What Real “Democracy Interference" Looks Like: US in Pakistan, Niger, & Ukraine, w/ Darren Beattie. Plus: Twitter Compelled to Hand Over Trump Records | SYSTEM UPDATE #127
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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, starting in 2016, we were subjected to incessant cries from American political and media elites about the evils of Russian interference in our sacred democracy.
By interference, they meant the purchase of some Facebook ads, some Twitter bots, and an alleged hacking operation aimed at John Podesta and the DNC, which resulted in the disclosure of true and revealing information about leading presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
And these same people have never really stopped petulantly complaining about Russian interference.
It is at least a non-trivial factor, if not the major factor, in why so many self-identified liberal Democrats support the U.S.
proxy war against Ukraine.
There were always so many pitiful aspects to this petulance, chief among them the fact that the U.S.
not only has a long history of, quote, interfering in the internal affairs of most other countries, using means far more aggressive and disruptive than some social media bots, but doing exactly that against Russia itself.
Indeed, the U.S.
State Department Openly funded anti-Putin opposition groups under Hillary Clinton's reign at the State Department during the Obama administration.
And while many people will gradually acknowledge, if they're forced to, that the CIA has in the distant past engaged in some fairly nasty coups and other destabilization campaigns, they do so only to imply that all of that unpleasant business is a thing of the past, back in the 50s and 60s before we learned our lesson about such things.
The absurdity of these claims has been yet again proven by two events just this week.
The Intercept today, in a great piece of reporting from two of my colleagues at the Intercept, of whom I've always been proud, Ryan Graham and Murtaza Hussain, divulged a secret State Department cable proving what U.S.
officials have long publicly denied.
Namely, that the U.S.
security state pressured their counterparts in Pakistani intelligence and military to get rid of the nation's most popular politician, Imran Khan, elected in 2018 to be his nation's prime minister.
The U.S.
was enraged in 2022 that Prime Minister Khan declared Pakistan's neutrality in the war in Ukraine, and was even visiting Russia shortly before the invasion for a long-planned visit.
As they so often do, but these days not always, U.S.
officials got their wish in Pakistan.
Khan, in April 2022, less than a month after the State Department meeting, that this document revealed demanding his removal, was removed from power by virtue of a middle-of-the-night, no-confidence vote.
And then he was charged and convicted on dubious corruption charges, resulting in a prison term of three years and his being banned from running again.
Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, Victoria Nuland, recently promoted by the Biden administration to the lofty new position of Deputy Secretary of State, visited the Western African country of Niger this week.
This time, the U.S.
was not on the side of a coup, but rather feigning support for democracy.
Nuland demanded, and she demanded, that Najir reinstate the overthrown president, who has long been viewed by the U.S.
as an ally and partner, and she threatened that country with all sorts of reprisals if they failed to obey her orders about who should run that country.
U.S.
allies and U.S.-trained coalitions in Africa threaten to invade Niger, which would mean a full-scale civil and regional war, especially since its neighbors, who also recently underwent coups, including Mali and Burkina Faso, have vowed to fight for the new military government in Niger in the event that the U.S.' 's allies in Africa invade and try and reinstate the old government who Victoria Nuland is demanding be reinstated.
Even American allies, long-standing U.S.-trained partners in Niger, were extremely defiant when Newland visited, refusing to let her even meet with the country's new military leaders and making clear that their sovereignty is not for sale.
Newland of course is the same person who in 2014 as part of the Obama State Department got caught in a secret tape recording plotting with the U.S.
Ambassador to Ukraine over who should be installed as that nation's president once the U.S.
succeeded in financing the removal of Ukraine's democratically elected president who they had judged to be too close to Moscow.
Newland is also the same person who was Dick Cheney's chief advisor in 2002 and 2003 in helping him advocate and plan the invasion of Iraq.
That she is constantly promoted by presidents of both parties, except when Donald Trump is in office when she disappears, illustrates how much of a premium is placed in Washington and its national security state on changing other nations' governments and interfering in their internal politics with a lot more than some Twitter bots.
We'll examine these new, powerful revelations about both Pakistan and Niger, and then we'll speak with former Trump speechwriter and current investigative journalist Darren Beatty of Revolver News, who just recently interviewed Imran Khan about the U.S.
role in his removal from power and his subsequent criminal conviction.
It's worth remembering that in 2016, Donald Trump explicitly campaigned on ending exactly these sorts of foreign interference operations.
And he won the Republican nomination and then the general election.
And that vow was a major reason the U.S.
security state and its neocon supporters despised Trump and vowed to destroy his presidency.
It is worth taking these opportunities to reflect on what real interference in other countries' democracies actually looks like, who is doing it, and for what reasons.
Then newly discovered documents revealed that prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith issued a subpoena to Twitter in 2022 demanding that the social media company turn over Donald Trump's private communications undertaken on that platform.
Twitter resisted the subpoena to the point that they got fined by the judge for doing so.
And this is the amazing part.
Not only was Twitter ordered by a federal court to turn over Trump's communications, but they were also banned by the court order at the request of Smith's prosecutorial team to even let Trump know of the existence of the subpoena that would have allowed Trump the opportunity to argue that the attempt to obtain his private communications was either legally invalid or unconstitutional.
We'll examine this common yet repressive practice of the U.S.
security state using powers enacted during the Patriot Act and after 9-11 to obtain Americans' private communications without their even knowing about it and how that practice found expression in this particular criminal investigation to try to render Trump a felon and ultimately ineligible to be elected president.
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It will just be immediately sent to your phone or to your email, whatever you tell it to do, to that we are now live on the air.
You can just click on the link and you'll be taken right to the show.
That will help this show, it will help Rumble, which we think is an important free speech platform, and will help other shows on this platform grow as well.
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You can follow us on Spotify, Apple, and all other major podcasting platforms if you rate and review the program and help spread the visibility of the show.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
Ever since he was removed from power, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has given interviews, including with one of our guests tonight, Darren Beatty, in which he has long and emphatically stated that in which he has long and emphatically stated that the party that is the primary impetus for his removal from power
is the United States, and in particular claimed that the United States was enraged as a result of Pakistan's decision under his leadership to remain neutral in the war between Russia and Ukraine and to refuse to side with the United States and with NATO in that war.
Like so many other leaders around the globe, the Pakistani prime minister viewed this war as not a war in which Pakistan was involved, decided Pakistan has a lot of internal problems to which its resources should be devoted rather than being sent to fuel a war that it has no direct interest in in Ukraine or with Russia, and that enraged the United States
to such an extent that, according to him and many statements he has been making, the United States intervened in Pakistan, where, of course, the U.S. has longstanding ties with Pakistani military and intelligence operatives, and insisted upon his removal from power.
Less than a month after the key meeting that he alleged took place between the State Department on the one hand and Pakistani military officials on the other, Imran Khan was in fact removed from power as a result of a middle-of-the-night no-confidence vote and he was then criminally charged in a way that led to his conviction and a prison sentence of three years and he is now banned from running again even though or just because of the fact that he is the nation's most popular politician.
As you might expect, the government of the United States, U.S.
State Department officials, U.S.
National Security State officials, as well as all of their allies in D.C.' 's think tanks and corporate media outlets have scoffed at the notion.
That the U.S.
was responsible for his removal from power, accusing him of being a conspiracy theorist, of trying to distract from his own corruption by blaming the United States, and the idea that this was some kind of absurd joke or fraud became immediate consensus in the United States media classroom and the think tank class, which reflexively defends the U.S.
security state from any kind of allegations, especially when a Democrat like Joe Biden is president.
As it turns out, The Intercept, the media outlet that I co-founded in 2013 that is often the object of my criticism for failing to do reporting like this, did some great reporting today.
The two reporters who appear on the byline are two reporters who are friends of mine and who I've always respected and praised in terms of the journalism that they do, even though I disagree with their political views often, Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussain.
And there you see the headline, which pretty much tells the story, Documents US pressure to remove Imran Khan.
And the sub-headline quotes the diplomat as part of a document that The Intercept got its hands on from the State Department detailing what happened.
Quote, all will be forgiven, said a U.S.
diplomat, if the no-confidence vote against Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan succeeds.
So not only were they demanding Khan's removal from power, they were urging that it be done through exactly the means that less than a month later it ended up being accomplished by.
And here are the key sections of this article.
Remember, When you hear the United States complain about interference by the Russians or other bad countries in our democracy, this, what the United States did here, what it's doing in Niger, what it did in Ukraine, obviously what it did throughout the Middle East in the war on terror, is what real interference looks like and it's often carried out by the CIA under leadership of both political parties and it is a source of many of American problems.
It's why Donald Trump ran in 2016 on a vow to stop all of this.
Quote, the U.S.
State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022 meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister due to his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, according to a classified Pakistani government document obtained by The Intercept.
The meeting between the Pakistani Ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power.
The political struggle escalated on August 5th of this year when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster.
Khan's defenders dismissed the charges as baseless.
The sentence also blocked Khan, Pakistan's most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.
Now, this is, as I've said before, increasingly becoming a weapon in the democratic world.
In 2017, in Brazil, when Lula de Silva was leading all polls, the anti-corruption probe immediately swooped in, arrested him, charged him on what I regard as highly dubious charges, the way that it was done, quickly carried out a conviction, sent him to prison for 11 years, quickly carried out a conviction, sent him to prison for 11 years, declared him ineligible He was barred from running.
That led to Jair Bolsonaro's victory.
And then the reporting we did in 2019 and 2020 revealed that the anti-corruption probe was rife with corruption.
And Lula was then released, permitted to run in 2022, and barely defeated Bolsonaro.
Now, in Brazil, with Bolsonaro remaining highly popular, he barely lost that 2022 election by less than two points, despite having every conceivable anti-incumbent result arrayed against him, including the fallout from COVID like Trump had to face.
He is now banned from running for the next eight years, Bolsonaro is, even though he has yet to be charged by a decree of the court.
This is becoming an increasingly popular weapon.
Of course, that's what's being done to Donald Trump, is they're using the criminal process against him to try and undermine what polls show are his likely chance of being re-elected president in 2024.
And this is what was done in Pakistan to its most popular leader, And it was done at the urging of the United States.
Quote, the text of the Pakistani cable produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan has not previously been published.
The cable, known internally as a cipher, reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed and isolation if he was not.
Now, again, just imagine, remember, all the indignation In 2016 that Russia would dare do something like try and create confusion and anger and interfere in our sacred democracy with some social media bots.
Look at what real interference looks like.
When the country's most powerful government swoops into one country after the next and dictates to them which leader they better have running their country and which leader they better not upon pain of suffering all sorts of reprisals if they disobey and all sorts of rewards if they obey.
Is this the role of the United States government?
Do you elect American leaders to go around using your money to dictate to other countries who should be leading their country?
The document, labeled secret, includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Donald Liu, and Asad Majid Khan, who at the time was Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S.
The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan's party.
Now, let me just stop there and note that, as I'm about to show you, Their reaction to the story in the United States is exactly what you would expect.
Most corporate media outlets are ignoring it because it didn't come from another corporate media outlet and they always like to malign stories or ignore stories if they come from outlets they think have no business reporting on what they think belongs to them.
But even more than ignoring it, the ones who are bothering to mention it, particularly
New York Times reporters and think tank officials in Washington are doing so by sitting online all day maligning this story, lying about who the sourcing was, claiming that it was Imran Khan who leaked the document to The Intercept even though they made clear in their story and then again in response online the reporters did that it didn't come from Imran Khan or didn't come from his party at all but it came from exactly as they said in the story
A member of the Pakistani military and the New York Times reporter who's the correspondent in Pakistan is just sitting on social media lying or claiming the Intercept is lying about their sourcing because he is bitter that he didn't get the story and even more bitter because the primary allegiance of the New York Times is to the U.S.
security state.
You wind up the New York Times And I know a lot of people think they have a bias that is left-wing or liberal in nature that is probably true on culture war issues.
It's definitely true there.
It's probably true on economic issues.
But on foreign policy, their bias is not really left or right.
It's more so subservience to the U.S.
national security state.
The New York Times, of course, was notorious for spreading the lies necessary to sell the Iraq War to liberals.
They do that with every word.
They're mouthpieces for the CIA.
That's principally what they are.
And that's why they immediately reacted to the story with scorn, trying to say it's poor journalism and the like.
All those motives kicked into gear.
The Intercept goes on, quote, The diplomatic meeting came two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which launched as Khan was en route to Moscow, a visit that infuriated Washington.
On March 2nd, just days before the meeting, the State Department official Liu had been questioned at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing over the neutrality of India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan in the Ukraine conflict.
In response to a question from Senator Chris Van Hollen, the Democrat from Maryland, about a recent decision by Pakistan to abstain From a U.N. resolution condemning Russia's role in the conflict, Liu said, quote, Van Hollen appeared to be indignant that officials from the State Department were not in communication Van Hollen appeared to be indignant that officials from the State Department were not in
So the State Department, days before they went into Pakistan and influenced and pressured the Pakistanis to remove Khan, they themselves are being pressured by Democrats in Congress who were infuriated that Pakistan had decided to remain neutral in this war.
Look at how much space and importance this war in Iraq and Ukraine Takes up how much impact and consequence there is for the United States.
We detailed the other night on Monday night that BRICS, the counter alliance to NATO and to the World Bank and to Western-led neoliberal institutions is growing rapidly and it's led by China in large part because of the US obsession with Ukraine and the perception in everywhere except Western Europe That NATO was to blame for this war, that it provoked it, and that this is just another instance of the U.S.
going around the world trying to rule every other country for the benefit of a tiny slice of American elites at the expense of everybody else.
That's how the cost of this war in Ukraine is rapidly increasing for the United States beyond just the tens of billions of dollars that we are constantly spending.
And it even affects the U.S.
and its interference in Pakistan to remove the nation's most popular leader, something that even before this proof emerged, Pakistanis already suspected.
Quote, the day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine.
Quote, are we your slaves?
Khan thundered to the crowd.
What do you think of us?
That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us, he asked.
We are friends of Russia and we are also friends of the United States.
We are friends of China and Europe.
We are not part of any alliance.
That's not tolerated in Washington.
Quote, in the meeting, the meeting between the State Department official and Pakistanis, according to the document, Liu, the State Department official, spoke in forthright terms about Washington's displeasure with Pakistan's stance on the conflict.
The document quotes Liu saying that, quote, people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position on Ukraine.
Aggressively neutral.
If such a position is even possible.
It does not seem such a neutral stand to us." Lou added that he had held internal discussions with the US National Security Council and that, quote, it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister's policies.
They were blaming Prime Minister Khan, who ran in Pakistan and won in Pakistan in part on a platform of Rejecting U.S.
attempts to continue to influence and run Pakistan for its own benefit.
That's how much anti-American sentiment there is around the world as the result of the perception and the reality that the U.S.
is constantly interfering in these other countries' internal affairs the way we got so indignant over in 2016 when Russia did a tiny fraction of all this.
Quote, Lou then blames, then bluntly raises the issue of a no-confidence vote.
Quote, this is the State Department and the meeting with Pakistan shortly before the no-confidence vote.
Quote, I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister, Lou said, according to the document.
Otherwise, he continued, I think it will be tough going.
In other words, get rid of Khan, who we are furious toward because he's keeping Pakistan neutral in this war, and all will be forgiven.
You won't have any more problems with us.
If you don't, if you let him remain in power, you're going to have major problems with us.
What do you think Pakistan's going to do when they hear that from the United States?
Remember, the United States marched into Pakistan without consulting with the Pakistani government and killed Osama bin Laden.
We often dropped bombs and drones on their country and no consultation with that country.
The United States has been providing huge amounts of money and weaponry to Pakistani intelligence for many, many years.
And Pakistanis know that the United States sees Pakistan as their playground.
And that's what Imran Khan was successful in exploiting in order to win.
Just like Donald Trump is successful in telling Americans that their money should not continue to be used to go around the world changing the governments of other countries.
Quote, Lou warned that if the situation wasn't resolved, Pakistan would be marginalized by its Western allies.
Quote, I cannot tell you how this will be seen in Europe, but I suspect their reaction will be similar, Lou said, adding that Khan could face, quote, isolation by Europe and the US should he remain in office.
The State Department has previously, and on repeated occasions, denied that that State Department official, Lew, urged the Pakistani government to oust the Prime Minister.
On April 8, 2022, after Khan alleged there was a cable proving his claim of U.S.
interference, so Khan knew of this cable and has been speaking publicly about it, he just couldn't get his hands on it, State Department spokesperson Jelena Porter was asked about its veracity.
Quote, let me just say very bluntly, there is absolutely no truth to these allegations, Porter said.
Do you see how readily the United States government lies?
Lies to reporters and lies to you.
They were explicitly asked about the existence of this memo because Imran Khan said he knew this memo exists.
He knew about the State Department meeting with Pakistani authorities.
in which the U.S. government demanded his removal.
Reporters went to the State Department briefing, asked the State Department spokesperson whether there was a memo like this and whether it was true, and she looked right at them and said, I want to bluntly deny it.
There's no truth to it.
They just lie as casually as they breathe.
Quote, in early June 2023, Khan sat for an interview with The Intercept and again repeated the allegation, just as he did with Darren Beattie, who we're about to talk to.
The State Department at the time referred to previous denials in response to a request for comment.
Khan has not backed off, and the State Department again denied the charge throughout June and July at least three times in press conferences, and again in a speech by a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Pakistan, who referred to the claims as propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.
On the latest occasion, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, ridiculed the question.
Quote, I feel like I need to bring just a sign that I can hold up in response to this question and say that the allegation is not true, Miller said, laughing and drawing cackles from the press.
Do you see that's how these briefings go all the time?
They laugh along with.
The government spokespeople, as they lie to the only reporters there to do a real job, to do an adversarial job of trying to find out answers, because they crave approval from the U.S.
government.
They see these Democrats who work in the State Department and the Pentagon and the CIA as their allies, their media does.
There's nothing adversarial about that relationship between the corporate media and This is what the spokesperson for the State Department, Matthew Miller, said.
This New York Times correspondent in Pakistan sat online all day mocking the Intercept story and the notion that the U.S. would have done this.
Quote, this is what the spokesperson for the State Department, Matthew Miller, said.
And by the way, needless to say, Matthew Miller used to be an MSNBC personality before getting hired for this Biden administration job.
Quote, I don't know how many times I can say it.
The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or party versus another in Pakistan or any other country.
Oh yes, perish the thought.
Everybody knows.
Can you imagine how much you have to be willing to lie for careerist ends and how subservient
You know the corporate media is that you were able to stand up in a State Department briefing and not only deny that the US wanted Imran Khan removed from power, even though they were demanding it that very month, but then to say, we don't have any preferences for who rules other countries, not in Pakistan, nor anywhere else.
How can you possibly make that statement?
And not be immediately scorned forever.
If we had a functioning corporate media, that's what would happen.
After all, Victoria Nuland, who works at the State Department, got caught on tape in 2014 plotting the removal of Ukraine's president before his term constitutionally ended and replacing him with a pro-US, pro-Western replacement.
She works right in that same building.
Quote, while the drama over the cable has played out in public and in the press, the Pakistan military has launched an unprecedented assault on Pakistani civil society to silence whatever dissent and free expression had previously existed in the country.
Now, you're about to hear that Victoria Nuland this week was in Niger, objecting to the removal of the US ally by military For so, of course, in Pakistan, we demanded a coup, basically, and ruled by the military.
And in Jir, now, because the politician that was removed by the military is a U.S.
ally, we're there waving exactly the opposite banner.
We only care about democracy.
We want democracy restored.
And yet, after the U.S.
got its way in Pakistan, the military officials who now are in control, who are the U.S.
allies, trained by the U.S., funded by the U.S., instituted a massive crackdown on every conceivable civil liberty and civic right there is, free press, free speech, particularly because that's the only way they know that they can tamp down on the fact that Imran Khan is the most popular politician in Pakistan by imposing full-scale totalitarianism in Pakistan while the U.S.
looks the other way.
In fact, that is what exactly the U.S.
said when asked about this, quote, in a press briefing on Monday, In response to a question about whether Khan received a fair trial, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, quote, we believe that is an internal matter for Pakistan.
So when it comes to countries that the US wants to interfere in, like in Ukraine, or Niger, or Iraq, or wherever, Libya, Syria, they'll say, we're the United States.
Of course we have to go around the world.
Engaging in regime change and wars and coups because we care so much about democracy.
We can't tolerate human rights abuses in other countries because we're the United States.
That's our role in the world to save other people from those kinds of anti-democratic assaults.
But then when it comes to US allies, Who are imposing at least as extreme and severe, if not more so, attacks on democratic rights, like Saudi Arabia or Egypt and here in Pakistan.
And then they're asked, how is it that you can continue to provide so much military and financial assistance to Pakistan as they crush all conceivable freedoms, put journalists in prison, kill dissidents?
They'll just turn around and say, that is none of our business.
That's the internal affairs of Pakistan.
That has nothing to do with us.
And the day before, or even 20 minutes before, to justify their interference in a country like Ukraine or Niger or Iraq, they'll say exactly the opposite.
We're the United States.
Of course we're going to go around the world standing up to despots and bullies.
That's what we do.
And that contradiction is so embedded in their discourses.
These lies are so normalized in terms of what the U.S. government tells their friends in the media to the point that if anyone challenges on them that the media itself will tackle along with these government officials, then none of this is even observed anymore.
So we want to show you what the reaction was by the New York Times, by think tank officials to this story.
But before we get to that, we want to bring in the former Trump speech writer who is now the founder and investigative reporter at The Revolver News because he is not only a good friend of the show and someone who always brings very important insight, very informed and thoughtful insight to whatever topic we talk to him about, but he also interviewed...
Pleasure to be with you, Glenn.
And we want to talk to him about that interview and what's taking place in Pakistan.
He's Darren Beatty.
And we are, as always, thrilled to speak with him.
Good evening, Darren.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Pleasure to be with you, Glenn.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
So I know, you know, before we talked about your coming on tonight, we chatted just a very small amount about this news story in The Intercept.
And before we get to your interview with Imran Khan, and of course he was telling you the same things he had told them about this specific cable and about the U.S.
role in his removal and subsequent prosecution, what do you make of this, the publication of this document?
Well, I think it's a remarkable achievement.
It's a real coup on the part of The Intercept.
You know, I have to applaud it.
It's a very important historical document.
It's been the subject of tremendous controversy within Pakistan.
And just for the backstory, I know you covered it, but it was effectively the Biden regime, through a State Department official, giving an ultimatum saying, you get rid of Khan, vote.
Or else, and literally the next day they began the proceedings for this no contest vote that ultimately ended in Khan's ouster and the situation he's in today.
He's actually in prison.
I was one of the two last journalists to interview him before he was ultimately unrested on Clearly phony charges of accepting briberies, which is another issue.
I think it's not to force it, but there are pretty striking parallels between Khan and Trump.
They were both sort of international celebrity playboys in the 80s.
Khan, of course, was a superstar cricket player.
National hero in Pakistan brought them to their victory in 1992.
He abandoned the Playboy lifestyle for politics.
And in the late 2010s, he, like Trump, defeated two entrenched, corrupt political dynasties.
In the US, of course, that was the Bushes and the Clintons, which Trump beat.
In Pakistan, it was the Bhuttos and the Trump families, which he beat.
And he's actually one of the only, if not the only, prime ministers in Pakistan connected to either of those families or the military, which is a big factor in this whole situation that we can talk about.
And like Trump, the deep state got rid of him effectively.
And the deep states in this case are connected at the hip.
We can talk about that.
It's really in the Soviet-Afghan war is really relationship between the Pakistani deep state and our deep state and CIA.
It was forged, and that has always been a strong ship.
So they got rid of Khan, just like they got rid of Trump.
And now both of them are trying to get back into office.
And both of them are facing remarkable obstacles.
In this case, Khan is far ahead of Trump because Khan's facing nearly 200 individuals.
Indictments.
I think Trump is at three or four.
So Trump has some catching up to do.
And like I mentioned, Tom was recently hauled off to prison where he's unfortunately languishing under pretty atrocious conditions, according to my sources.
He's in one of the worst types of cells that they reserve for terrorists.
There's bugs.
He doesn't have Food.
Adequate food.
It's a pretty bleak situation for him.
How this explosive leak of a document confirming everything that he had been saying that...
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to draw too much of a parallel to Brazil because the situation is a lot different.
You don't have the same U.S.-Pakistani relationship going back so many years based on concerns about al-Qaeda and that region and the like.
It is also the case that Jair Bolsonaro maintains a huge amount of popular support.
He now, too, is banned from running for the next eight years.
Even though he hasn't been convicted, he's very likely to be criminally charged.
This is clearly becoming part of the playbook where you take politicians who have popular support, supposedly in a democracy, there's nothing they can do about that popular support.
They batter them, they bash them, they do all the things that used to work, but because nobody trusts their media any longer, And there's independent media, alternative sources of information that can convince people to disregard that.
That no longer works, so they have no more weapons to undermine popular support, and so they resort to this kind of brute force, just saying they're not allowed to run, we're going to charge them with crimes.
Let me ask you, the Intercept story He emphasizes the role that the war in Ukraine played in the United States' desire to remove Imran Khan.
There's always been a lot of tension between the U.S.
and Imran Khan.
There's been suspicions that the United States government has spread, that he had close relationships with the Taliban or with Muslim extremist forces inside Pakistan.
There's always been these tensions, but clearly something elevated it significantly in early 2022.
He was elected in 2018.
Do you agree, and of course The Intercept's saying this because that's what the memo reflects, that the anger in the part of the United States was due to cons, neutrality in Ukraine.
Do you think that that was the precipitating factor?
Well, the precipitating factor was an aggravating factor, but I don't think that was really the story and it's not the core of the story.
And, you know, it's the the the leak of this document, as remarkable as it is, doesn't advance the understanding on what was It was all public.
Now we just have confirmation that there was indeed this document and it's absolutely real, which incidentally should be a little bit embarrassing for Biden and the regime more broadly in the United States, because think about how much they made of this pretty unsubstantiated notion of Russian meddling.
They played up in order to undermine the legitimacy of Trump's victory in 2016.
Now we learn that Biden administration basically said to Pakistan, get rid of your democratically elected leader or else.
And these are the people complaining about the meddling.
But I don't think this is the full story.
The issue with Khan, the State Department individual, I believe his name is Donald Liu, at least the cable acknowledges that Donald Liu is just a messenger boy.
You don't give a item like that unless you have approval from the highest levels.
But I think we can all kind of understand Biden is not really the driving force of anything at this point.
So the question is, who is really the driving force of this regime change?
And I think I've identified the most likely culprit in Victoria Nuland, who is the boss of Donald Liu as a very senior role in the Department as the Undersecretary for Political Affairs.
As you mentioned in your monologue, she has a decorated history as a gene change, color revolution professional.
You know, going back to you and all the way up now to Niger, where she's trying to launch, I guess you could say, a counter color revolution in Niger to restore the Western aligned leader.
But it gets deeper than that because she actually has a specific history with Khan.
You know, Khan has been involved in Pakistani politics for quite some time.
And he was a very vocal and popular critic of Obama's illegal drone strike policies in Pakistan.
And Victoria Nuland, going back then, had a senior State Department position where her job was to defend the very drone strike policies that Khan was so effectively criticizing.
On top of the fact that Khan was one of the most powerful voices generally opposing the Iraq War and the War on Terror, it's probably relevant at least to mention that Victoria Nuland's husband, Reagan, It was one of the intellectual architects of the Iraq war.
So I think she has the motive.
She has the means and the capability and the aggravating factor of Khan's visit to Russia, which was the big deal at the moment, provided kind of the last straw or the pretext to do what ultimately they wanted to do anyway.
On top, I should mention of internal things that had already been brewing between Khan and the military and his intelligence establishment in Pakistan.
So the time was right.
The US officials always wanted because he wasn't a reliable puppet like previous leaders, part of those families in the military.
His visit to Russia was just, you know, the icing on the cake, the cherry on top.
It was served up on a silver platter, it was ready to go, and they did it, and they got another scalp, unfortunately.
You know, it's interesting, the Intercept article mentions that they were able to interview Prime Minister Khan, I think it was a couple of months before you did.
As you said, you were one of the last people to interview him before he ended up being taken into custody.
I remember seeing that you had gotten an interview with him and I remember my instant reaction was it seemed a little odd that that wasn't such a likely pairing and so it seems to me and I haven't confirmed this which is why I'm asking you that
At some point he decided that it was necessary to make himself heard to American audiences, to Western audiences about the role the United States played in his removal from power and now in the attempt to turn Payne to a criminal.
So to the extent that you can without compromising sources or whatever, how did that interview come about?
Did it seem like he was reaching out to people and wanting to be interviewed?
Was it something that was hard to get?
Can you shed a little bit of light on what seems to have been his communication strategy with these interviews?
Um, well, it wasn't a matter of him reaching out at all.
I had, uh, you know, pretty connections in that regard.
And it was not easy, but people within his circle were convinced and trusted me.
And, um, I was able to do an interview, but it was not a product of an outreach, um, program.
And in fact, The interview itself was a little bit strange.
I mean, people, the feedback was tremendous and people were shocked that I was actually, like, respectful and listened to what he had to say and actually, you know, acknowledge that the U.S.
national security state, there are elements of it that are corrupt and so forth.
They weren't expecting that at all.
And I think I'm the only sort of right-leaning outlet in the West that he's ever talked to.
His typical experience with the Western media is extremely adversarial.
And in fact, I mentioned I was one of the last two journalists to talk to him before he was arrested.
The last one was the BBC, which gave a very hostile interview.
And obviously, You understand just being the BBC, you can predict what it would be like.
And so talking to me, actually, he was extremely guarded.
I teed things up for him to be a vociferous critic of the American security state.
And he was actually far more diplomatic than I expected or frankly than I would have liked.
Um, so it, uh, it was, it was an interesting experience in that regard.
Um, he was, you know, clearly a little bit uncomfortable when I brought up the Newland issue.
He was his media strategy to Western audiences until his arrest.
Was actually really to downplay the US involvement and kind of pin it all on the Pakistani side because Understandably, you know, there's yet a lot to lose there, which is another reason frankly why I think I know there are some people Accusing con or PT his part.
It is his party of being the source of this leak which I you know the intercept and They're saying that's not the case.
It's from the military, which I believe.
But also, I don't think it would have been in Khan's interest to do so.
That was kind of his insurance policy in a way, assuming that he had access to it in the first place, which he maybe didn't.
But if he did have access to it, I think he would have held on to it more as an insurance policy rather than And if you look at the history of Pakistan recently, going back several decades, there's a lot of leaders who are assassinated.
There's a lot who disappear.
It can be a pretty brutal place in terms of struggle for political power.
The United States, the CIA, has had their hands very deep into that country.
For a long time, and especially when someone's facing the possibility of prison under very harsh detention conditions.
And as you said, the possibility of many years in prison.
I could see some kind of negotiation where he agrees to leave the country and never come back.
But clearly his life is at risk.
I think that kind of caution is understandable and probably even advisable.
But let me ask you about the kind of political component to this.
I think one of the reasons why it might have immediately viewed this as not an obvious pairing is because Khan has been a controversial figure, I think, in the sense that people on the right would not be immediately drawn to him.
He built his political career, as you said, after leaving this life of a very popular, dashing, handsome, you know, kind of playboy lifestyle, a sports hero, a national hero, and built his political identity on appealing to more devout Muslims in that country.
That's why he was suspected of having ties potentially to the Pakistani Taliban, even the Afghan Taliban, and to potentially even Al-Qaeda, that used to be said.
He was a very harsh critic of the Bush-Cheney war on terror and then Obama's drone campaign in Pakistan and just like the general pro-war hawkish approach that a lot of people on the American right, most of the American right, favored in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I think there's been a lot of transformation in terms of how the American right sees these types of policies, sees the CIA.
Donald Trump ran in 2016.
Basically, railing against exactly these kinds of operations.
I mean, I could hear Trump's voice already saying, why would we have an interest in trying to change the leader of Pakistan?
We could work with him.
Why would, you know, there's no reason we should be devoting our resources and efforts and risking this anti-American sentiment to try and change the leadership.
What do you, how enduring of a political transformation do you see this as being?
The idea that Basically the place for skepticism when it comes to the U.S.
endless war machine, the war in Ukraine, just these kind of regime change wars more broadly, and then the use of domestic law enforcement powers by the FBI, by the NSA, by the CIA here in domestic politics in the United States is really found on the populist wing of the American right.
How enduring of a change do you think that is likely to be?
Well, I mean, it depends all what the change entails.
I will say that I think there's a huge opportunity and a place for a broad reassessment of the Islamic world generally in the aftermath of our understanding of how failed and fake and disastrous the war on terror
Was generally, and I think that the American right with, you know, part of the transformation that Trump has affected in our politics was providing an opening for that kind of reckoning and reconciliation in a way, because, you know, Khan was a great critic of the war in Iraq, and so was Trump.
And so again, there are a lot of parallels.
And incidentally, they got along great.
Um, Trump personally got along great with with Prime Minister Khan and the administrations were fine.
I mean, there was some issue, you know, Trump sent a tweet about Pakistan, but that's just politics.
That's just negotiation because we do give them a lot of money and we expect things in return.
But the relationship was very good.
And then Biden comes in and brings in Newland and you know, everything, everything changes.
So I think that in itself is kind of instructive in relation to this kind of reconfiguration that you've described.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think it's pretty common knowledge that the CIA, the U.S.
security state generally, was very devoted to sabotaging first Trump's campaign and then the Trump presidency, including inventing and concocting Russiagate, which they fed every day to the New York Times and the Washington Post, including by leaking very sensitive top secret information, such as Michael Flynn's call that they intercepted with the Russian ambassador.
Just this endless flow of kind of sabotage and maneuvering.
But often I think we forget to go back to that first step and ask, why is it again that the U.S.
security state, that American neocons decided that Trump was this intolerable enemy.
And I think so much of it has to do with the fact that during that campaign and then into his presidency, he was really questioning the taboos, the core cherished taboos of the CIA.
Whether NATO is still viable, whether we should be doing regime change operations in places like Syria.
And then, of course, just the general disposition of the United States to involve itself and interfere in countries around the world.
And, you know, I think that's going to be a self-perpetuating cycle.
The more the U.S.
security state abuses its power, the more the Trump movement will be against them.
The more the Trump movement is against them, the more they'll continue to abuse their power to ensure that he and nobody like him ever is able to wield political power.
So that's my view on it anyway.
Darren, I know you have to run.
I'm super appreciative of your taking the time.
I hope people will continue to follow your work at Revolver News.
I know that I certainly do.
It's a very important source of information for me and for our audience.
I hope people will also look at that interview that you conducted with Amran Khan in light of this document that emerged.
I think it's timelier and more important than ever, and I'm sure we will have you back on the show shortly.
I hope we do, and have a great evening.
You too, Glenn.
Thanks so much.
Bye, Darren.
All right, so that's Darren Beatty, who did conduct this interview with Irman Khan just a couple months ago, and in that interview, as he said, and I've had this experience myself before, where you kind of know that a political leader thinks something, you want that view to be aired, but for reasons that are
attributable to the fact that people in these kind of positions, you're running Pakistan or you have been very recently running Pakistan, you're facing all kinds of criminal charges, there's a lot of political violence that is often conducted, the CIA is everywhere.
You are going to be careful about heaping blame on the United States with kind of this abandon, especially with the CIA, particularly when you're in a very vulnerable position.
When he was in political power, he was very adamant about doing it.
You saw the speech he gave where he was addressing anger from the United States and Western European capitals about his decision in the interest of his country.
To remain neutral in the war in Ukraine.
And you saw the kind of rhetoric that he routinely issued, which is, who are you to tell us what we're supposed to do?
We're not your slaves.
We're not here to serve your interests.
We're here to serve our own.
And that is a common theme now, a very powerful ethos in a lot of what used to be called the non-aligned countries, or developing countries, or the global south, however you want to refer to it.
It's now really best referred to as part of the alliance led by China called BRICS.
And this mentality is growing more and more powerful because the United States is weakening itself through this war in particular in Ukraine and it is giving a lot of fuel to that narrative and it's also as that alliance grows and there's a more viable alternative for these countries as you're about to see for Niger to tell Victoria Newland, we don't care that you're here.
You can go and call your longtime American friends up if you want and have dinner with them, but you're not even going to meet with the new leaders of our country.
They're not going to talk to you, let alone take orders from you.
And even to have these long-standing American partners say to Victoria Nuland, our sovereignty is not for sale.
I don't care what you threaten.
That really does reflect me.
That's inconceivable even 10 years ago.
And I think that the U.S.
in a lot of ways, as we've been saying, is digging its own grave.
The reaction to this story in many ways is as illuminating as the story itself.
So as I alluded to earlier, to the extent the story wasn't ignored, and I don't think you're going to hear it covered in most corporate outlets, that's their tactic, just ignore things that are confusing to their narrative.
They don't want to tell their viewers that the United States essentially engineered a regime change in a major nuclear armed power.
over anger by Joe Biden and his officials being done in his name over the war in Ukraine.
I don't think that's what they want to tell their audience.
Remember, it's only Russia that interferes in other people's democracies under that narrative, so this would confuse it.
Folks would just ignore it.
But some people who are very invested in Pakistan have talked about it, and they immediately sprung to the defense of the United States government, as they always do that.
That's their driving ideology.
And they did so largely by maligning the journalists at The Intercept and their story, even though The Intercept's story is based on a document that is clearly authentic and that you can go and read for yourself.
And that says exactly what The Intercept's head said, because it describes... It's a State Department document, cabled, describing what happened at this interview or this meeting.
It's their own version.
of what they did and what they said.
And what they said they said is that they threatened Pakistan with all kinds of punishments if they let Imran Khan stand power and all kinds of benefits if they remove him.
It's not that complicated.
And yet here is Salman Massoud, who is part of the Pakistani media, but he also is now the New York Times Pakistan correspondent.
So if you read an article about Pakistan in the New York Times, it's very likely to be reported and written by him, at least in part.
And this is him commenting on the disclosure of this cable by The Intercept.
Quote, taking things up a notch, PTI, the political party, is likely to be behind the leak of their controversial cable.
So The Intercept said it came from the Pakistani military.
He's essentially saying The Intercept lied about its source or that The Intercept doesn't know who its source is.
He even used the word likely because he has no clue where this document came from.
He's trying to imply that it came from Imran Khan in order to somehow malign the document.
First of all, if the document is authentic and it clearly is, who cares where it came from?
That's the same point about the documents published by WikiLeaks in 2016 about Hillary Clinton and John Podesta and the DNC.
Who cares where they came from?
As long as they're authentic, which they were, and they revealed a lot of light about Hillary Clinton.
So, trying to question whether The Intercept is telling the truth about its source is just a way to subtly plant seeds in your mind that you're not supposed to believe this story because it came from Imran Khan and The Intercept knows less about their own source than the guy from the New York Times who sweeps down with this pompous attitude to pronounce even though he has no idea where it likely came from.
And then he says, quote, still the contents don't prove a conspiracy, but merely strained relations.
And that was already known.
It's what they always do.
It's what immediately they did with the reporting of the Twitter files.
Oh, this is about nothing.
This doesn't show anything.
It doesn't show anything wrong.
No one did anything wrong.
It's just dialogue and struggling and grappling with complex content moderation questions.
We already knew all this.
It's a nothing burger.
One of the reporters from the Intercept, not one of the ones who wrote the story, but a different one, said that 100,000 people an hour were reading this story.
It made a huge splash in Pakistan.
And as he asked, Rhetorically, why would so many people be having such high levels of interest in a story that revealed nothing that we didn't already know?
All of these tactics were used when we started reporting the Snowden story as well.
From the United States corporate media, especially the New York Times, that think it has a divine right to get all national security leaks.
They immediately started saying exactly all of this.
These documents don't really prove anything.
They don't show anything.
All they show is the NSA struggling to figure out how to keep the country safe, maligning our sourcing, maligning Snowden, and then mostly saying, we already knew the NSA was doing all the spying.
Really?
We already knew that?
Why did that story become the biggest political story, the biggest journalism story of the decade?
Why did the United States bring multiple felony charges against Edward Snowden and have kept him in exile in Russia for 10 years and counting?
Why did they bring down the plane of Bolivian President Evo Morales because they suspected Snowden might have been on that plane and he wasn't when it was coming back from Russia to Bolivia if Snowden revealed nothing that we didn't already know?
And the fact that it comes from these embittered journalists who have their overarching loyalty to the U.S.
security state because that's where they get their leaks from.
It's such a symbiotic relationship.
If you work for the New York Times and you report on foreign relations or foreign affairs or intelligence or military matters, your day is the following.
You come into the newsroom of the New York Times, your phone rings, It's somebody at the CIA or the FBI saying, I have something for you.
Great, send it over.
They send it over.
They publish it.
They call it an exclusive.
It gets a lot of attention for the New York Times.
They work for these agencies.
They print what they're told to say by them.
That's how Charlie Savage won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 when he was at the Boston Globe for reporting on Bush's signing statements.
Ended up in 2019 or 2020 announcing to great fanfare that the Russians had placed bounties on the heads of American soldiers by paying the Taliban every time they killed an American soldier.
Only for US intelligence to come out and admit there was no real substantiation for that claim.
He got that story because the CIA knew that Trump was trying to withdraw from Afghanistan.
And that was when Liz Cheney was leading the way to prevent Trump from doing that, working with pro-war Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
And right as Trump was trying to withdraw from Afghanistan, Charlie Savage is given the story from the CIA that he goes and prints that's totally fabricated.
Saying that the Russians had placed bounties on the heads of American soldiers so that Liz Cheney the next day could go to the floor of the House and say, how can we leave Afghanistan?
That would be rewarding the Russians.
It's all coordinated and the corporate media is the key player in it.
And the role they play is that they are the propagandists for the U.S.
security state.
That is 100% the role they play.
Especially when it comes to foreign affairs.
It's not about liberal and conservative or even Democratic versus Republican.
The reason they have that loyalty is because that's who gives them their stories.
That's where they get their information from.
That gets them exclusives and gets them on TV.
Without that, if they alienated the U.S.
security state, that would dry up.
They would go to somebody else more subservient still.
It's how Natasha Bertrand flew up the promotional ladder inside the U.S.
corporate media because she demonstrated to the CIA that she was willing to print anything that they told her to say no matter how false it was.
She was the first person to get the story about the letter filled with lies where they claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation.
That's how this game is played.
That's the role of the corporate media in our political culture.
Here is Ryan Grimm responding to this kind of casual musing from this New York Times reporter that they lied about their sourcing.
Quote, I can say with 100% confidence that this claim from the New York Times is completely untrue.
Khan was not our source.
Neither was any other civilian.
Our source is the Pakistani military.
If the Times has evidence to the contrary, publish it.
Otherwise, retract this.
Salman Masood, the New York Times reporter who published that lie, ignored Ryan Grimm's tweet because he sees the intercept and Ryan Grimm is too beneath him.
He's the real expert on Pakistan.
He's the one who talks to the CIA every day.
He's the one who knows what's going on.
And he talks to Pakistani intelligence and military officials, the ones who work hand-in-hand with the CIA.
They serve the establishment.
And if somebody who they view as beneath them on the credentials level publishes something that undermines the interests of their masters...
They'll malign them, but they won't engage them.
And so instead of directly talking to him, he spent the rest of the day either publishing more claims to malign the intercepts reporting or just retweeting people who did the same in think tanks.
So it was just a union of the New York Times and Washington pro-war think tanks immediately coming out in defense of the CIA and the United States government.
Here is another tweet from this New York Times reporter, quote, There was no American conspiracy to remove Imran.
He invented it because he didn't want to name Bajwa.
The headline of the Intercept story on the Pakistan cipher is a tad misleading.
This is, sorry, that was, there was no American conspiracy to remove Imran.
He invented it because he didn't want to name Bajwa.
That was something that Salman Massoud retweeted with no comment.
He then retweeted the think tanker Hussein Haqqani, who has all kinds of ties to Pakistani military and intelligence sources.
The headline of the intercept story in the Pakistan Cipher is a tad misleading.
How does a US diplomat telling a Pakistani diplomat that my government is not like your Prime Minister and relations might improve once he goes constitute a, quote, pressure to remove him?
What?
That's exactly what pressure to remove him means.
When the world's greatest and most powerful country, most powerful country I mean, swoops into Pakistan, on whom Pakistan relies for all kinds of military and financial assistance to maintain national stability, And says, we're really angry with this Prime Minister.
We want him gone.
And if you get rid of him, everything will go back to normal and we'll be fine with you.
But if you leave him in power, there's going to be a major punishment coming, a big price to pay.
At the very least, that's, quote, pressure to remove him.
At best.
That's the most generous way to describe it.
But in order to defend the U.S.
government and say there's nothing here, this is just normal relations between the U.S.
and Pakistan, he said, how is it the case that if the U.S.
government comes and says, hey, we're going to punish you if you keep your leader in place, the one that got elected, that's the most popular leader in the country among the citizenry, we're going to punish you.
He's saying, how is that pressure to remove Imran Khan?
That's exactly what it is, and everybody rational and honest would see it as such.
He then continued his campaign to undermine the story.
I just saw the tweet on the screen questioning the authenticity of the document.
I don't think we have it on the screen, actually, but there is a tweet that he also retweeted Where they pretended The Intercept was saying this, quote, we were unable to verify authenticity of the document, a very authentic case of sensationalistic journalism.
So this is The New York Times all day long attacking and maligning The Intercept for doing the real job of journalists, which is to expose the secret conduct of the U.S.
government that they don't want its citizens to know about.
Here is a tweet from another think tanker, Bruno Masseys, who became a very vocal supporter of the US war in Ukraine.
But in this case, he made an observation that I think is very important and true.
Quote, within three minutes of a major scandal affecting the State Department breaking out, by which he means the Intercept publication of this document showing the role the US played in removing the Pakistani prime minister, three think tanks It's what they do in every case.
correspondent were already on social media saying it was nothing.
For those who knew American society in happier times, it's very disheartening.
Their critical conscience is dead.
It's what they do in every case.
Every time there's a story that they don't report showing misconduct on the part of the government under Joe Biden, there's this swarming of these major media institutions and think tank institutions attacking whoever reports it and claiming that it reveals nothing, that the government did nothing wrong.
That is the role of these think tanks and corporate media outlets, and it's the reason why nobody trusts them.
Now, that is what real interference in another country's democracy looks like.
I'm sure the U.S.
has all kinds of Twitter bots and Facebook programs to disseminate disinformation on Facebook as well, but this is real interference.
This is how the U.S.
does it.
They're the masters at it.
They've been doing it for a long time and they're still doing it.
And it's not just in Pakistan, but also in the Western African country of Niger, which has a long history of being colonized and dominated by France.
The country had a government in place that the United States government loved.
The United States government put military bases there, trained its leaders, trained its military, had all kinds of long-standing connections with the political elite of that country.
And within the last month there was a coup led by military leaders that overthrew the government that had become highly unpopular in large part because of their inability to protect the country against attacks by Islamic extremists and other reasons as well.
And similar coups had just happened in the neighboring countries of Mali and Burkina Faso.
So you have three countries now in that same region that have undergone pretty similar coups, all of which which led to governments more hostile or at least less cooperative with the United States than the ones that they replaced.
So they took Victoria Newland.
Who we've been planning for some time to just devote an entire show to about who she is, what her history is, where she came from, what she thinks, what she's done, how she just keeps rapidly climbing up the ladder of power in Washington while her husband and her family are the highest level neocons who've worked with Bill Kristol for a long time, cheering every U.S.
war.
That's who they sent to Niger to try and Threatened this new military leadership that if they don't immediately give up power and reinstate the US puppet, there's going to be a big price to pay.
They're going to lose all their support.
They're going to lose all their finances.
Who knows what else she threatened.
There is a regional alliance of other countries led by Nigeria, which is the biggest economy in Africa.
That is very close to the United States, threatening war, invasion of Niger if they don't immediately reinstate their prior government.
And the governments of the neighboring countries in Western Africa who have undergone similar coups, Mali and Burkina Faso, have said that they will involve themselves in that war on the side of the new government in Niger if that U.S.-backed alliance Actually does invade.
So there will be a serious regional war.
The region is on the brink of that kind of war.
And I don't know, for me, the last person I would send to try and defuse tensions was Victoria Nuland.
But that's who they sent.
She's fresh off her new promotion.
She's now the Deputy Secretary of State, the number two person in the State Department behind Anthony Blinken.
You heard Darren Beattie say, and I absolutely agree.
That it's almost inconceivable to imagine that the State Department effort to pressure Pakistan to get rid of Imran Khan was not done with the direct supervision and approval of Victoria Nuland.
She is a coup monger.
She goes around the world dictating to other countries who their leaders should and shouldn't be.
That's why Dick Cheney loved her.
That's why people like John Bolton love her.
It's why both political parties, except for Donald Trump, continue to empower her whenever they get into office.
It doesn't matter who you vote for.
You can vote for Republican or Democrat.
She went from Bill Clinton to George Bush to Barack Obama, was out of government when Trump was there, and then back into government at the highest level under Biden.
You can vote for whatever party you want, and unless Donald Trump wins, she's going to be running foreign policy for the United States.
That's what we're always being told.
The two parties can't get along.
They hate each other.
They have nothing in common.
Somehow, Victoria Nuland is beloved by both.
Here is a political article from this week on her trip to Niger where they told her they wouldn't even meet with her.
Quote, Niger coup leaders refuse to let senior U.S.
diplomat meet with the deposed president.
The deposed president is in prison, like Imran Khan is.
If you ask the U.S.
government, they're imprisoning Imran Khan, they're eliminating all civil liberties, they're crushing dissent, they're imprisoning and killing journalists, the U.S.
government will say, that's not our business, that's Pakistan's internal affairs.
Because the U.S.
government likes the government of Pakistan that's doing that.
But when it comes to Niger, we can't tolerate despotism.
We can't tolerate an attack on civil liberties.
We want to visit this president who's in prison because he's our friend.
They refuse.
Quote, they were quite firm about how they want to proceed, Victoria Nuland said.
A senior U.S.
diplomat said coup leaders in Niger refused to allow her to meet Monday with the West African country's democratically elected president, whom she described as under, quote, virtual house arrest.
Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland also described the mutinous officers as unreceptive to US pressure to return the country to civilian rule.
That's exactly what they did in Pakistan, but the opposite.
Pakistan had civilian rule, and now they have military rule, and the United States government demanded that that happen.
And now they're pretending in Niger to be offended by that.
Quote, they were quite firm about how they want to proceed and it is not in support of the constitution of Niger, Newland told reporters.
She went to that country and she started accusing them of, you're not following your constitution.
Everything you're doing is wrong and we're angry about it.
We're the United States and you better change what you're doing or you're going to face our wrath.
Newland characterized the conversations as quote, extremely frank and at times quite difficult.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, that's diplomat speak for we got into a huge argument and it produced nothing of any consequence or value because we couldn't agree.
Nuland spoke after a two-hour meeting in the Jair's capital with some leaders of the military takeover of a country that has been a vital counterterrorism partner of the United States.
In speaking to Hunter leaders, Nuland said, she made, quote, absolutely clear the kinds of support that we will legally have to cut off if democracy is not restored.
I just want you to think about this for a second.
Victoria Nuland is saying that under US law, if there is a coup in any other country, whereby a democratically elected leader is removed and replaced by military rule, she can't do anything about it.
The law says that the US has to stop giving aid to that country.
And yet, in Ukraine, Victoria Nuland got caught demanding and engineering the removal of that democratically elected president, and in Pakistan, the State Department, of which she's a part, engineered a coup.
They demanded that the democratically elected civilian leader be removed and replaced with a military junta, and promised that if you do that, you will get all the rewards of US assistance.
What happened to the law when it comes to Pakistan that says if there's a coup, the United States is legally barred from giving aid?
Politico goes on, quote, if the US determines that a democratically elected government has been toppled by unconstitutional means, federal law requires a cutoff of most American assistance, particularly military aid.
I mean, just the double standards are just so glaring.
They're so glaring.
But they never have to account for them because if you are a journalist, one of the fringe, marginalized journalists who goes to the State Department or the Pentagon briefings or the White House briefings and confronts them on this, all the other journalists will laugh you out of the room.
They'll laugh along with the spokesperson.
There's that African reporter, I believe his name is Simon Becta, who has been going to the press briefings with Karine Jean-Pierre and asking very adversarial questions and the press corps hates him.
They've yelled at him before, they've demanded he apologize to her, they want to take away his press credentials.
Being adversarial to the US government and its spokespeople under Joe Biden is impermissible.
It turned Jim Acosta into a celebrity.
He wrote a best-selling book depicting himself as being Julian Assange.
He put a big picture of himself on the cover.
The price of telling the truth in Trump's America.
But now, if you don't go and do any of that, you're considered a loser.
Because that's not what real journalists do.
Here's the Wall Street Journal article from today that focuses on one particular general in Niger who has long been a favorite of the U.S.
government.
They thought they could use their long-standing relationship with him to basically make clear to the military junta that it's in their interest to do what Victoria Nuland demands.
And he stuck his middle finger up at them.
Whether that's because he No longer feels pressure to obey U.S.
demands or because he believes it's in his own personal interest to side with the new leaders of Niger is unclear, but the polling we showed you that was published by The Economist makes clear that the most trusted country in Niger is not the United States or France or China, it's Russia.
And the Wagner Group and Russian operatives are all over Africa and have succeeded in getting a lot of these countries on their side, both in terms of the war in Ukraine and beyond, to the point where traditional U.S.
allies are now laughing in the face of Victoria Nuland and saying, we don't care what you have to offer or what you threaten.
The Wall Street Journal article, at the center of Niger's coup is one of America's favorite generals.
Brigadier General Mosasa Salou Barmal, long courted by Washington as a partner against Islamic extremism, has emerged as the main diplomatic channel between the U.S.
and the junta.
Can we put the article up on the screen, the text of the article?
What stung perhaps more sharply were televised images of one particular man, Brigadier General Mossal Salmou Barmou, among the coup plotters.
Barmou is a guy that the U.S.
military has courted for almost 30 years.
He is a guy the U.S.
sent to Washington, D.C.' 's prestigious National Defense University.
He is a guy who has invited American officers to his home for dinner.
He's a guy in charge of elite forces crucial to stemming the flood of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State fighters across Western Africa.
Quote, Brigadier General Barmoh, a U.S. defense official said just a few months ago, is the guy.
In the wake of the military revolt, the U.S.
has suspended its training of that country's forces and cut some other military assistance to Niger.
Should the State Department formally declare the uprising a coup, American law would require further rejection of military aid.
The U.S.
has vowed to continue food and other humanitarian assistance.
Barmou is well aware the coup could cost him critical combat support, no more joint training, tactical advice from the U.S.
Green Berets, or American drones sending real-time surveillance.
If that is the price to pay for our sovereignty, then let it be, Barmoo wrote to the Wall Street Journal a few days after the coup.
He didn't respond to further questions for this article.
That is the United States' most reliable ally in Niger, saying, we don't care what you have to offer.
Our sovereignty is not for sale.
This is really a reflection of declining US standing in the world.
And so much of it is due to their obsession with the war in Ukraine, but a lot of it is to do with the fact that this kind of interference in the internal affairs of other countries on every continent on the planet for many, many decades now has created so much anti-American sentiment.
Imagine what they hear when the United States constantly stood up in 2016 and 2017 and said, how dare the Russians interfere in our sacred democracy?
That is something that countries do not do to each other.
That makes sense to the press corps and to a lot of followers of the Democratic Party.
It's for domestic consumption that propaganda is.
It's laughed out of the room almost in every other country on the globe, at least outside of Western European capitals.
Here from The Intercept, that's another good article in July about the coup in Niger.
Niger coup leader joins long line of U.S.-trained mutineers.
So it's talking about how a lot of people the U.S.
funded and trained and groomed to be U.S.
allies are now turning against it.
Brigadier General Moussa Sargal Barmoua, who trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, helped oust Niger's democratically elected president.
A U.S.
official tracking the coup, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, confirmed his relationship with the U.S.
military and said he was probably not alone.
Quote, I'm sure we will find out that others have been partners, have been involved in U.S.
engagement, he said to the other members of the junta, noting that the U.S.
government agencies were looking into the matter.
U.S.
trained officers have conducted at least six coups in neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali since 2012.
They have also been involved in recent takeovers in Gambia, Guinea, Maritana and Niger in 2023.
Quote, we trained to standards, the laws of war and democratic standards, said the US official.
There are foreign military personnel.
We can't control what they do.
We have no way to stop them.
This is, from the beginning, one of the reasons why I was so disgusted with this narrative about Russiagate.
There were so many reasons, beginning with the fact that there was simply no evidence.
That the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow, that I knew it was incredibly dangerous to create a framework where the two countries with the biggest nuclear arsenals on the planet couldn't speak to each other because of immediate accusations that any American speaking to a Russian official was guilty of treason.
That's what Michael Flynn came very close to going to prison for, calling up a Russian official.
That's how they changed this climate in Washington.
To make it so that communication, which is crucial to avoiding war, was basically off limits.
But a major reason is because I can't think of anything more audacious than hearing the US political and media elite class, the ruling class in Washington, feign anger over interference in democracy when the United States has been driven at its core.
That's been the linchpin of foreign policy for decades.
We played you before many times.
I was going to play it again, but just in the sake of time, the audio where Victoria Nuland got caught on video plotting who was going to replace the Ukrainian leader in 2014.
We showed you last night the video of Joe Biden in 2018 at the Council of Foreign Relations boasting About how he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired who was investigating Burisma, which is paying his son.
And then once that prosecutor was gone, all investigations of Burisma were magically resolved.
That is interference.
Here is a video from a Democratic Senator Chris Murphy in 2014 on C-SPAN.
Remember, the U.S.
government, if you were to go to the State Department briefing or the White House briefing, As a real journalist not someone who works for corporate media and say how can the US claim Ukraine is democracy when the United States played a vital role in the removal of that country's democratically elected leader in 2014 or how can you object to Russian interference in our democracy when we interfered in
Ukraine democracy, they will laugh at your face and get the media to laugh with them and tell you that you have no idea what you're talking about and that none of that happened.
Just like they denied the existence of that memo that The Intercept today published describing their role in removing the Pakistani Prime Minister.
And yet, and I know this has been forgotten, in 2014, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who was somewhat new to the role at the time and didn't know how to lie and hide as well as he does now, was extremely open and candid, probably to the point that he infuriated everybody.
He had visited Kiev with John McCain and pledged U.S.
support for the anti-government protesters and then went on CNN and spoke very openly Pridefully, in fact, about the vital role the U.S.
played in removing the Ukrainian leader.
Let's listen to what he said.
This buddy is from McLean, Virginia.
Independent line for Senator Chris Murphy.
Hi, I just have a few points, and thank you for allowing me to call C-SPAN, by the way.
Hello?
You're on, go ahead.
Oh, hi.
Yeah, so I'll just have three quick points, and then I'll take the answers off the air.
Isn't it true that Yanukovych was elected for the first time in 2010 for one five-year term?
That elections were scheduled for 2015?
The second point is, why is it okay for foreign ministers from other countries to show up during protest movements, let's say in Ukraine, like the foreign ministers of Poland and Germany, and support the protesters against the current government there?
Wouldn't it be something similar to the foreign ministers of, let's say, Mexico and Canada showing up Uh, during the Occupy Wall Street movement and saying, yes, we agree that your government is corrupt.
And the third point is, why isn't the West and America talking about the fact that a large, or a significant portion of the Ukrainian opposition right now is made up of far-right politicians, including from the party FORDA, which openly is fascist and xenophobic, and they said that they don't want to join the EU because they consider the EU to be a bunch of gays and Jews, just as well as they say that they don't want to join the imperialist Moscow regime.
First of all, isn't it amazing to listen to a question like that and then realize that it is extremely rare for any question like that to be posed to leaders of the Democratic Party or members of the bipartisan War Party in Washington.
Every one of those three questions was extremely well reasoned and based in known facts.
They're all difficult to answer.
They all point to the obvious flaws and lies embedded in the U.S.
narrative about Ukraine.
And I can't think of one time when I heard somebody on CNN or the Washington Post or the New York Times or NBC News pose those questions to one of the members of the Washington ruling class.
It's just a random member of the public calling into C-SPAN.
I really do believe that if you just pick someone randomly off the street who is reasonably attentive to American politics, he'd be far more likely to become informed by listening to what they have to say than by turning on corporate news and hearing employees of media corporations Talk about those same issues.
They would aggressively misinform you and mislead you.
That's the kind of question that every journalist should be asking.
Let's listen to what Senator Murphy said in response.
Let me take all those very quickly one at a time.
You're right, Yanukovych was elected and I mentioned this before.
I understand the difficult position here, which is that Yanukovych was elected and we are not in the business of encouraging First of all, do you hear what he's saying?
on the streets against elected leaders because we ultimately think that elections, as you mentioned, are the place in which you should settle your differences.
The issue here is that Yanukovych lost his legitimacy to govern when he used force to try to break up these protests.
And the United States didn't go on to that square in any meaningful way.
What do you think the, first of all, do you hear what he's saying?
He's saying, yes, Yanukovych was elected democratically.
and His term under the Constitution goes to 2015, but we decided, the United States did, that we wanted him removed because we declare he lost his legitimacy when using violence against protesters who were causing all kinds of instability in Kiev, funded by the United States.
What do you think the United States government would do if it had anywhere near That kind of a protest movement sweeping the United States, demanding the removal of the American president before his term was up, financed and funded by American adversaries with leaders and officials of those adversary countries coming to Washington and telling the crowd, we stand with you and we will finance you and support you.
Obviously, not only would the U.S.
government use violence in that case to break up those protesters, but most Americans don't think they should.
And yet Chris Murphy says, yes, he was elected, but we decided he lost his legitimacy and therefore it was time for him to go.
These are the same people!
Who, two years later, were going on television and looking in the camera and saying, we are enraged that Russia interfered in our democracy because that is not what responsible, ethical countries do.
Listen to the rest of his answer.
I understand the difficult position here, which is that Yanukovych was elected and we are not in the business of encouraging rebellions and revolutions on the streets against elected leaders because we ultimately think that elections, as you mentioned, are the place in which You should settle your differences.
The issue here is that Yanukovych lost his legitimacy to govern when he used force to try to break up these protests and the United States didn't go on to that square in any meaningful way until The President tried to break up the peaceful protests.
That's why Senator McCain and I went, and we certainly got a lot of grief from people asking why two U.S.
Senators are going to the square to support a protest movement against an elected government.
We did that because we think that there were human rights and civil rights that were violated there, and we've always stood up for that.
And again, I think that answers your second question as to why you had foreign ministers and foreign leaders who were on that square.
It was because we're standing up for the idea that people should be able to lodge protests against their government.
You are right that there is an element of the opposition that has some real radical ideas and there is an element of antisemitism.
that was present on that square.
I will tell you from having been there, if there were 500,000 people there, maybe a couple thousand of them represented that viewpoint.
And so by and large, this movement completely rejects those radical and prejudicial ideas.
And I have confidence that this new government is going to be inclusive and going to be tolerant and it will be part of our job, I think, I think, as members of the Foreign Relations Committee, to make sure that those kind of more radical elements don't have a seat at the middle of the table as the coalition government goes forward.
I mean, they just speak like colonial masters.
It is.
How do they condition these people to think this way?
He's on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
He got elected by the people of Connecticut to represent them in Congress, to serve their interests, and he immediately gets to the Senate and starts irrigating to himself the right to dictate when other leaders of other countries who were democratically elected have sufficiently lost their legitimacy.
To make it such that the United States has the right to go in and engineer the removal and pick the successive leader?
This is exactly the mentality that has subsumed the Washington ruling class for so long and continues to do.
It is not a thing of the past.
Here is just one example if you actually think that the real way interference happens is the way the Russians did it with fake Twitter and Facebook profiles.
From The Guardian in 2014, they revealed that the United States created an entire quote, Cuban Twitter, a whole fake Twitter to lure Cubans in and then disseminate information to them that would stimulate and motivate them to go overthrow the Cuban government.
No matter what you think of the Cuban government, In what conceivable way is the role of the United States to go in, spend its resources to try and change the government of Cuba?
The government, the population of Cuba has been starved for decades because we have an embargo on them.
It didn't remove the government of Cuba.
But this is what the United States goes around the world doing all the time.
And they not only do it to Pakistan and Ukraine and Niger and so many other countries, but they even did it to Russia in 2020.
Here is from the Fletcher Center for Strategic Studies.
The title is Where the U.S.
Sees Democracy Promotion, Russia Sees Regime Change.
And this is about the fact that the State Department under Hillary Clinton openly financed anti-Putin protest groups in the name of spreading democracy.
That's real interference in another country.
That was a major reason Putin didn't like or actually hated Hillary Clinton.
Quote, in the aftermath of the revelation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election, Russian President Vladimir Putin rejected those claims and accused the U.S.
of interfering in Russian elections instead.
Notably, he claimed that the U.S.
U.S. everything is claimed.
Notably, he claimed that the U.S. helped aid protests against the 2011 Duma elections and in 2012 against his re-election as president.
As evidence, he cited pronouncements by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that there should be an investigation into electoral irregularities.
He also pointed to then-U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul's meetings with civil society groups and opposition political parties at the U.S. Embassy during his first week in Moscow, which led Russia's state-controlled television to claim McFaul was sent to, quote, to Moscow to orchestrate a revolution against the Russian regime.
Take a look at Michael McFaul's Twitter program.
profile or any of the interviews he's given on NBC News over the past three years, and you will see someone completely deranged and obsessed with changing the Russian government.
Of course, that's what the United States was doing, interfering in the Russian elections and interfering in Russian internal politics at least as much, and I would say far more so than Russia was accused of doing in 2016.
You could go onto the U.S.'s government's own websites and just see them spending money as part of these USAID programs.
Spending and giving money to and financing Russian opposition groups.
Quote, more recently, USAID and the National Democratic Institute funded GOLUS, a civil society organization that engaged in extensive electoral monitoring to expose fraud during the 2011 Duma elections in Russia.
This included a $51,000 grant for voter education and a $50,000 grant to mobilize election monitoring, which led to roughly 3,000 election monitors being trained to operate in 30 regions throughout Russia.
These revelations were instrumental in helping mobilize the large protests against Putin in 2011 and 2012 and contributed to what Putin interpreted as encouragement for the protests against the electoral results by Secretary Clinton.
This is an indisputable record of the United States Having democratic elections in the United States where you go to the polls and decide who you want to represent you in order to serve your political interests and serve your economic prosperity and the needs of your family and govern your country and the communities in which you live.
But the United States government acts as an imperial power in the world.
It goes around the world picking and choosing which governments ought to rule all these other countries and everybody knows it except for the US media and the people who trust them.
Here's the Guardian in December 2016 as a reminder of what Donald Trump campaigned on.
Donald Trump, quote, we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes.
He vowed that repeatedly through 2015 and 2016.
Including not just during the campaign, this is referring to a speech he gave in Fayetteville when he was the president-elect.
He had already won the 2016 campaign.
President-elect in Fayetteville declares focus on destroying ISIS hours after Barack Obama dismissed false promises of bombing terrorists into surrender.
That's a Trump.
He said throughout the campaign that his vision was we should not use military force or military influence or military power or the resources of the U.S.
government to change the regimes of other countries.
We should only use military force to kill our enemies, which he said was ISIS and Al Qaeda.
Remember, he said, I'm going to bomb the shit out of ISIS during the campaign.
So he drew this distinction between, we should use our military to bomb and kill enemies of the United States who are actually threatening the United States and our national security.
And obviously, that was what Obama was already doing, bombing ISIS and al-Qaeda and tons of other civilians all throughout the Middle East, throughout his presidency.
Trump wanted to do more, and he did do more.
He escalated those bombings.
I didn't agree with that.
I criticized it.
It was very reckless.
It killed a lot of civilians.
But that was what he promised to do in the campaign.
But the other side of it was, that's the only time we're going to use military force.
We're not going to go around the world engineering regime change operations.
Here's what the article said, and I think a lot of this has been forgotten on purpose.
Quote, Donald Trump has laid out a U.S.
military policy That would avoid interventions in foreign conflicts and instead focus heavily on defeating Islamic State militancy.
Quote, we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn't be involved with.
The President-elect said on Tuesday night in Fayetteville near Fort Bragg, military base in North Carolina, he vowed a strong rebuilding of the United States military, which he suggested had been stretched too thin.
Instead of investing in wars, he said, he would spend more money to build up America's aging roads, bridges, and airports.
But he also wanted to boost spending on the military to help pay for the buildup.
Trump pledged to seek congressional approval for lifting caps on defense spending that were part of sequestration legislation cutting spending across the board.
Quote, we don't want to have a depleted military because we're all over the place fighting in areas that we shouldn't be fighting in.
It's not going to be depleted any longer, he said.
Trump used similar rhetoric during the election campaign when he railed against the war in Iraq.
Unusually for a Republican, Trump not only loudly expressed his dismay at George W. Bush's 2003 intervention, but falsely claimed that he opposed it at the time and accused Bush of lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
Trump has long expressed his skepticism about U.S.
foreign interventions, an activity that he has labeled, quote, nation-building.
He told The Guardian in October 2015, quote, we're nation-building.
We can't do it.
We have to build our own nation.
We're nation-building, trying to tell people who have had dictators or worse for centuries how to run their own country.
Assad is bad, Trump said of the Syrian president.
Maybe these people could be worse, meaning the people we're trying to Replace.
So we talk a lot about how the US security state viewed Trump as this mortal enemy, how they did everything in their power to sabotage him, including abusing their powers for interference in our domestic politics.
And the reason for it, one major reason, was because he was saying things like this, in a way that no other presidential candidate who got close to the White House Has said for decades that our posture of endless wars, of dictating to other countries who should be running them, of real interference in the internal affairs of other countries is not in our interest and we should stop.
And he's saying that again now.
Here is Trump in a warning that he gave about neocons and warmongers who continue to dominate American politics and the dangers that they have engendered in Ukraine and beyond through this constant desire to control the world through the kind of interference The Intercept exposed today was happening in Pakistan.
World War III has never been closer than it is right now.
We need to clean house of all of the warmongers and America's last globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Industrial Complex.
One of the reasons I was the only president in generations who didn't start a war is that I was the only president who rejected the catastrophic advice of many of Washington's generals, bureaucrats, and the so-called diplomats who only know how to get us into conflict, but they don't know how to get us out.
For decades we've had the very same people such as Victoria Nuland and many others just like her obsessed with pushing Ukraine toward NATO, not to mention the State Department support for uprisings in Ukraine.
These people have been seeking confrontation for a long time, much like the case in Iraq and other parts of the world, and now we're teetering on the brink of World War III.
And a lot of people don't see it, but I see it, and I've been right about a lot of things.
They all say Trump's been right about everything.
None of this excuses.
They all say Trump has been right about everything.
Is in any way the outrageous and horrible invasion of Ukraine one year ago, which would have never happened if I was your president, not even a little chance.
But it does mean that here in America, we need to get rid of the corrupt globalist establishment that has botched every major foreign policy decision for decades.
And that includes President Biden.
Whose own people said he's never made a good decision when it comes to looking at other countries and looking at wars.
We have to replace them with people who support American interests.
Over our four years in the White House, we made incredible progress in putting the America last contingent aside and bringing the world to peace.
And now we're going to complete the mission.
All right, so there's a lot you can say about that.
There's a lot of things that happened during the Trump administration that conflicted with that vision.
Probably Trump's greatest flaw as a president and as a leader is his vulnerability to being manipulated by people who flatter him.
And then he ends up empowering them, even though they are completely against the ideological framework he says he wants to defend.
That's how Mike Pompeo ended up running the CIA and the State Department, despite being a classic warmonger hawk and neocon.
It's how people like John Bolton ended up in the administration, even though Trump says he liked to use Bolton as this crazy dog that he got to show other countries to scare them so that then he could then facilitate peace deals.
Now, you can say, he almost got the U.S.
There's no denying a simple fact that I happen to regard as extremely important.
Donald Trump is the first American president in decades not to involve the United States in a new war.
That's just a historical indisputable fact.
Now, you can say he almost got the U.S. involved in a war in Iran, but he didn't.
You can say that John Bolton was trying to engineer regime change in Venezuela, which is true.
And then that didn't happen.
And Trump concluded that Bolton was a scam artist and grew this newfound respect for Nicolas Maduro because he was able to resist those regime change operations.
So the government of Venezuela was not overthrown.
Trump once said, when asked, look, if I wanted to overthrow the Venezuelan government, we would have used what was called an invasion to do it, and I didn't.
So part of Trump's failure to follow through on this vision was in part due to the fact that he has character flaws as a leader and a person.
Part of it is due to the fact that he was not very sophisticated in understanding how Washington worked, and they were able to run circles around him sometimes.
There were stories about how the military and the CIA would just ignore his orders, including removing troops from Syria, and that was applauded.
Those people were called the adults in the room and they were cheered for subverting Trump's orders.
There was this military rule.
They just would ignore the civilian commander-in-chief's directives.
And then part of it was he's a politician and was doing a lot of trade-offs.
So I'm not saying this was the perfect vision that Trump ended up fulfilling.
Far from it.
But even to voice something like this, That warmongers are in charge of all political parties, that the reason the United States is suffering in terms of the quality of life of American citizens is because we're a globalist who want to go around ruling the world through military force and through starting new wars to benefit neocons and to the arms industry.
Even just saying that is a gigantic threat to the US military-industrial complex.
That's why no leaders say it.
Chuck Schumer was right that everyone knows not to do what Trump does to confront the U.S.
Intelligence Agency because, as he told Rachel Maddow, they have seven, six different ways to Sunday to get back at you.
And that's what the Trump presidency was.
And not just the Trump presidency, but the post-presidency as well.
He's facing three criminal indictments in a country that has long had as its religion the idea that former presidents don't face criminal prosecution.
And I'd be shocked if that number doesn't climb as the election approaches.
There's likely an indictment coming in Georgia, maybe a couple of other places.
So you see what happens to political leaders who challenge the establishment.
As Darren Beatty said, the parallel between what's done to Trump and what was just done to Imran Khan, who also challenged the deep state of Pakistan, which is linked to the deep state of the United States, and the way in which the United States
As we now know, thanks to great reporting from The Intercept, played a major role in engineering Imran Khan's ouster and his subsequent imprisonment, is what they do to people in so-called democracies if they make the mistake of challenging establishment orthodoxies while maintaining high levels of popular support.
That's what Donald Trump did, it's what Imran Khan did, and look what's happening to both of them.
And the main reason why the U.S.
security state and neocons decided early on that they couldn't tolerate the threat of Trump is because he was going around saying things like this.
He was threatening the linchpin of American foreign policy and American economic interests, which is imperialism and militarism, and doing the real kinds of interference in other countries' politics, not the kind that Russia was accused of doing in 2016.
In 2016. Now.
So speaking of the attacks on Trump.
And the ongoing reprisals against him.
There was a story today.
That we wanted to cover tonight.
But in the interest of time, we're going to go ahead and put it for tomorrow that we prepared to report on.
It's actually a story that we could use another day because it involves some complicated legal issues.
But the essence of it, which we will just tell you and then report on it more in depth tomorrow, is that as part of Jack Smith's criminal investigation into Donald Trump, The prosecutorial team under Jack Smith issued a subpoena to Twitter requiring Twitter produce the private communications that Donald Trump had on Twitter's platform, namely direct messages.
And not only did they require Twitter, when Twitter objected and the court approved the subpoena, to turn over these private communications, they imposed a gag order on Twitter.
Twitter was barred from even telling Trump They were forced to turn over Trump's communications.
Twitter raised the objection that this gag order violates the First Amendment right because as a company they have the right, they said, to communicate to their users when the government is trying to force them to turn over data about the users because in part that will let Donald Trump or whoever user is subject to the target of these subpoenas to raise objections.
Trump could argue there was an executive privilege claim or an attorney-client privilege claim.
That Twitter doesn't have standing to raise on its own.
So if you are able to issue a subpoena and get private data and private communications about somebody without their even being told, generally when subpoenas are issued, the target of the subpoena is notified so that you can have the ability and the opportunity to go into court and object.
It happens all the time.
But in this case, Twitter ended up getting fined several hundred thousand dollars for dragging its feet in turning over the material.
And they were barred, prohibited from even telling Trump that the subpoena had been issued.
So he had no idea that Jack Smith was getting his private communications until he was deprived of the opportunity to object.
And this has become an increasingly common practice among the U.S.
security state.
The Patriot Act, for example, allowed exactly this sort of thing.
Where it enabled the FBI no longer to use subpoenas.
They can just issue what are called national security letters.
They write letters directly to financial institutions or communication companies demanding information, private information, about American citizens.
And as part of that power they have, where there's no court involved, they can order the financial institutions or the social media companies to keep it a secret.
And if you violate that order, You're guilty of crimes and you can be fined and punished.
The ACLU, there you see it on the screen, in 2007 challenged the gag order under the Patriot Act as unconstitutional, but the court upheld its constitutionality.
The January 6th Committee, and this is something that we exclusively reported, we got our hands on some of the subpoenas that they issued to financial institutions.
And I reported it when I was at Substack.
They identified the people they wanted to investigate based purely on the names that appeared on protest permits.
So Americans exercising their First Amendment right to express grievances and to petition the government for a redress of those grievances.
They used the list of names in order to decide whose bank records and phone records they wanted to subpoena.
And they issued those subpoenas to those bank institutions and to those telecom carriers and barred them from telling the citizens that they were getting their private data.
So the citizens also lost the right to object.
This has become an increasingly common and abusive practice.
And the fact that it was done by Jack Smith against a former president of the United States, the first instance we know where they actually obtained Donald Trump's private communications in a way that barred him from going into a court and asserting all kinds of rights shows you just how extreme they've become.
And it's always worth remembering why.
It has its roots in ideology, and in policy, and in particular Trump's being in opposition to the primary weapon of the United States, security state, the national security state, and the military industrial complex that profits from it, which is this constant obsession with going around to other countries and Using military force in wars or other kinds of pressure campaigns to dictate to them who should govern and lead their country.
And they do it in democracies and they do it in semi-democracies and they do it in every other kind of country.
And it's not something the United States used to do in Guatemala or in Iran in 1953 or in Central America in the 1980s.
It still happens to this day.
When the United States would carry out coups in other countries as part of the Cold War, every single time that it would happen, the U.S.
media would depict the change of government as being in advance for democracy, because the United States was always on the side of democracies.
So if the United States would engineer a coup, the CIA would engineer a coup against a democratically elected government during the Cold War, the New York Times Time Magazine would come and say that the people of that country heroically overthrow their corrupt communist rulers and democracy is restored, even though it was the CIA removing democratically elected leaders and installing military regimes in those countries that took orders from the CIA.
And when those changes of government would happen, and people inside those countries would say, we think the United States and the CIA were involved, they were laughed at and mocked.
Because it took years for the evidence to emerge that that's exactly what happened.
The New York Times would say, so-and-so in this country is claiming the CIA is involved, but that's just a false conspiracy theory designed to distract from his corruption or to rally the country around him by claiming falsely that the United States was involved.
So it always seems like it's a thing of the past because everything the CIA does is in secret.
We don't get the evidence until much later.
That's what makes the intercept story so important.
It's what makes what's happening in Niger so important is that it gives us the evidence now.
We can see it in basically in real time.
The way in which the United States, not in the 1950s and 60s, but to this very day, continues to do exactly the sort of thing that Donald Trump ran for president based on a promise to end.
And you see what's happening to Donald Trump because that's what happens to opponents of the deep state.
And all of these things link together in so many ways.
And that's the reason why I end up spending two hours on our show tonight, why it's already past nine o'clock and we're still going on, because these are very complex issues.
And because the vision that we're presenting to you is so contrary to what the established media presents, Noam Chomsky has talked about this before, the value of concision, that television before cable was structured, and it still basically is, where everything you say has to be wrapped up into two or three minute short spurts of information because you have to speak between commercial breaks.
And that's designed, or has the effect at least, of shielding establishment pieties from critique because if you want to go on television and just spout establishment pieties, Russia is evil.
The war in Ukraine was Putin's fault.
Every claim like that, the Russians interfered in the 2016 election, all of that, you don't need any evidence to present because it's the thing the corporate media says every day, so people just assume it's true and nod their head.
But if you want to present a dissenting perspective, if you want to negate What corporate media and the establishment forces it serves are claiming every day you need time to develop your case.
If you make these claims, people are going to want to see evidence for it.
And it takes time to present that evidence, but you only need to present evidence if you're challenging establishment orthodoxies, not if you're repeating them.
And that's one of the reasons why I always found internet journalism to be so liberating because I know I'm a columnist for this newspaper in Brazil called Folha, which is the largest newspaper in Brazil.
It presents itself as the New York Times of Brazil.
And the only reason I'm a columnist is because they need a lot of traffic and my columns generally generate controversy and give them what they need.
The columns get published in their print edition, and it has, as a result, extremely severe space constraints, and I find it very difficult to make the arguments I want to make, given those space constraints, because oftentimes, in fact, almost always, I'm saying something different than what the rest of the media is saying, and so I need the space and time to present the evidence for it, because it seems so strange to people to hear, and they want evidence for it, and they want an explanation.
And that's what's so liberating about internet journalism is that it doesn't have those space constraints.
And being able to do this show, we do do some ads, but we try and keep them to a minimum.
And we don't have to be off the air at any specific time.
So it gives us this opportunity to delve into these topics in the way that we did tonight.
And they are intricate and they are complex.
But I know there's always been an audience, and there's the audience numbers for this program, both podcast numbers and the live show, demonstrate that there's a big appetite for people who want to spend the time and devote the attention span necessary to really delve deeply into these issues.
And that's why I find this show gratifying to do, because so often these individual stories connect to a common theme.
And that's certainly true of American behavior in Ukraine, in Niger, And it's true of the reprisals that are being imposed on Donald Trump for saying all of this and objecting to it.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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