by this as well.
What do you think is the ultimate motive in what is clearly not just a kind of isolated or ad hoc attempt to censor certain posts, but a systemic attempt to kind of commandeer the internet?
What is, what do you see as the motive behind this?
Well, I think it's pretty clear they want to stifle public debate.
They don't want to have a free marketplace of ideas, because so many of the ideas that are being advanced by the radical left are not palatable to most of the American people.
We're still a right-leaning country, but you can't have a free marketplace of ideas if the government has its thumb on the scales, if the government has an eraser, effectively, to remove those voices from the conversation.
It's a dangerous thing.
I mean, the founders of our country wrote about this extensively.
They were so deeply concerned.
We're not a monarchy.
We're a government up by and for the people.
And in a republic like this, if you're going to maintain these systems, these institutions that are so essential for our keeping the republic, You have to have the free exchange of ideas.
You cannot have the government censoring speech that it disfavors.
You know, I asked the director today if he could define one of the central terms in the litigation that they've been using.
They only censor disinformation.
I said, well, can you give us a definition?
Of course, he had none.
I mean, it's such a subjective term.
And I think you pointed out in a tweet earlier today, I saw that you're explaining this to people.
This is what's so dangerous.
These are very subjective terms.
It's like hate speech, right?
It can mean anything.
And so the government has this enormous power to silence voices it disagrees with.
And that's how you lead into tyranny.
This is not a game.
This is the highest stakes thing that we can be delving into.
And the director of the FBI who's in charge of all this was just evasive today.
I just thought it was I just thought it was so stunning.
And a lot of people agree with us.
Yeah, I just want to focus a little bit more on this exchange you had with him about the meaning of disinformation because I think for a long time, maybe over the last decade or maybe two decades, the kind of liberal left case for censorship was more grounded in the idea that hate speech can be very dangerous and that ended up, I think, having only limited utility and it was seemingly overnight Coming out of Russiagate and the like, that this industry of disinformation experts, something that does not really exist.
There's no field of discipline in universities to become a PhD in disinformation.
It is an incredibly subjective term to the point of meaninglessness.
They kind of sprung up overnight.
That became the justifying framework for how the media tries to manipulate propaganda.
But the fact that it's now being used by the government itself, I think is incredibly alarming.
I guess the question I have is, you know, even if you could define disinformation, even if that were a term susceptible to some kind of very fixed meaning, why would anybody trust the FBI or Homeland Security or anyone on the left or right to decree truth and falsity to the point that you cannot question what's decreed true?
That's that is that is the question.
And I wanted to lead the director down that road to ultimately ask him that.
But he couldn't even concede.
He didn't even pretend to know what disinformation is or that they use the term.
I mean it was feigned is the right word.
Use that earlier.
I think he was disingenuous.
But but that's the ultimate principle there in the court by the way in Louisiana and this massive opinion.
points out in his recitation of the applicable law in the case, he says an injunction has to be enjoined here.
He said it's a bedrock principle of constitutional law in this country that the government does not get to decide what speech gets to be heard.
The government can't decide that it disfavors a viewpoint and shut it down.
It's called viewpoint discrimination.
It's blatantly unconstitutional.
That's been the law in this country since the beginning.
And now you have the biggest law enforcement agency in the country openly engaging in it, regularly meeting with the platforms.
And by the way, Elvis Chan, Agent Chan, who was testifying on behalf of the FBI, he's the star witness of the case.
He said that they were planning to do this all the way through the 2024 election, at least.
Thank goodness that the attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri and some of these other states have stepped up to try to stop this, and they brought it to the attention of the court.
They've enjoined it for now.
But as you've noticed, the Biden administration and the DOJ, the FBI, have appealed that ruling.
So apparently they want to go to the 5th Circuit now.
The U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and argue they somehow have the right to do this.
It's just really unbelievable.
I mean, it's an incredibly potent weapon.
If you have this weapon in your hand to control the flow of information over the primary source of receiving information and forming political opinions, which is now the Internet, of course you're going to pursue that and protect and preserve that until the end.
Let me switch gears just a little bit and ask you about the issue of the FBI in January 6th.
I personally think people who are raising a lot of these valid questions have sometimes done a disservice to this cause by going a little bit further than what the evidence warrants in terms of the claims being made about the role the FBI did play.
What really shocked me, though, was he said, Director Ray did, that he is incapable of saying two years or more later after this riot on the Capitol on January 6th, whether or not the FBI had any FBI informants or undercover agents on the whether or not the FBI had any FBI informants or undercover agents on the in these events.
What do you make of the FBI's role?
What is your view of whether the FBI had some kind of a role and what the Congress can do to extract more information about that?
Well, we've been asking for it.
We've been requesting this for a long, long time.
They've been very evasive, and he did it again today.
But I think you could tell by the way he answered that question, and certainly by his body language, he's hiding something.
He very carefully said, we didn't have any plainclothes officers or agents in disguise there.
And then he was grilled on it.
I think it was Andy Biggs, my colleague from Arizona, who was asking him, and he went over it again and again.
And finally, He got the director to he had to concede.
Well, I'm not saying there weren't some assets involved.
I'm really not prepared to enter that today.
I mean, come on.
The people are owed these explanations and it's not even that incredible of a revelation.
I mean, we have you know, FBI intelligence assets all over the Capitol all the time.
He could just concede the truth of it, but he's unwilling to do it.
And what that does, of course, is it draws more suspicion.
It just plays right into this narrative that has developed because of the evidence that the FBI is in on it.
You know, it makes him look corrupt and maybe there's nothing wrong with that, but we don't know.
And that in itself is a problem.
You know, on some level, and there was some questioning about this very early on in the Senate, and it was raised by Democrats.
And when they realized where that might lead, they immediately kind of withdrew it.
It was never something the FBI was willing to talk about.
Again, on some level, if you look at the groups that are alleged to have led and organized these events, these are groups the FBI had long identified as being what they regard as domestic extremists.
You would expect almost, you would want the FBI to monitor them, to have informants in them if you're somebody who believes that that's a proper role for the FBI to play.
So the idea that they were simultaneously pointing to the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys as being these grave threats and yet didn't have informants within these groups is so incredible.
And I think that seems to be the reason why they're kind of in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position.
But on some level, isn't there some obligatory process or subpoena or something that needs to be done to force them to answer?
Yes.
I mean, Glenn, the truth will set us free.
We have to get the answers.
We're owed those answers.
And they're doing everything within their power to prevent that coming forward.
And we're using every tool in the arsenal that we have.
I mean, we've subpoenaed this.
If it has high intelligence value, we'll review it in the SCIF.
But these answers have to come forward and we're going to have to compel them.
And if the leadership of The DOJ and the FBI continue to take these positions and be evasive and not provide the information, you're going to hear increasing calls for impeachments.
I mean, we don't have that many tools.
We have to use the ones that are available to us, and our constituents are demanding that, and they're right to do so.
They're right to do so.
Absolutely.
So you've been generous with your time.
I just want to ask you one last question while you're here about a different topic.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, you were very clear in your harsh condemnation of Russia as having done something both illegal and immoral, but you were also one of the 57 House members to vote against the authorization of $40 billion to send there last May, the only time I think Congress voted on it, essentially invoking the argument that Americans are suffering at home, we can't be spending A. What do you make of where this war is going and the U.S.
role in it?
foreign war.
That was about a year ago.
Congress hasn't been asked really to vote again, although it's been in authorizations.
Two part question.
A, what do you make of where this war is going and the U.S. role in it?
And then B, do you intend to support this bipartisan bill to ban the provision of cluster bombs to Ukraine by the Biden administration?
Well, the first one is we cannot allow Vladimir Putin to take another country.
It's It upsets the world order since World War Two.
The implications of this are enormous.
Everybody in the free world understands that if Putin is successful here, It empowers and it probably inspires China to move on Taiwan.
And then we you know who knows else.
So it's important for us to prevail.
And the United States has an important role of leadership in the world to stand for freedom and to do what we've done.
But here's the catch.
We need our international partners to do their share as well.
And everybody around the world knows that we are carrying the burden of this.
We are the primary financier of this defense of Ukraine.
And we need to stand for our position and not put this on the backs of the American taxpayers because, well, gee, we also have a $31 trillion, $32 trillion federal debt here of our own.
And so that's the concern.
We want to make sure that there's careful stewards of the resources we're sending over there.
And especially early on in this conflict, we had no oversight of this at all.
And that's why we said, whoa, wait a minute.
We're not the world's policemen.
We are the most benevolent people in the world.
But the reason we're able to do this is because we maintain our own sovereignty and security first.
And that's the America First idea, and we've sort of abandoned that, and it gets caught up in the emotion of war, and we understand that, but we have a really important stewardship responsibility.
With regard to the cluster bombs, I mean, look, I have a mixed, to be honest with you, I have a mixed emotion on this.
I mean, I think they need the, obviously, the equipment necessary to end this conflict as soon as possible, to end the misery.
War is hell.
But the further and further that we dig in and get involved, and again, more of it being carried on our backs, is just a concern to us.
We're having a thoughtful debate about it here.
I think everybody wants Ukraine to win, but it shouldn't be America's war, if that makes sense, and that's what we're trying to ensure that it doesn't become.
Great, so we asked you on to talk about the hearing today, so I don't want to press too much further on that.
I would love to have you back on to talk about that, but definitely to continue to report on the issues that we've discussed tonight, which I really regard as the highest importance.
The fact that we have a systemic effort on the part of the U.S.
security state to censor the internet for political ends, I think is something incomparably menacing, and I'm really happy that you are focused on that, and I appreciate your taking the time to talk with us about it tonight.
Well, same here, Glenn.
Thanks for what you're doing and keep up the good work.
Absolutely.
Absolutely, have a good evening.
So you heard the congressman.
That was the first time I've had a chance to interview him.
And I have to say, my impression of him, particularly on the issues that we asked him to come on that he was prepared to talk about with regard to today's hearing and the role of the FBI in participating in the censorship regime, the evasiveness, and just the refusal to provide basic information about something as significant as January 6th.
And by significant, I simply mean the use of it to justify all sorts of powers is really striking.
And I sometimes think that The way in which this unfolds so slowly can serve to obscure the extreme nature of what really is tyranny.
And I think one of the things I've noticed, and I've noticed this in the United States and I've noticed this following British politics as well when I was at the Guardian and obviously out of the Snowden reporting had big implications in the UK.
But then also here in Brazil, where the censorship regime is, I would say, four or five levels beyond what it is in the United States, maybe two or three levels beyond what it is in Western Europe, at least we still do have the First Amendment in the United States that enables court rulings like the one we got last week.
I think it really is underappreciated, even by people who say they are concerned about it.
I include myself in this.
Sometimes it is easy to underestimate the extent to which this is gone.
And when we hear words like tyranny and despotism and authoritarianism and attacks on basic freedoms, we have these images in our head of kind of stormtroopers who come to your house the minute you criticize the government.
And obviously, you can go on social media right now and post all kinds of harsh critiques about Joe Biden.
And more likely than not, stormtroopers aren't going to show up at your house and haul you off to a gulag.
And so it's very easy to tell yourself, oh, those kinds of words are too extreme.
They're overstatements for the society in which we live.
But very often, these things happen not so melodramatically or so suddenly and abruptly, but incrementally.
And I say, I raise Brazil because, as we've talked about many times before, and the reason I talk about it is not only because I think Brazil is in and of itself important in terms of its size and influence in our hemisphere, but also because it is being used as a laboratory, as a test case.
Brazil is a big, big country.
It is a big country in the democratic world.
It's the sixth most populous country on the planet.
It is in the top five of populations for world democracies, and the fact that the censorship regime has become so advanced here in Brazil, and there's not much discussion about it around the world because it has happened so slowly, I think is highly illustrative of the point I'm trying to make here, which is a little bit elusive, but I think nonetheless very important to get at, which is, I was talking to a friend
Earlier this week about the fact that in all the time as a journalist that I've worked for almost 20 years now There was never a time when I had kind of a second thought about whether I should Report on some story or express some criticism and obviously a lot of the reporting I've done has been reporting that has triggered the anger of power centers all over the world I was once indicted criminally here in Brazil and For reporting I did, there's been reporting that the U.S.
government under President Obama was plotting on how to criminalize the journalism we were doing in the Stoning case, my husband with him, without subjecting yourself to a level of risk that isn't worth it.
And once you start having that idea in your head, That obviously is the stuff of which self-censorship is made.
So you start telling yourself, oh, it's not that stormtroopers are coming to my house, but I'm just choosing not to express this view.
And I mentioned earlier this preface from George Orwell that he ended up not getting published.
It's been a while since I had looked at it, so I went back and looked at it today because I had some of the details wrong.
I was a little bit foggy on exactly what happened.
It wasn't a preface to 1984 or to the homage to Catalonia as I suggested it might be.
It was a preface instead to Animal Farm.
And he intended it as an explanation for what Animal Farm was intended to be.
And it was never published because at the time it was considered too conscious.
Orwell was saying this is a critique of the Russian Revolution, the Animal Farm is, and the way in which inequality intrinsically emerges and then becomes despotic even when you're carrying out a revolution in the name of equality.
And he talked about how he understands that Stalinism and Soviet repression are very real and very menacing, but he then said, It's easy if you're a subject of the British Crown to think that way because it's always easy to see other countries as being despotic.
But the reality is we have our own form of very significant tyranny here in Britain as well.
And that was the point that he was making is that you won't have stormtroopers show up at your house if you criticize the British government.
But what you have instead on some level, even though it's a more subtle, it's a more effective form of despotism.
Which is that the control of information and propaganda is so extreme.
That the price people pay for being dissidents is instantaneous and extremely consequential.
And on some level, when you can create a closed system of propaganda, it is a more effective form of brute tyranny because you don't see it.
It's not visible.
So you can easily tell yourself you're living in a free society when in reality, the reason why free speech is permitted in theory is because nobody has any dissent to express because dissent has been Suppressed and the prison is in the mind.
And this is exactly what is being created here.
That is why I was so impressed with Congressman Johnson because he has a background as a constitutional lawyer.
He's not a rhetorical bomb thrower.
He was very careful about the way in which he was making his points and the points that he was making.
And yet what he was describing was something genuinely alarming.
The FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security, the NSA, and the Biden White House have indeed created a system that allows them a very effective means of censoring viewpoints and the control and the flow of information over the Internet, which is the primary way that Americans now formulate their political ideas about the world.
And they have an extremely high success rate because, of course, even if they frame it as a request or something they're hoping will happen, as the congressman was saying, when the FBI knocks on the door of Facebook or Google or Twitter, It's obviously very threatening And these companies are acting in their commercial self-interest.
Why would they want to provoke a major war with the federal government that controls enormous budgetary power, can punish them in a regulatory or legal way, as they're explicitly threatening to do?
And we actually now live in a world, in a society, in which the U.S.
government has, in fact, developed the power to censor our political speech and what it is we can and can't hear.
It's not totalitarian, there's not absolute, there's still outposts of free expression.
I'm obviously allowed to go on this show and say the things that I say and there's no police coming to my door.
So I don't want to overstate the case, but the trend is very much along those lines.
And you don't need 100%.
Sometimes having little outposts of dissent can serve to fortify that illusion that the repression isn't quite as severe as it is.
And so I just think it's very important to sometimes step back and appreciate the concrete reality of, again, this is not coming from crazed conspiracy theorists who are relying on speculation.
The Democratic Party has been saying that out in the open.
They summon these executive attack companies before them and they tell them, you either start censoring or we will punish you.
We've seen from the Twitter files, the actual emails going back and forth.
You can read them from this FBI agent, Elvis Chan, to Twitter, to Facebook, to Google as well.
Some of those have surfaced.
The plans of the Homeland Security Department to impose a systemic means of controlling the flow of information on the grounds that they're combating disinformation.
And as we know so well, so often, the people who claim to be combating disinformation are the people who, in fact, are disseminating it.
And the effort to combat disinformation is in fact an effort to shield their own disinformation from critical scrutiny and dissent.
And that's what made today's hearing so remarkable is that the Democratic Party was there to essentially delegitimize any effort to raise these issues and to compel the FBI to disclose information about what it is that they're doing.
While you had members of the Republican Party like Congressman Johnson doing their job, what Democrats used to do for decades when the FBI would come up here before them, questioning them in a very sober and evidence-based way about the abuse of power by the FBI, the Democratic Party was there to say, you should not do this.
The FBI is an agency full of integrity and nobility and they are trying to do their best to protect us and they shouldn't be questioned but applauded.
Remember when Matt Taibbi went before the Congress to testify about his reporting on the Twitter files along with Michael Schellenberger, and they were reporting on exactly that collusion, that censorship regime I just described.
And the Democratic Party, which had long been saying that none of this was happening, there was no censorship coming from the U.S.
security state, finally was forced to admit the truth that in fact it was, and they switched on a dime from it's not happening to yes, it's happening, and we should be glad that it's happening.
And we've showed you so many times the speeches and statements from Democratic members of that committee, including Colin Allred and others, that fake Congresswoman Stacey Plackett, who now say the FBI, the CIA, the U.S.
Security State are full of patriotic men and women who are only trying to keep us safe.
And when they're censoring, they're protecting us from dangerous information.
And instead of being angry at them, we should be grateful for them.
And I wanted to show you a couple of the Democrats and the way in which they were behaving today.
First of all, here is Congressman Jerry Nadler.
I believe he's the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee.
He was the chairman for a long time.
He still is now.
He's now the ranking member.
Now the Republicans control it.
Let's listen to his homage to the greatness of the FBI.
No matter how many times Republicans attack Director Wray, or the FBI, or the investigation at Mar-a-Lago, I trust in the rule of law.
Mr. Trump will have his day in court.
I believe the system will hold him accountable.
And I thank the men and women of the FBI who helped bring the classified information to safety and protect the national security of our nation.
I mean, that sounds like Dick Cheney from 2002.
Or Newt Gingrich or John Bolton.
At any point in their career how dare you question these noble agencies of the federal government who are only here to do their job and protect us.
These are patriots and not people who ought to be questioned.
This was the message from the Democratic Party over and over.
Here as well we have the Congressman from Georgia, Hank Johnson, who was present for the entire hearing and continuously interjected to express his rage over the fact that Republicans were questioning such an honorable public servant.
Let's listen to him.
Director Wray, are you aware that MAGA Republicans have repeatedly called for the FBI to be defunded?
I have heard some of that language.
In fact, Republicans on this very committee Have said that your institution should be dismantled.
Isn't that correct?
Well, I think certain members have.
And one member even tweeted, quote, defund and dismantle the FBI, end quote.
Another told Fox News that, quote, Republicans should defund the bureaucracy, end quote.
And a third told the press that he thinks the FBI, quote, needs to be split up and moved out into pieces, end quote.
Those are direct quotes and only a small sample of what's out there.
Can you briefly describe for us what the effect would be on our national security and on our domestic tranquility if the FBI were to be defunded or dismantled?
Okay, so then Director Wray, as intended by this theater, goes on to talk about all the wonderful things the FBI does in catching criminals and pedophiles and terrorists and domestic extremists.
This is not oversight.
This is propaganda.
Imagine you're a member of a committee that is legally obliged to exercise oversight over an agency and you have the director before you and instead of questioning him about the controversies and the abuses of power in which he's been engaged, you instead ask him for two minutes to talk about all the wonderful things the agency does for the American people and the undercurrent of it all is
Is that any attempt to even think about limiting the power of the FBI, even to just break it up or assign it different functions or limit its powers, is something just so offensive that no person in good conscience should be able to do it.
Here is the incredibly authoritarian Eric Swalwell, the Democrat from California, and here he is in his Classically, melodramatic way, talking about the greatness of the FBI.
You preside over... Sorry, that is the wrong video.
Let me see if I can... Can someone help me find that?
I think it's here.
This is Derek Swallow.
I apologize to Matt Gaetz for mistaking him.
...named Garrett Ziegler.
Over the past couple weeks, he has doxed the addresses of a former special agent connected to the Hunter Biden case.
He has put up the dates of birth and pictures of two current special agents who work for you.
He has said the name, which I will not say, of an assistant U.S.
attorney who worked in the Hunter Biden case, that she will answer for her crimes.
He will focus everything on her.
Justice will be done.
It's out of my hands, but she will answer.
Did these types of threats and doxing concern you about threats to your workforce and what it could mean?
Well obviously what we're most concerned about are the actual acts of violence which themselves have happened and as we just discussed.
But this kind of phenomenon, doxxing, is itself hugely problematic because the more information, personalized information, about
Law enforcement professionals that are out in the internet the more people who may be unstable or inclined to violence There are out there who can choose to act on it, and we're seeing that all too often the number of officers across law enforcement Killed in the line of duty Has been up alarmingly over the last few years, and I know that Because one of the things I committed to doing early in my tenure was every time an officer
Anywhere in the country is shot and killed in the line of duty, I was going to personally call that sheriff or that chief and on behalf of the FBI express our support and condolences and relay that to the family.
And I have done that now close to 400 times since I've been in this job.
Thank you for doing that.
And you don't only do that, you send your I mean, this is pathetic.
your special agents in charge to their funerals as well, and I've seen that.
I mean, this is pathetic.
It was just completely pathetic.
You have an oversight hearing, and Eric Swalwell, just like these other Democrats, use it to glorify the FBI, to suggest that any attempt to criticize them Do you think the FBI are the vulnerable, marginalized group in society that cannot be criticized because to do so would incite violence against them, the way that Democrats try and protect whoever their allies are from criticism, using that same rationale?
The idea that the FBI is a marginalized group being victimized by violent people is about as Orwellian as it gets.
The reality is exactly the opposite.
But all of this is designed to create a framework where the FBI cannot be questioned.
And the reason for that is because these Democrats, these liberals, and many members of the left who like to pretend they're antagonistic to the Democratic Party, but at the end of the day tell their followers to go support them, that's their signal that they're on the right side, don't really care about any of this, except to don't really care about any of this, except to the extent that they're happy about it.
And the reason for that is that when Donald Trump was running for president in 2016, these agencies very quickly realized that he was too unstable and too unpredictable and too unreliable and could not be counted on to be an ally of theirs, to let them do everything they wanted.
He began mocking the CIA for getting Iraq wrong.
He argued that Jim Comey was trying to help Hillary Clinton get elected by refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton for very similar acts that they're now prosecuting Donald Trump for doing in terms of the mishandling of classified information.
He was a vehement critic of the CIA's top priority, which was regime change in Syria to remove Bashar al-Assad.
And so they immediately acted to try and sabotage the Trump campaign.
That is where Russia came from, from these people.
They politicized their law enforcement powers.
They fed the Washington Post to the New York Times every day.
Leaked lies that connected Donald Trump to the Kremlin that became the primary theme of the Hillary Clinton campaign.
And so if you are a liberal, if you're a member of the Democratic Party, if you are a leftist who maintains ultimate allegiance to the Democratic Party, the reason you don't care about any of this stuff is because you're happy about it.
No one wants to admit that That they like the CIA and the FBI, especially if your self-identity is somebody who's on the left.
Precisely because, as the head of the congressman, critiquing these agencies or viewing them as malevolent have been a staple of left liberal politics for decades, until very recently.
So what they do instead is just ignore it.
And they send these Democrats here to sing the praises of the FBI as a way of shielding them.
From things like the censorship regime in which they're engaged, because the beneficiaries of that are Democrats.
That is the reality of what's going on here.
And it's incredibly obvious.
Now, as I said, there was one exception, Priscilla Jayapal, who used her time not to heap praise on the FBI, but to demand answers to a program that we devoted an entire episode to, because the Director of National Intelligence received a report
Describing how the FBI, the CIA, Homeland Security are buying extremely invasive data about American citizens even though they would be prohibited from collecting it on their own because there's no probable cause and they couldn't get a search warrant to do it.
And even the security state admitted in this memo, which was intended to be secret, they forced its declassification.
That the information they are buying would be information they would be barred constitutionally from collecting if they tried to collect it themselves.
And Congresswoman Jayapal, despite being a Democrat, to her credit, did her job.
And I want to show you this not only to...
Praise her, but also because it's important on the substance, on the merits.
Watch how Director Wray just refuses to give her even basic information about this program that we all know exists because we all read it.
And I reported on it on that episode.
Listen to her exchange with him.
And you can just see, this is what he was like all day.
Just watch this.
Wall Street and Ventel and has a Lexus account.
All of these companies provide data for purchase.
Can you tell me how the FBI uses that data?
Respectfully, this is a topic that gets very involved to explain, and so what I would prefer to do is have our subject matter experts come back up and brief you, and they can answer your questions in detail about it, because there's a lot of confusion that can be unintentionally caused about this topic.
But does the FBI purchase data?
My testimony that you referred to before remains the same.
And the story about the ODNI report doesn't change that, but again, there's a lot of precision and technical dimensions to this.
Well, I do appreciate that, but I'm looking at a report that is from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence saying that the FBI purchases data.
Mr. Chairman, I ask unanimous consent to enter this into the record.
Objection.
Do you know if the contracts with data brokers, like the ones I described, provide location data?
My testimony about purchasing commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising remains the same, which is that we currently do not do that.
But the information that you have Again, I'm not trying to be obtuse or difficult here.
I just know from experience that the more you drill into this whole issue of commercial data, geolocation data, etc., that it gets very involved.
In some cases, it involves pilot projects that are in the past.
In some cases, it involves national security information, etc.
So I just want to make sure that we get you the information you need.
That's great, I will take that, but I do want to say that this is just an extremely important issue for the American people to understand how their data is being used.
That is location data, that is biometric information, it's medical and mental health information, it's information related to individuals' communications, it's information about people's internet activity, and while I understand that that's complicated, that is the reason that you come before us, so that the American people... Give us two minutes and twenty seconds.
She was asking about a program we all know the FBI is doing.
Because she read, like we did, and like we reported on, the National Intelligence Director's report that, again, was intended to be classified.
And when the House Republicans learned of it, they forced it to declassification.
He refused to give her even the most basic information.
Claiming it was too complex for her to understand, that it was too complicated for him to speak safely on.
That's what he did all day long about every issue.
Do you believe that the Director of the FBI, two years after January 6th, two years and five months or four months after January 6th, Basically two and a half years, doesn't know whether the FBI had assets on the ground as part of January 6th.
Even the New York Times has reported that the FBI had an informant as part of that crowd.
You think the FBI director doesn't know that?
Or doesn't know how many, roughly, that the FBI had?
He said he didn't.
He refused to provide that information by feigning ignorance, by claiming ignorance.
They have a contempt for everybody because they know they can exercise power without any challenge.
And the reason they know that is because one of the two parties in the United States, which happens to control the White House, the entire executive branch, and the Senate, continues to believe that questioning the FBI or criticizing the FBI is some sort of act of treachery and that doing so is improper because the FBI is a political ally of theirs.
And the fact that the FBI and the CIA and the U.S.
security state are political allies of one of the two major political parties in this country is all the more reason to regard as incredibly menacing.
The way in which this power is being commandeered and being employed.
And this, to me, is the number one issue.
Because if the U.S. security state can control the Internet and can essentially prevent dissent from being heard, including right up to the election, as happened in 2020 with the Hunter Biden laptop story, when they lied and said it was Russian disinformation and got all of those stories suppressed based when they lied and said it was Russian disinformation and got all of those stories suppressed based on that intelligence lie that the corporate media ratified and So I'm glad that there are members of Congress who are cognizant of the priority this requires.
We will obviously continue to report on this, but I hope it is visible how extreme things have already become.
drama needed or hyperbole needed to describe it as such.
So I'm glad that there are members of Congress who are cognizant of the priority this requires.
We will obviously continue to report on this, but I hope it is visible how extreme things have already become.
And once government institutions and government agents get a hold of a power like this, the last thing they ever do is open their hands and give it up.
They want more and more of it unless they're forced to.
and forcing them to stop is really the only viable alternative.
Professor David Miller is a political sociologist whose work has focused, as he puts it, on quote "the analysis of power and propaganda, especially the way states and corporations lobby to on quote "the analysis of power and propaganda, especially the way states and As a scholar and an author, he has delved into many political controversies, including ones involving foreign policy and war, but in 2021,
He was fired from his teaching job by Bristol University, where he was a professor, in the wake of complaints from prominent British politicians and then by students who argued that his harsh criticism of the Israeli government and the way pro-Israel groups inside of the UK wield influence to foster pro-Israel foreign policy, quote, incite hatred against Jewish students, exactly the same theory
Often invoked to justify the firing of conservative scholars on campuses throughout the West, when they express heterodox and anti-establishment views on race, gender ideology, and gay issues, and then are accused of making students unsafe by virtue of the expression of their opinion.
Professor Miller has appealed this decision.
He's fighting to win his job back.
We are delighted to welcome him to System Update to discuss his case and its implications for free speech and academic freedom.
As a reminder, if you're somebody who wants to fight for free speech, The place you want to go is not the cases where your views that you agree with are being attacked or your allies are being silenced.
That's easy to do.
Everyone can do that.
The true test for whether you believe in these values and whether they will be strengthened is precisely in those instances where somebody is being silenced or censored for expressing views with which you disagree.
So we're delighted to welcome Professor Miller to our show.
Professor Miller, good evening.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Hi, how are you doing?
Doing well, thanks.
So let's just start at the beginning.
I had referenced these series of events that culminated in your firing from Bristol University in 2021.
The accusation was that you had essentially incited hatred against Jewish students at the school.
Walk me through, in a kind of summary way, what the case against you was and what the outcome ended up being.
So it took about three years.
First of all, I had done a lecture on Islamophobia, where I had said that some Zionist organizations fund Islamophobic organizations.
And this was too much for some students who went to an Israel lobby group who complained to the university.
But the university wouldn't accept that because the lobby group wasn't a student.
So they got some actual students to complain who were from lobby groups themselves, from the Union of Jewish Students, which is a Zionist organization in the UK, which is similar to Hillel in the US, for example.
I'm the head of the Jewish Society at the University of Bristol and they complained and they investigated me for two years.
A QC came in, that's a Queen's Council lawyer, came in and did an investigation, found that there wasn't a single thing that I had ever said was anti-Semitic and they dropped the case.
And then six weeks later, I did a public meeting outside of work on a Saturday afternoon.
And I referred to the fact that I had been attacked and complained about.
And those were the words that I used.
And then all hell broke loose.
They started to complain that I was making Jewish students unsafe by simply referring to the factual matter that I had been attacked and complained about.
And then a further investigation was convened by a QC who again found that I was not guilty in any way of anything anti-Semitic.
But the university decided that nevertheless, it wasn't the words that I had said which were problematic, but it was the way I had expressed them.
And they might have made some students feel unsafe.
So they dismissed me.
Before we get into the substance of the free speech and academic freedom implications, which is where I want to devote the bulk of our discussion, just to have a full disclosure about what your actual views are, because a lot of times people say, I was fired for being an Israel critic.
I think it is fair to say that you hold some views that, on the spectrum of the Israeli-Palestine debate, are Let's call it radical, just in the sense that it's views that the mainstream does not not only share, but doesn't typically include in the debate.
For example, you believe Zionism is a racist ideology, and you also believe that pro-Israel forces inside the UK wield a large amount of influence to enable Yes, certainly I believe that Zionism is a racist ideology.
It has been from the beginning.
It still is.
Always will be.
Talk about that.
Just briefly describe what you mean by that.
your views that have been the source of controversy?
Yes, certainly I believe that Zionism is a racist ideology.
It has been from the beginning.
It still is, always will be.
Talk about that.
Just briefly describe what you mean by that.
Well, so in order for the State of Israel to be created, they had to remove 750,000 indigenous people, the Palestinians, and they had to do that by force and by, you know, effectively and they had to do that by force and by, you know, effectively militarily And of course they can't now come back, they won't let them come back.
So that in itself is a form of racism.
The indigenous people were Not appropriate to live there.
Instead, the Jews who had come there were the appropriate people to live there.
That's a form of racism.
And that form of racism has continued all the way through since 1948.
People talk about the The State of Israel as being an apartheid regime, that's certainly the case, but it's a regime which is a settler-colonial regime which cannot do anything but be racist unless it was to dissolve itself into a state of all the people of the area.
So that's what I mean when I say it's racist.
No, I guess I should kind of amend what I said, which is that although those views are not mainstream in the West, there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the way you see it.
They also view Zionism very similar to the way you just described it.
But in the West, this is kind of a limitation on what people can get away with saying, even for those people who believe or who claim to believe in free speech.
What specifically were the claims that, or the views that you expressed that were cited as inciting hatred against Jewish students, which ultimately ended up being the way in which they kind of justified your firing while claiming that they were still upholding academic freedom?
What specifically, what specific views were the top, were the subject of this complaint?
So in the first instance it was that I had said that Zionist organizations are amongst those who fund Islamophobic groups, both street Islamophobia and more elite Islamophobic organizations like think tanks, like for example the Henry Jackson Society in the UK.
Now that's a matter of fact which had come out of research which I had done and which nobody has ever denied, but that was regarded as being Somehow problematic.
Another thing which I said which they thought was problematic was that I had been attacked and complained about by a Zionist student group and they didn't like me saying that.
And the third thing was when I said that actually what we're facing here is a coordinated Zionist attack on campuses and on free speech to stop the possibility of people voicing support for the Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle.
And that was the thing which particularly, I think, annoyed them, was that I referred to something called the Zionist Movement, which I have written about at length, which is a collection of actually existing organizations who exist, and they call themselves Zionists, who exist to support Zionism.
Now, I think this is a movement which has significant power, but in order to demonstrate that power, one has to look at particular cases and find The ways in which that power is exercised.
So it's not that I think that Zionists control the world, but it is the case that Zionists have significant power.
And in the case of the UK, let me just take the example of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.
This is a policy weapon which was developed following the Ministry of Foreign Affairs conferences over the years in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And it's an implement, a weapon of the Israeli state.
And it's been adopted by the UK government, by the UK Labour Party, by 200 universities and colleges, and by many local authorities in the UK.
Now, that is an element of power, which I think is quite significant.
And I have never heard anyone say that that is not a form of power by the Zionists and indeed by the Israeli state. - Thank you.
We've covered in the past this kind of tension that I think often appears on the right, which is taking up the free speech banner, which believes that conservative voices are being censored, not just by the government in the segment we just did, but also on college campuses in particular.
And there does seem to be attention sometimes because those same conservatives will then turn around and support the firing of people like yourself, whose views they regard as deeply offensive.
The argument, though, that they make is that if someone focuses unduly on one country, namely Israel, that you're a British subject, that you're teaching at an English university, and you're speaking so often about Israel, that Jewish students are justified and you're speaking so often about Israel, that Jewish students are justified in believing that you must harbor some animus toward the Jewish people or else there's no other way to explain this kind of fixation that you have or this at least lack of balance that
in speaking so much about Israel.
What would you tell Jewish students who believe that or how would you respond to that argument?
Well, first of all, if you look at the work which I've produced over the years, I've written, I don't know, 10 or 15 books on Iraq, on HIV and AIDS, on health, on food, on propaganda, but mainly I've focused on propaganda over the years and focused in particular on the conflict in Ireland, on Iraq, on Afghanistan.
And of course, on Israel-Palestine.
So I, you know, obsession with Israel?
No, I am very interested in it.
And I got in particular, I got interested in the question of Israel and Zionism, when I was attacked for being an anti-Semite way back in about 2009 or 10.
Because I had started to write about neoconservative think tanks in the aftermath of Iraq, the Iraq invasion of 2003.
And I didn't understand Why I was being called an anti-Semite.
I thought these people were mad.
And so I started to look at this and I became more and more interested in the way in which Zionism was operating and the way in which it used lobbying tactics, which are used by all sorts of social interests.
And incidentally, of course, I've done quite a lot of work, written books, in fact, on corporate lobbying and corporate public relations.
So I know a little bit about lobbying outside of the question of Israel-Palestine.
But look, The reason people are interested in Israel-Palestine is because it's a long-running conflict, and the activities of the Israeli state are exceptional.
The Israelis try to say, oh, well, if you criticize Israel in a different way than you criticize any other democratic state, well, then you're discriminating against Israel, and that must be some kind of antisemitism.
On the contrary, Israel is not a normal democratic state.
And if we actually find that empirically, then we're not allowed to say that by this argument that we're somehow discriminating against Israel.
Israel is a settler-colonial regime.
It's the same as many other settler-colonial regimes, like, for example, the creation of the United States, of Canada, of Australia, of New Zealand.
We're all settler-colonial states.
They managed to continue to be settler colonial states because they more or less eliminated all of the natives.
And that's the only way that Israel can find peace, is to eliminate the natives.
And that's, of course, what it's trying to do.
But there is an alternative way.
to resolve a settler-colonial conflict, and that's what you see to some extent at least in Ireland, in the case of Ireland, certainly in the case of Algeria, and indeed of course in the case of South Africa.
So the thing I would say about The question of settler colonialism is not to do with some particular quality of the Jews who happen to be particularly evil in engaging in settler colonialism.
Settler colonialism is a structural form of colonialism which people of many different backgrounds can engage in, and the solution to it, of course, is decolonization.
I always think it's bizarre that on the one hand we're constantly told by the U.S.
government, by the British government, by various Western European governments that our governments have a special relationship with Israel.
In the United States, they are the recipient of enormous sums of aid, each year billions and billions of dollars worth.
For me, what justifies Focusing on Israel in a way that one would not focus, say, on a country that is not supported by the US government.
It becomes an extension of US government policy or British government policy.
I think that's an additional reason.
When I look at this debate in which you're now enmeshed, and I hear these arguments about how you're making Jewish students unsafe, the similarities between your case and the cases where a lot of conservative professors have been fired on the grounds that they make The climate or the classroom unsafe for black students or for gay students or for trans students or for any other kind of marginalized or minority group seems very similar to me in terms of its rationale.
Do you see that same similarity and do you find those cases where conservative professors are being punished or otherwise sanctioned as threatening to academic freedom and free speech as you do your own?
Well, I mean, look, the way in which our society has developed in the UK and indeed in the US, it's become much more the case.
You've been talking about this for the whole show, and I know you've talked about it a lot in other shows as well.
It's become the case that those on the left and those on the right are being attacked routinely by this whole apparatus of censorship, which Matt Tabe and Michael Schellenberg talk about in the Twitter files, this kind of censorship industrial complex.
And it focuses on the radical left, yes, but it also focuses on the right.
And when you have an organisation like this one in the UK called the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which is a moderately Zionist organisation, And of course what it does is it writes reports on the left, including one on a show which I do on Press TV, and it writes lots of reports on the right.
And it tries to justify itself by saying, well, we're looking at these very bad people and hopes that nobody will say, hang on a minute.
Why are we censoring independent media, whether it's right wing or left wing?
Why are we doing that?
And what they hope is that we'll just go along with this.
And this will be seen as protecting us, as you've been saying, Democrats, politicians have been saying recently in debates.
So it seems to me that we are in a new situation It's not that there hasn't been censorship in the past, but that we're in a situation where there is a massively ramped up attempt by the security state, the censorship industrial complex, to clamp down on the possibility of people expressing views which are outside the mainstream.
And of course, the mainstream Remains not just a kind of liberal, nice place where we're all lovely to each other, but it remains a place where key state organizations are engaged in massive attempts to destabilize the world, as we see in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Absolutely.
You know, as I said in the intro, one of the things I do all the time is when I tell people on the left, or even liberals who like to insist they are defenders of free speech and opposition and opponents of censorship, is to purposely seek out those cases where people are being silenced when they're expressing views with which you most disagree.
And that's certainly something I try and encourage people on the right to do as well.
There's obviously a lot of support for Israel on the right, also within mainstream liberal circles as well.
It's a very bipartisan, trans-ideological view in the West.
But for those who are disturbed by what has happened to you, and I definitely include myself among them, what is the current status of your attempt to reverse this decision and how is it that people who are inclined to help you could do so?
So I have an industrial tribunal, it's called, in the UK starting on the 16th of October and there are two weeks booked in the court for the evidence to be heard.
There are thousands and thousands of pages of evidence to be heard.
It's a very document heavy case.
We had to, and indeed the University agreed with this, go back to ask for the limit on evidence to be taken off and as a result there are thousands of pages to go through, statements to go through, and there will be cross-examination, especially of five or six of the University's most senior officials, and I think that would be interesting because it's not a formal court situation, it's a tribunal situation,
Which is much more informal and it will allow us to introduce evidence of the campaign against me which of course is the key to my argument that there was a campaign against me and that the university should just have ignored the campaign because it was politically motivated and we can introduce evidence on that and I'm fighting of course to to get my job back but also to establish the point of political principle
That anti-Zionist views should be protected under the Equality Act in the UK.
That's an act which protects political views and the expression of political and philosophical views, like the expression of religious ideas.
So we're hoping to establish that as a political principle.
And that will be, I think, a valuable way to fight back against the Zionist movement's attempts to criminalize pro-Palestinian speech.
And so I'm hoping that we can establish that principle and that will be a useful precedent.
So the way people can support me of course is through helping me to support my legal fees.
This case will cost tens of thousands of pounds.
I have a crowd funder.
We've already raised quite a significant sum of money, but we need quite a lot more.
And the crowd funder, I hope you can put the link up, but it's the website.
We're going to put the link in the chat below the video if it's too unwieldy of a URL for you to say.
But yeah, we'll definitely put that link up.
And you know, I think every time there is a censorship any decision that ends up being upheld or vindicated, all it does is erode principles of free speech.
And I've always personally thought that if there's any place where we need free speech to flourish in its most absolute expression, academia is the place for that.
That is the place where even taboos ought to be subject to being questioned and disputed.
So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on and talk about this.
This is a case we will continue to follow and to report on.
And for future developments, I'd love to have you back on.
I wish you the best of luck in your battle.
Thank you very much, Glenn.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
Have a great evening.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
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