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Aug. 11, 2023 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:23:30
Biden Demands Billions More to Ukraine—Still Without Meaningful Oversight, Google Faces Historic Anti-Trust Lawsuit (w/ Matt Stoller), & Jack Smith Gets Trump's DMs | SYSTEM UPDATE #128

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- Good evening, it's Thursday, August 10th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, new polling data last week revealed that a majority of Americans, 55%, now oppose further financial assistance from the United States to fuel the war in Ukraine, with a similar percentage believing that the U.S.
has now done enough.
It will likely not surprise you to learn that the views of American citizens do not matter at all to the D.C.
ruling class, either generally or especially when it comes to American wars.
Just days after this polling data was released, and the trend has long been clear that support for the U.S.
role in Ukraine has been eroding steadily among Americans, President Biden today demanded that Congress approve an additional $25 billion to send to arms manufacturers and to Ukraine.
The U.S.
has already authorized more than $110 billion for the war, but the new amounts Biden is now seeking are so large that even Associated Press, when reporting on it, called it, quote, another massive infusion of cash as the Russian invasion wears on.
This is the first time that Biden has sought the kind of additional expenditures for the war that will require congressional approval ever since the Republicans under House Speaker Kevin McCarthy regained control of the House.
Prior to the midterm election, McCarthy, knowing that voters were turning against the war, and more importantly to him, that many of the House Republicans he needed to become Speaker opposed the war from the start and voted no the first time around, pretended that he would be far more restrained than Nancy Pelosi was in allowing more spending for the war, saying, the days of a blank check are over.
But as soon as Republicans safely won that election and the majority that went along with it, and McCarthy was safely elected Speaker, he and his allies, including the pro-war hawks he deliberately put in charge of the key military and foreign affairs committees, began making clear that the House Speaker was, of course, a full-scale and ardent supporter of Biden's war policies in Ukraine.
There is some speculation in Washington now about whether McCarthy will have the political space to maneuver Biden's request to approval in the House.
The New York Times today reported that, quote, Mr. McCarthy said in June that any supplemental appropriation request for Ukraine was, quote, not going anywhere, and that additional aid would have to be worked out in the regular congressional spending process.
But it is hard to remember the last time the U.S.
war machine did not get what it wanted and it seems very difficult to envision that happening here.
We'll analyze all aspects of this new war spending request and the political components to it as well.
Google faces one of the greatest legal threats yet to its massive power.
In a case brought by the Trump Justice Department against the search giant, a federal judge in Washington ruled in the fall that Google must stand trial in order to contest charges brought by the Justice Department's antitrust division and various states' attorney general that its search engine's market dominance is so extreme that it constitutes a violation of antitrust laws and should therefore be broken up.
The trial starts September 12th.
Our guest tonight to talk about all of this is one of the nation's leading antitrust experts, Matt Stoller.
Last week, he wrote about this case under the headline, quote, the first big antitrust trial of the century is about to start.
About that trial, Stoller wrote, quote, Google has maintained this monopoly, the government alleges, not by making a better product, but by locking down everywhere that consumers might be able to find a different search engine option and making sure they only see Google.
Stoller will be with us tonight to examine the potential consequences, which are massive, from this trial starting shortly.
Finally, last night we told you about newly disclosed documents revealing that prosecutors working for special counsel Jack Smith issued a subpoena to Twitter in 2022 demanding that the social media company turn over Trump's private communications on the platform.
Twitter resisted the subpoena to the point that they were fined by the judge.
But not only was Twitter ordered by a federal court to turn over Trump's communications, they were also banned by court order at the request of Smith's prosecutorial team to even advise Trump of the subpoena, which would allow him the opportunity to argue that it was legally invalid or unconstitutional.
We'll dig more in depth into this common yet repressive practice and how it found expression in this investigation to try to render Trump a criminal and to report on one particularly bizarre component of the anti-Trump aspects of this ruling where a judge seemed to approve an argument that the government later on said was invalid and that they made by accident.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
The war in Ukraine continues to drag on without any evident end in sight, indeed.
It has become yet another endless war in the long history of endless wars that the United States seems very happy to fight.
Lots of people in Washington and in the arms industry make a lot of money when these wars happen.
There are also all sorts of benefits to the CIA and to the warfighting agencies within the U.S.
in terms of added budgetary authority and greater powers.
Everybody in think tanks becomes more important because they get to plan wars and talk about wars.
It really excites Washington.
It animates them.
It animates the media.
It produces ratings.
And, of course, it produces a lot of profit as well.
And it all comes at the expense of the American people.
And for that reason, the American people, very predictably, are now turning against the U.S. role in this war.
They have had enough.
We covered last week, or earlier this week, rather, the polling data demonstrating that a majority, a clear majority of Americans, now oppose any further U.S. expenditures for the war in Ukraine.
And in fact, that gap, which is 55-45 pretty clear, would be a lot bigger if not for the fact that self-identified liberal Democrats overwhelmingly support the war.
75% to 25%, by far the biggest demographic group, still in support of this war.
So most Americans are now turning against this war.
They do not want any more of their taxpayer dollars going to this war.
The Congress has already authorized over $110 billion, and there's just no end in sight to this war.
The only possibility, if the United States doesn't withdraw or forge a diplomatic solution finally, is to just keep spending tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollars more to destroy Ukraine, to kill Ukrainians, and eventually probably having to then paying for reconstruction of that country and eventually probably having to then paying for reconstruction of that country through all kinds of private hedge funds and investment funds like BlackRock and JPMorgan and others, which are very excited as well about However,
No matter, public opinion in Jewel makes no difference.
They sufficiently propagandized the public to get the public on board at the start of the war in a bipartisan way.
And the fact that Americans are now wanting to get off this ship does not mean that this ship is stopping to let them off.
In fact, it is escalating in terms of how quickly it seems to be moving.
From the Associated Press earlier today, The headline, quote, Biden will ask Congress for $13 billion to support Ukraine and $12 billion for a disaster fund, an AP source says.
So that's $25 billion.
You'll notice they paired the war spending.
With a disaster fund so that that way anybody opposed to the spending package will instantly be accused of opposing the $12 billion in humanitarian spending.
Here are the details.
Quote, President Joe Biden on Thursday will ask Congress to provide more than $13 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine, another massive infusion of cash, that's the Associated Press' characterization, As the Russian invasion wears on and Ukraine pushes a counteroffensive against the Kremlin's deeply entrenched forces.
A person familiar with the Associated Press said, The last such request from the White House, made in November, was met and then some.
Congress approved more than what the Democratic president had requested.
In fact, you'll recall that in May of 2022, President Biden originally requested an allocation of $33 billion for the war in Ukraine.
Congress received it, arbitrarily threw another $7 billion on, Just lopped it up to $40 billion, just rounded up by $7 billion to $40 billion.
And that was really the only time Congress was required out in the open to approve a standalone expenditure.
That was when every single Democrat, as well as every single Democrat leaning independent, such as Bernie Sanders in the Senate, the entire squad in the House, every last Democrat, every single one of them voted yes.
And as usual, they got enough support from the Republican establishment, from the neocon and pro-war wing of the Republican Party to pass that $40 billion expenditure by a very lopsided bipartisan majority.
They had already approved, very early in the war, $14.9 billion, which they were drawing down rapidly.
So before you even blinked, The United States has spent $60 billion on the war, which is almost equal to the total military budget for Russia for the entire year, which is $65 billion.
So in a matter of three months, the U.S.
blew through $60 billion.
And the same thing happened in November when Biden had made a request, and then the Congress not only approved it, but lopped a bunch of money on top of it.
And the Associated Press says, quote, there's a different dynamic this time.
A political divide in the issue has grown with the Republican-led House facing enormous pressure to demonstrate support for the party's leader, Donald Trump, who has been very skeptical of the war.
And American support for the effort has been slowly softening.
The White House also is expected to ask for $12 billion to replenish federal disaster funds, according to the person, who was not authorized to speak publicly about a request that had not yet been made public, and spoke to the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Note here, just as an aside, this rotted journalistic practice that they just give anonymity to anybody without even bothering to pretend to have a reason for doing so.
The justification here was they were given anonymity in order to speak about a matter not yet public, but obviously the source was authorized to leak this.
They wanted to kind of do a test case.
It's not like some inside the government whistleblower.
This is just a Biden official going and wanting to announce it through the Associated Press and not wanting to be named.
And of course, they immediately grant that anonymity so that government officials can do everything in secret.
Quote, Biden and his senior national security team have repeatedly said the United States will help Ukraine, quote, as long as it takes to oust Russia from its borders.
Privately, administration officials have warned Ukrainian officials that there is a limit to the patience of a narrowly divided Congress and the American public for the cost of a war with no clear end.
As you likely know, we've been reporting on this for a while.
As the public support for the war has been eroding, or softening in the words of AP, the attempt has been made propagandistically to convince Americans that there's this great counteroffensive coming.
And all you have to do is hold on a little longer.
The counteroffensive is going to be this explosive momentum change in the war.
The Ukrainians are going to break through these incredibly entrenched defensive lines the Russians have spent months entrenching and building.
And that was going to finally be what enables the Ukrainians to expel Russians from their land.
Remember, Russia occupies more than 20% of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they have had possession of since 2014.
I don't know how you perceive it, but for me, I have a very hard time envisioning Ukraine driving Russian soldiers entirely out of eastern Ukraine.
All of those provinces in eastern and southern Ukraine that they are now very aggressively occupying, as well as Crimea.
And the problem has become that both sides, Russia and NATO slash the U.S., have asserted absolutist goals as their non-negotiable, uncompromising demands for ending this war.
The Russians have made unequivocally clear that they will never accept being expelled from these territories in eastern Ukraine, which they claim has been used to oppress and mistreat Russian-speaking ethnic Russians, as well as to allow all sorts of Nazi battalions to fill up in that region and to threaten Russia as well with the presence of NATO on their soil.
And meanwhile the U.S.
has said we will never allow this war to end if it means the Russians gain even an inch of Ukrainian territory as a reward for this invasion.
And so the war by design, in terms of the framework that has been imposed, the framework asserted by Western leaders, is almost designed never to end.
And if it does end, it's going to be a very long time before it does.
And Joe Biden is saying, as are the Democrats, that we're going to keep putting money into this war for as long as it takes.
That is, by definition, an endless war.
So this $110 billion, on top of now this $25 billion that Biden is seeking, is just a very starting point for what the U.S.
will end up spending if, in fact, Joe Biden gets his way and continues to have authorization to spend as much of your money as he wants, to fatten up the armed industry, to launder money through the CIA, to pour all this money into the most corrupt country in Europe—a country, by the way,
Where Joe Biden and his son Hunter and his family have not only been aware of the corruption, but participated in it with Hunter Biden making a huge amount of money in Ukraine in order to sell his father's influence and access to his father during the time that his father was vice president and basically running Ukraine.
From the New York Times, which focuses on the political aspects of this request, Biden seeks another $24 billion for Ukraine in test of bipartisan support.
The Times says, quote, The aid request is the first by the President since Republicans took over the House in January, and some party leaders have expressed opposition to spending more to help Ukraine beat back Russian forces.
The request will test whether the expansive American effort to bolster Ukraine retains the bipartisan support it has enjoyed in Washington since Russian forces crossed the border nearly 18 months ago.
Leading Republicans, including President Donald J. Trump, have grown increasingly vocal in expressing skepticism or opposition to more aid for Ukraine.
Quote, the president has reaffirmed that we will stand with Ukraine as it defended sovereignty for as long as it takes.
A strategy that has successfully united our allies and partners and equipped Ukraine to defend itself against Russian aggression.
Shalanda de Young, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, wrote in a letter to Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California.
Mr. McCarthy said in June that any supplemental appropriation request for Ukraine was, quote, not going anywhere and that additional aid would have to be worked out in the regular congressional spending process.
that we can't do this.
Notice there that McCarthy's vow Not to allow any more money to go to Ukraine is purely procedural, not substantive in nature.
That it won't be through this stand-alone budgetary process, but only as part of the regular congressional spending process.
He will allow more money to be spent on Ukraine that way, but just not this way, he said back in June.
We'll see if that holds.
70 House Republicans voted last month to cut off Ukraine altogether, and while that suggests a bipartisan majority remains, It was unclear if Mr. McCarthy would defy such a large segment of his conference.
That's the point.
Obviously, there are enough votes when you add every single last Democrat who presumably still supports spending on this war.
And if one of them gets brave enough to dissent, you have the rest of the Democratic caucus, which constitutes almost half of the House.
And on top of that, you then have more than enough Republican votes in favor of Joe Biden's policy.
It is a very bipartisan war, as they always are.
The question is, the Speaker controls the House with a kind of iron fist.
Not quite as much of an iron fist as Nancy Pelosi had, because as you likely remember, the holdouts to Kevin McCarthy's Speakership extracted a lot of concessions that, to some mild extent, loosened the hold that the Speaker has on how the House functions.
But you still need the Speaker of the House to agree to allow this to come up for a vote In order for it to do so, even if a majority of the House supports it.
And what Kevin McCarthy has said is that he won't allow that, that it's going nowhere.
With 70 people in his caucus saying they want to cut Ukraine off entirely, and remember, the margin that he has to stay as Speaker is very slim.
They have the right to remove him at any time, basically.
And I believe there are enough House Republicans who are steadfast, sufficiently steadfast, in their opposition to more spending.
that they would exercise that leverage if they have to, to prevent McCarthy from holding a vote.
He's in a very difficult position because he personally supports this war.
He personally supports Joe Biden's worth spending.
Of course, Kevin McCarthy wants to spend another $25 billion on this war.
He's made that very clear.
The question is, will the minority of House Republicans, though a substantial minority that oppose this war, exercise their leverage to prevent him from doing so?
Quote, the President's request includes $13.1 billion for military aid to Ukraine in repunishment of Pentagon weapons stocks used for the war effort.
Another $8.5 billion would go for economic, humanitarian, and other assistance to Ukraine and other countries affected by the war.
And $2.3 billion to leverage more aid from other donors through the World Bank.
Just lots of billions of dollars flying around.
The Supplemental Appropriation Request also includes $12 billion for disaster relief, $4 billion for border security, and $60 million for wildland firefighter pay.
The combined $40 billion total of the request will challenge the spending limits that Mr. Biden negotiated with Mr. McCarthy in May.
So note that they're putting a bunch of things in there that make it even harder for McCarthy to block, including border security, humanitarian aid.
There were just these gigantic wildfires in Hawaii that, just in the last 48 hours, wreaked a lot of damage.
Dozens of people have died.
We don't know the exact amount.
They're going to exploit all of that to insist that this supplemental budgetary spending is necessary, but the amounts are so high.
They just negotiated a debt ceiling limit between the two parties, and they're already pushing up against that just with this one standalone bill by itself.
Quote, Dan Caldwell, the vice president of the Center for Renewing America, a right-wing think tank influential among House Republicans and Freedom Caucus members, said his organization would work to try to kill Mr. Biden's request.
Quote, Congress should not spend billions more in support of continuing a war In which there are no vital American interests at stake and where there remains a real risk of nuclear escalation, Mr. Caldwell said.
Oh yeah, you remember that?
The fact that the country against whom we're fighting has nuclear weapons and they considered this war of existential importance to the survival and national security of their country since it's happening right on the other side of their border?
And that Joe Biden himself said, this war has brought the planet closer to nuclear Armageddon than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
So not only are we paying for this war to continue endlessly, we're paying to incur these risks, these massive risks.
And again, over what?
Over the question of who rules the Donbass.
Quote, Speaker McCarthy made clear after the passage of the debt limit deal that he would not support supplemental spending packages like the one the Biden administration is requesting.
Both he and the rest of the House GOP need to keep their promise by not moving this aid package forward.
Now, all of this spending, this wild spending on Ukraine, which isn't accomplishing much.
Ukraine held off Russia for a while.
People found inspiration in that.
But now the Russians, just through sheer might, through sheer superior size and force, are winning the war in the sense that they are occupying Ukrainian territory, the part of Ukraine they said they wanted to secure and protect.
and expel right-wing Nazi battalions from and the like.
And if they're going to be moved from those spots, it's going to be through a gigantic war effort.
Nothing remotely suggests the Ukrainians are near succeeding in doing that.
And we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that will be needed at least every time.
And at the same time, much of the liberal establishment in Washington, including the New York Times that editorially supports this war, is warning that America is spending too much, that it has too much debt, and therefore American citizens need to prepare for significant cuts to things like their Social Security and Medicare.
In other words, we don't have enough money To provide American seniors who are living much longer now with basic subsistence that they rely on to survive.
While at the same time, the same outlets warning Americans to expect these cuts are insisting that we keep spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to fuel this completely senseless war.
Here was the New York Times editorial board in July of this year, just last month.
The headline was, America is living on borrowed money.
Oh, you don't say.
America is living on borrowed money, says the Times.
Quote, borrowing is expensive.
A mounting share of federal revenue, money that could be used for the benefit of the American people, goes right back out the door in the form of interest payments to investors who purchase government bonds.
Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy, the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.
By 2029, the government is on pace to spend more each year on interest than on national defense, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
And that's pretty notable, given that we spend more on national defense than the next 16 countries combined.
By 2033, interest payments will consume an amount equal to 3.6% of the nation's economic output.
Before the pandemic, a decade of very low interest rates meant that even as the federal debt swelled, interest payments remained relatively modest.
Measured as a share of the national economy, the federal debt was roughly twice as large at the beginning of 2020 as it was at the beginning of 1990.
But the burden of interest payments was barely half as large.
The era of low interest rates has ended, however.
The cost of living on borrowed money is rising.
It is imperative for the nation's leaders to chart a new course.
Remember, this is the position of a newspaper owned by billionaire heirs who inherited an enormous amount of money for doing nothing other than being born in a way that let them win the genetic lottery.
And they are telling you they want billions and millions of dollars going to the American War Machine, the arms industry, at the same time they're lecturing us on overspending and the need to prepare for cuts to your parents' way of life.
Quote, both parties said they understand the need for larger changes.
Quote, we're going to do even more to reduce the deficit, President Biden declared in his speech from the Oval Office after Congress voted to raise the debt ceiling.
They just got done raising the debt ceiling and this one thing will push against that debt ceiling.
After Biden said we're going to do a lot to lower the deficit.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, acknowledging the legislation didn't amount to much, said after the vote that he intended to form a bipartisan commission.
So we can find the waste and we can make the real decisions to really take care of this debt.
You know when they start talking about bipartisan commissions and finding waste and fraud and all of that?
That is just an attempt to move their mouth and appear to be saying something when they're saying nothing.
Quote, any substantive deal will eventually require a combination of increased revenue and reduced spending.
Not least because any politically viable deal will require a combination of those options.
Both parties will have to compromise.
Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed and of imposing taxes on the wealthy.
Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of expected federal spending growth, should be on the table.
Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable.
That will require painful choices.
Painful to whom?
Not to the people ordering this editorial to be published.
But the failure to make those choices also has a price, and the price tag is increasing rapidly.
All right, so we're spending way too much.
According to the New York Times, by 2033, we're going to be spending more on interest payments on the debt than even we spend on national defense, which every year is now close to $1 trillion as a result.
People in your family and you yourself need to prepare for cuts to your Social Security and Medicare because we just can't afford this kind of spending any longer.
This very same New York Times, just in February, four months ago, five months ago, published, probably their 20th editorial, urging unlimited US support for the war in Ukraine.
The headline, Putin began his unjust war one years ago, here's what Ukraine needs now.
Isn't that amazing?
They're simultaneously saying that the U.S.
government can't afford to take care of its own citizens, and then also publishing op-eds saying, here's everything Ukraine needs, here's everything we have to give to Ukraine, as though the priority of our government is not to take care of American citizens, but to take care of every other country, starting with Ukraine.
Quote, a year since Vladimir Putin ordered his forces to invade Ukraine, the war is far from over.
It's always far from over.
That's why these are endless wars.
However bravely Ukrainians fight on, and however muddled the performance of Russia's military, Ukraine cannot prevail without continued and substantial Western assistance.
Since the invasion, that has swelled to over $150 billion in American and European spending, and the weapons supplied to Ukraine now include the latest Western tanks and anti-aircraft system.
To strengthen the alliance supporting Ukraine, as the second year of this terrible and unnecessary conflict begins, it is useful to examine why it is in the interest of the United States and other democracies to expend so much wealth And to take so great a risk in confronting a nuclear power.
So they go on and basically recite all the pro-war arguments that...
You're now very familiar with.
It's just shocking to put these two editorials together, which of course the exact mentality in Washington has been for two decades now.
That on the one hand, we're spending too much.
There's no money to clean up waste when a train derails and dumps a bunch of toxins into the drinking water in Ohio.
Or to provide clean water to the people of Flint, Michigan.
All of that.
Where does the money come from, they say.
And whenever there's time for an endless war, it's nothing but we have to spend as much as we need to the very end.
Spend more and spend more and spend more.
Here's what Ukraine needs and wants.
From the very start of this war, it was obvious that this was going to be a war of endless, reckless, drunken spending.
In the reporting I did on what happened when Biden asked for $33 billion for Ukraine in May of last year and Congress immediately upped it to $40 billion, we just put together in the first three months of the war, there you see it on the screen, the flurry of spending that took place almost every other week they were announcing massive new spending commitments for Ukraine.
So here you see the Here you see, let me pull that back up.
Yes, that was my mistake.
I take full responsibility.
February 26th, Biden approves $350 million in military aid for Ukraine.
March 16th, that was just about two weeks later, another $800 million in military aid.
March 30th, not even two weeks later, an additional $500 million.
April 12th, announcing $750 million more in weapons for Ukraine.
May 6th, Biden announces a new $150 million weapons package for Ukraine.
And it's pretty much been like that ever since.
That was sandwiched by the $14.9 billion authorization at the very start of the war.
And then back in May, they were putting another $40 billion onto that package ever since.
Ever since then, they've been spending as recklessly, as aggressively, as frenetically, just without any votes necessary in the open.
This now is a time when they will need a vote if they want this other $25 billion.
Now, as we mentioned, Kevin McCarthy was making all kinds of anti-war noises before the midterm election because he wanted to secure a majority of the House for Republicans, mostly because he wanted to become House Speaker.
That was his longstanding dream.
And he knew that public opinion polls, especially among the politically engaged, were turning against the war.
And there you see the promise he made, quote, no blank check for Ukraine if GOP wins the majority.
This was in October.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy warned Tuesday that Republicans will not issue a, quote, blank check for Ukraine if they win back the House majority, reflecting his party's growing skepticism about financial support for Kiev as it battles Russia's invasion.
Quote, I think people are going to be sitting in a recession.
They're not going to write a blank check to Ukraine, McCarthy told Punchbowl News.
They just won't do it.
It's not a free blank check.
So that was very vague.
It was more rhetorical than substantive in terms of the commitments he was making, but at least it was a vow to reverse what the House was doing under Nancy Pelosi, which was giving Joe Biden not only everything he asked for, but much more.
Almost immediately upon winning the House Majority and then becoming Speaker, Kevin McCarthy sent his pro-war lackeys out into the media.
And it was very notable that he gave the key committee assignments that involved national security and foreign affairs to the most pro-war hawks in the party.
The populace got other committees like oversight, which was important, but it didn't compromise the U.S.
national security state or the U.S.
security state, which as we know is always the most sensitive area.
So in April, just four months after Or three months after McCarthy was elected speaker, one of his closest associates, a traditional establishment Republican, Michael McCaul, who supports the war in Ukraine steadfastly.
If anything, he's been critical of Biden only for not spending more.
And McCarthy made him the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which manages all of these matters.
I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said because it seemed to at least shift a perception of where he is on the issue of Ukraine.
Kevin McCarthy mean anything by no more blank checks.
I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said because he it seemed to at least shift a perception of where he is on the issue of Ukraine.
Let me play it.
I want to play something that Speaker McCarthy said because he it seemed to at least shift a perception of where he is on the issue of Ukraine.
Let me play it.
I think what's happening in Ukraine is an atrocity, and I think Ukraine, not just Ukraine, the world has to win there.
What Russia has done is wrong.
In a phrase that I use at Blank Check, I use that for anything.
I look at every dollar of taxpayers that we would use, but the one thing I know that in Ukraine we have to win, because it also would save Taiwan at the same time.
Are you reassured now, and should the Ukrainians, should President Zelensky be reassured that House Republicans are not going to stand in the way of more aid to Ukraine?
Yeah, I traveled with Kevin, Speaker McCarthy, to Poland, Romania.
He's always believed that this felt this way.
When you were over here, Chuck... He always felt this way, said Michael McCaul.
In other words, everybody knows that he didn't mean what he said before the election.
But no more blank checks.
Of course he's on Biden's side.
Of course Kevin McCarthy, Kevin, who traveled with Michael to Kiev, understands the need to open up the Treasury Department and the purse strings and have the spigot flow to Ukraine without any kind of impediment.
Not only does he, Chuck Todd was trying to imply, oh look, he's seen the light.
And his close political ally, Chairman McFaul said, no, look, he's always felt this way.
He always has known the U.S.
has to support the war until the end.
Let's listen to the rest.
When you talk to, and I've talked to the prime ministers and the presidents of Japan, you know, South Korea, Taiwan, what's happening in Ukraine will determine what happens in Taiwan and the Pacific.
I think the prime minister of Japan going down to Ukraine to signal their support.
And he said himself what happens in Ukraine today will happen in the Far East tomorrow.
I believe the best deterrence to Chairman Xi is a failure for Putin in Ukraine.
So they know they're losing Republican support for the war in Ukraine.
All public opinion polls are showing that.
A major portion of the GOP caucus voted no all the way back in the start of the war and they've only gotten more opposed.
So they know the only argument that they can make that might reach Republican voters Who are hesitant about this war is no, it's not that this war is necessary to weaken Russia, it's that this is the war we need to weaken China, to scare China.
And if we don't defeat Putin and show them and Beijing that we mean business, that we're willing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on war, Then that's going to be a signal to China that we also won't care if they invade Taiwan.
That's the argument they make because they know that Republicans and conservatives are susceptible to anti-China militaristic rhetoric.
The problem, of course, is that Republicans seem not to be affected by that.
They understand that China is a separate question.
And the fact that we might want to defend Taiwan in the event of Chinese aggression has little to do with the fact that right now we're trapped in this quagmire where the only people who are benefiting are the same arms industry and the same U.S.
security state agencies that always benefit in endless war.
And everybody else is suffering, starting with Ukraine and Ukrainians.
We said at the start of the war, we're there to protect Ukraine.
And instead, this policy has done nothing but destroy Ukraine.
Remember two things.
One is that the Ukrainians themselves seem not to want to fight.
That's the reason so many of them are fleeing, risking their own life to get to Romania and other places, even Russia, to flee from the war.
And that's why President Zelensky keeps having to increase The punishment for fleeing, he's fighting with the conscript army, and also shutting down all dissent.
No media outlets are permitted to question the war.
Martial law is declared.
Zelensky said there will be no elections until the war is over.
He's staying in power until the end.
It gives you a sense of how resistant the Ukrainians are as well to being used as cannon fodder in this war.
A lot of the best fighters, the most willing fighters, already are dead, already are killed in this war.
And the people they're using now are just ordinary citizens who clearly do not want to fight.
The other issue is that, and then we're going to get to Matt Stoller in just a second, is that there have been attempts made to attach oversight provisions to where this money is going.
So it's not just that they want to spend Tens of billions of dollars and then hundreds of billions of dollars is that the last time there was a vote to use the Inspector General who has been finding all sorts of fraud and waste and abuse in the war in Afghanistan and the expenditures there, Democrats united and voted no.
One or two Democrats voted yes.
Senator Ossoff of Georgia, Senator Tester of Montana.
On that committee, but you had enough Republicans, including John Cornyn and Lindsey Graham, joining with the Democrats to reject any attempts to impose oversight on where this money is going.
They did a similar thing to Rand Paul's attempt to use the Inspector General in Afghanistan, and they voted no on that as well.
So there's no real provisions of safeguard or oversight about where this money is going.
And so not only is it flying out the door, it's flying out the door in a way that nobody will ever be able to detect.
After we speak to Matt about this really interesting and consequential Google trial with the Justice Department, we're going to return to this briefly just to show you a lot of what has been found when it comes to Afghanistan so that you can get a sense for How this money is likely being mistreated in a country even more corrupt than Afghanistan, which is Ukraine.
So we're in another endless war, started six months after we got out of the last one, which was the one in Afghanistan.
And not only is there no end in sight to the war, there's no end in sight to these spending sprees in the name of this war either.
Matt Stoller is the Director of Research at the American Economic Celebrities Project.
He's the author of the Simon & Schuster book, Goliath, The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
He's worked in various positions in Washington, in Congress.
and elsewhere he's kind of just been around forever, but I believe he's one of the most informed and reliable experts on antitrust law, if not the most reliable one.
He's somebody I always turn to, whose work I read, to stay informed on all matters of big tech monopoly power and antitrust, and there's this trial coming up, as we indicated at the start of the show, in September, where Google faces one of the most significant legal challenges yet to its power and its entire existence And we're happy to have Matt, who's been on the show many times before, back again tonight to talk to us about it.
Good evening, Matt.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Yeah, it's always a pleasure.
So let's start off with just the basics of this trial.
It doesn't get a lot of media attention, even though it has the potential to be one of the most consequential trials in years.
This was a lawsuit initiated by the Trump Justice Department, not the Biden Justice Department.
The Biden Justice Department is continuing it.
And it was brought against Google as well as by various state attorneys general.
Talk about the theory of the case, what the government is alleging against Google.
Sure.
So this is a case about Google search.
So the allegation is that Google is an illegal monopoly.
It has, excuse me.
It has about 90% of the search market and roughly similar amounts of the search advertising market.
And the claim from the Department of Justice, first under Trump, now under Biden, is that it acquired this power and maintains this power illegally.
And specifically what Google does is they pay Apple and Mozilla and Samsung and other entities that distribute browsers through distributed search engines through phones and through browsers, they pay them to put Google as the default.
And then they also own Android, which is an operating system for phones, and they force Google Search to be the default on that as well.
And so in doing so, they make it really hard for anyone else to get into the market.
And since search involves, you know, to make your search engine better, you need to have users who then will give you data and show you what search results work and which ones don't.
Because they're able to exclude anyone else from getting into the market, Then they can exclude everyone else from being able to make quality search engines.
So the basic theory of the case is that Google has essentially bought up all the shelf space for search.
And that's illegal.
I think the central issue in these antitrust cases, not just legally but politically, is where do you draw the line between a company that just becomes very good at what it does and therefore is highly successful, everybody wants to use their product, and then it seems like you're punishing them for being successful if you bring an antitrust case, versus a situation that I think almost everybody across the political spectrum thinks
the law and government should prevent, which is the elimination of real competition or the ability to compete because obviously that disserves the consumer.
It doesn't permit for a free market economy to work because there's no competition.
Google's argument is that it falls into the former, that people can compete with it.
It's just no one's as good as they are.
And there was this recent set of events over the last, say, six months involving this new artificial intelligence product and the one released by ChatGPT in particular that became very successful.
They were associated with Microsoft that integrated ChatGPT into Bing, which people had forgotten existed, but it actually does.
It's a competitor of Google.
And for a while, at least, it seemed like that was revitalizing Bing and fortifying Google's argument that they do have competitors, and those competitors, if they develop innovative products, Can actually attract people to use them instead of using Google.
What happened to those arguments and do you think they demonstrate Google's perspective?
Yeah, no, it's a great question.
So there's a number of issues here.
And philosophically, I mean, and politically, it's so obvious that Google just has too much power, right?
Like, I mean, yeah, I could talk about the legal elements.
But, you know, Scott Galloway is a marketing professor.
He calls Google his god, right?
Because we tell Google everything.
We ask Google everything.
And then engineers at Google decide what information we get.
So this is a huge political problem.
And there are all sorts of consequences to it.
To answer your question about whether it's kind of, you know, they're sort of just better at what they do.
Competition is a click away.
You know, the basic question is why they pay $45 billion a year to different entities, including like $20 billion to Apple, so that they can be the default on Apple phones if You know, if they didn't have to do it, like they're not a charity, so why would they do that?
And the answer is because they're trying to exclude rivals.
I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of like what, you know, actually, one of the things worth mentioning, which is that Google Search has kind of gotten worse over the last five to ten years.
Everyone sort of notices there's more ads, it's kind of harder to find things, but there are different reasons why that might be.
But one of the very clear reasons, and a lot of Googlers who are coming out and saying, you know, I'm leaving Google because it's not a fun company to work at anymore.
They're saying it's not a very good company.
And what you saw with ChatGPT is that Google actually had the AI stuff before anyone else.
They just didn't deploy it because they didn't really see a need to.
It wasn't, you know, they had a monopoly and there's no reason to deploy potentially disruptive technology if you have a monopoly.
So when Microsoft deploys ChatGPT, which I know it's an independent company, OpenAI, but it's essentially, it's like I think 49% owned by Microsoft.
It's essentially part of Microsoft.
They did integrate that into Bing.
And if it were an open market where there was real competition, Then you would expect Bing's market share to go up.
And there was some interest in Bing initially, but because of all of the defaults and all of the screens that are constantly saying, hey, are you sure you don't want to make Google your, you know, your default?
I mean, remember, a lot of people use Chrome.
People use, you know, Google has lots of levers that they can pull.
the market share for Bing has gone right back down to three or five or seven percent or whatever it was.
So there was this kind of like initial interest.
And then what we've shown is what we've seen is that it kind of came right back down.
Now, Google would argue, oh, it's just because our our product is better.
And I think the Department of As you said, anyone who uses the Internet knows that Google is omniscient.
It is ubiquitous.
It's because of all of these levers that you can pull.
And there are some reasons to think that the DOJ is right, but that's the gist of the argument.
So I just want to ask you a couple of examples.
As you said, anyone who uses the Internet knows that Google is omniscient.
It is ubiquitous.
We have been asking Google for help in finding what we want to find, which enables them to know exactly what our interests are.
They control our email in so many ways.
A lot of so many people use Gmail.
There are a couple of examples that we've covered on this show over the past six months, and I'm interested in knowing whether these are relevant to or part of this lawsuit.
One is we recently interviewed the co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, who talked about how This site, Wikipedia, has become systematically biased.
And I mean, I think a lot of people who have pages on Wikipedia can vouch for that in so many ways.
And you can look at various pages and see how glaring the bias is.
And his point was the only reason that really matters is because Google makes sure that Wikipedia is shoved down everyone's throat.
That if you search on Google, your first thing you're going to see is Wikipedia.
So Google even controls the reputations of people, how people are perceived.
And then the other thing is, as you know, Rumble, the platform that we're on right now, has a lawsuit against Google claiming that Google abuses its search power by suppressing any competitors of Google's other platforms.
So, example, if you try and find Rumble videos using a Google search, it will be extremely difficult because Google is algorithmically suppressing Rumble search results because they want to protect YouTube, which is owned by Google.
There's a lot of evidence for that.
If you even just use Google search functions to try and find a Rumble video, you'll see it.
The judge said there's a lot of merit to this claim, at least at first glance, and will allow the case to proceed.
Are those the kind of things that are relevant in the trial?
Or if not, what type of abuse is Google guilty of with its search engine dominance?
How does it negatively affect the user?
So, great questions.
It's actually really interesting.
Google is probably going to face five trials, major trials, over antitrust violations in different areas of its businesses and privacy problems in the next eight months.
And this is the first one.
This is September and October.
You're going to see a trial.
This particular trial, there were some There were state attorneys general who have also been part of the case, and they made claims somewhat similar to the one about Rumble, although they were talking about Yelp and TripAdvisor, what are called vertical search, because everything in antitrust is confusing and stupid, but essentially downstream from Google's monopoly of search, as well as how
Google just controls the internet.
So like with Wikipedia, how they just sort of shape our perceptions, you know, you could see it like today, somebody sent me a story that CNET had to delete thousands of articles just to like, make their results show up bigger and like, So basically, how is Google shaping the Internet?
Those are issues, the judge sort of threw, tossed those issues out of the trial and said, that's not what antitrust covers.
Antitrust is much narrower.
In fact, all we have to, all you can really claim, the government can claim is that Google is excluding rival search engines from the general search market using these default search agreements and using its ownership of Android.
They're trying.
The precedent in the circuit is the Microsoft case when Microsoft was doing something very similar with Internet Explorer versus Netscape.
So it's like it's a narrow it's it's very narrow.
And this is one of the problems of antitrust laws.
It's become much narrower.
But over time, but you are going to see these other cases come forward.
You're also seeing an investigation of Google Maps.
And I think there's a lot of interest in Congress over the basic problem that you're putting forward, which is Google is just really powerful.
And if antitrust can't handle a situation where they can shape our perceptions because one company controls the entire Internet or the experience of the entire Internet or how maybe just the gateway to the Internet, then that's a problem.
And Congress might have to step in.
But then, like I said, the last thing I'd say is the five cases that I mentioned are not the end of the – like that's a lot of litigation.
I mean, the Google executives are going to be spending a lot of time in court.
But you do have a lot of other cases, like the Rumble case, that are going to come down in the next few years.
So I think we will ultimately get to all the problems you're talking about, because fundamentally, Google's just too powerful.
Everyone in the U.S.
knows it.
Everyone worldwide knows it.
So there's all sorts of things that are going to... We're going to break up Google.
We're going to deal with this problem.
It's just that this is kind of like the first major challenge that we're gonna see when lots of people are gonna get put on the stand and just we're gonna we're gonna learn a ton about how this whole how how Google works how the internet works how these gate how the real people who are making decisions I've been making Let me ask about the politics of all this.
The Biden appointee that has generated the most support for me, or one of them, has been his choice to lead the Federal Trade Commission, which is Lena Kahn, in part because she is devoted so much of her scholarship and her work to warning about the dangers of excess power in the hands of big tech.
The Republican Party, conservatives in particular, have made anti-Big Tech rhetoric a central part of their public persona when they go on cable news, when they go on to all sorts of shows, they rant and rave against the evils of Big Tech, and yet
A lot of Republicans, not all of them, some of them support Lena Kahn, some of them support the Justice Department efforts to bring antitrust cases, but a lot of the leading Republicans, particularly Jim Jordan, who on the one hand is so vocal in spewing contempt for Big Tech, all well deserved I think, but then on the other is very hostile to Lena Kahn, regards her as some sort of grave threat, and does a lot of work protecting Big Tech when the spotlight is off and the cameras aren't rolling.
What is going on here in terms of the dynamics of the Republican Party and Big Tech?
Is it just that the only thing they're angry about when it comes to Big Tech is that they're censoring the internet against conservatives as they perceive it?
Or does the Republican Party kind of as a whole have real problems with how concentrated the power of Big Tech is?
I think there's a fight within the Republican Party.
There's a fight within the Democratic Party as well.
And it's almost a generational turnover.
So you have senators and leaders like Josh Hawley and J.D.
Vance and Ken Buck and Matt Gaetz and others who are saying, look, we need aggressive antitrust enforcement because these firms are just too powerful.
And it's not just Google.
It's a whole bunch of firms.
And, you know, kind of the Chamber of Commerce across the economy.
And then you have members of Congress like Jim Jordan and others who are actively seeking to cut the budgets of the antitrust division and the FTC and prevent action against anti-trust action against dominant firms.
And the reason – and they're actually trying to – they're not just trying to prevent the federal government.
They're trying to prevent state attorneys general.
So you have like the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, is very conservative and he's brought one of these five cases.
And Jim Jordan fought against him having a special authority to have the case heard in So there's really what's really going on is an ideological fight within the Republican Party about whether the government should be able to address corporate power itself.
And Jim Jordan's main complaint against big tech firms and against big business in general is that they used to be like part of the Republican Party machine.
And they're not as much now.
They can be kind of like playing footsie with Democrats.
And he's trying to discipline them and saying, no, you're part of our political machine versus like other more populous members of the Republican Party who are saying, actually, consolidated corporate power is intrinsically a problem, is intrinsically a threat to liberty.
And we need to break them up.
So there's a real fight.
I would say that I think most of the Republican establishment is kind of on the side of Jim Jordan.
But that's entirely true.
Like Bill Barr under Trump did bring this suit.
Ken Paxton is part of it.
And then you have a bunch of, you know, you do have some leaders in Congress that are trying to do the same thing.
But the Republican Party really does have a kind of like big corporation, big business addiction that they have yet to kick.
There are a couple of bills that have been around the Senate for a while that have gotten a lot of bipartisan support, including one by Amy Klobuchar and a couple of others that would actually dismantle some of this monopolistic abuse.
And the allegation has been that Chuck Schumer has two daughters who work for big tech.
I believe one of them works at Facebook.
Maybe they both do, or for a lobbying firm that serves Big Tech and he has... And Amazon.
And Amazon, right.
And he has blocked these bills from really advancing and getting a floor vote.
Is that a valid criticism of Chuck Schumer?
It is.
I mean, Mitch McConnell did his part, too.
But Chuck Schumer, you know, promised Amy Klobuchar very publicly last summer that he would give the tech antitrust bills a vote.
And then he just didn't.
And there are all sorts of reasons like why, but none of them have, you know, there's no there's been no argument.
That I can see, aside from he went out to, you know, the West Coast to grab a bunch of money from some of these firms.
And he has, you know, he has a very specific way of seeing politics.
You know, there, I think there's been like, it's not just his two daughters, one of whom works for Meta and one who works for Amazon.
Like a lot of the alumni from his office have gone and worked for, and worked for big tech, like, Dozens of ex-Schumer staffers.
So there are like reasons to think that it's not total good faith here.
But, you know, like we're going to we're going to keep pushing.
I mean, if there's enough political pressure, he will be forced to hold a vote.
But, you know, it's kind of this situation where the Republicans and the Democrats and people like Schumer and McConnell are each giving each other an excuse to not have a vote Oh, McConnell doesn't want it.
Oh, no, no.
Schumer doesn't want it.
And it's like, the truth is, both of them don't want it.
And they're just kind of like blaming the other.
So I think it's, it's a really important point.
And we have this problem where everyone will talk a good game.
But like, really nailing down who's the problem is a little bit like trying to nail jello to the wall.
So last question, as this trial approaches, how excited are you?
Do you have trouble sleeping when you think about it at night?
How are you doing with this trial imminently arriving here?
It's a really big problem.
I'm having trouble sleeping.
I am just, I'm really excited.
And it's hard to even talk to anyone else because of how obsessed I am with this Google trial and no one else is really that interested.
And so it's like, it's kind of socially weird for me.
Well, we're going to keep pretending that we're interested in hearing what you have to say, just to give you an outlet, because we do at the show, stay concerned about you.
And we are always appreciative to be able to talk to you, Matt.
It's always great.
Okay, thanks a lot.
All right.
Have a good evening.
So I just want to return to one last aspect of this new appropriation that Joe Biden is seeking in the $25 billion range for the war in Ukraine.
And that is, I think sometimes it gets overlooked how much abuse and corruption
There was discovered in the war in Afghanistan where money was flying around by the billions of dollars for 20 years in a country where there's not obviously very high levels of structure or oversight and how much of this money just simply disappeared and how constantly the government got caught lying systematically to the American people and that's the reason why even if you support this war
And even if you're happy to see all this money go out the door, that what should really concern you is the way in which, for whatever reasons, so many of the war supporters in Washington keep blocking oversight and monitoring and supervision that to the point where just a month ago or so there was this vote to have some kind of Inspector General
I think one of the things that people have forgotten is we all know the Pentagon Papers, which was the archive that was leaked by the Rand Corporation's Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.
I named, including Bernie Sanders, voted no.
And I think one of the things that people have forgotten is we all know the Pentagon Papers, which was the archive that was leaked by the Rand Corporation's Daniel Ellsberg in 1971.
He had discovered this trove of documents showing the U.S.
government was lying systematically to the American people about the progress of the war in Vietnam.
Internally, the U.S.
government kept saying it was losing, that the best they could hope for was a stalemate.
But publicly, they kept saying, we're winning.
Victory is right around the corner.
We just need another six months.
And the government, the Congress, kept authorizing this money based on these lies.
Notably, there was something very similar to the Pentagon Papers when it came to Afghanistan, which were the Afghan Papers published by the Washington Post, and they were very similar to the Pentagon Papers, in terms of what they revealed about the Vietnam War.
There you see the Washington Post headline, At War With The Truth, in 2019.
And I just want to read you a couple of the key findings of the Post investigation, because somehow this has all been swept under the rug, I think.
In a new media climate that's more subservient than ever to the U.S.
war-making machine and the military-industrial complex, this has gotten a lot less attention than even the Pentagon Papers did at the height of the Vietnam War.
So let's just remind ourselves of what this investigator found, what was found, when some scrutiny was applied to how this money was being spent in Afghanistan.
The war that ended only six months before this, the U.S.
found another war, which was the one in Ukraine, to fund.
Quote, U.S.
officials constantly said they were making progress.
They were not.
And they knew it.
An exclusive post-investigation found, quote, a confidential trove of government documents obtained by the Washington Post reveals that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would never become public, U.S.
officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.
The interviews also highlight the U.S.
government's botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a confident Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan's thriving opium trade.
Since 2001, the Department of Defense, State Department, and U.S.
Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an inflation adjustment estimate calculated by Nedda Crawford, a political science professor and co-director at Brown University.
What did we get for this $1 trillion?
Was it worth $1 trillion?
Jeffrey Egers, a retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers, he added, quote, after the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in his watery grave, considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan.
Several of those interviews described explicit and sustained efforts by the US government to deliberately mislead the public.
They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul and at the White House to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
Quote, every data point was altered to present the best picture possible.
Bob Crowley, an army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency advisor to U.S.
military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers, remember these are Interviews conducted internally and in secret by the U.S.
government, as reported by the Washington Post, given the gravity of these findings, it is amazing how little attention this got, and even more so, how there were no consequences for any of the people who did this.
Quote, surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable, but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.
John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show, quote, the American people have been consistently lied to, constantly lied to.
The interviews are the byproduct of a project led by Sopko's agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Known as SIGIR, the agency was created by Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone.
That is the agency SIGIR.
That found these extraordinary discoveries.
Not that the government was wrong in its predictions, but that it deliberately and intentionally misled the public.
And massive amounts of money disappeared.
That's the agency that Rand Paul wanted to now turn its attention to the war in Afghanistan, or the war in Ukraine rather, given They're rather successful record in exposing corruption of the kind he believes is taking place in Ukraine.
But again, if you're for the war, you should want this more than anything, since you have the most interest in ensuring this money is used for its actual intention and not to line the pockets of corrupt Ukrainian officials or the American arms industry.
And yet?
The relevant Senate committee voted not just on Rand Paul's amendment, but also one offered by Roger Wicker of Mississippi, I believe, to create a separate inspector general specifically for Ukraine.
That one had more support than Rand Paul's bill did, but that also failed.
So why would Members of Congress voting to send hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money, over which they're supposed to be the guardians to Ukraine and a war zone in the most corrupt country in Europe, oppose the kind of oversight that led to so much discovery of lying and abuse and fraud, unless they suspect that something similar is happening in the war in Ukraine.
And they don't want it to be revealed and discovered because that would impede further and erode further American support for this war.
That's the only conceivable reason to oppose this kind of oversight, especially given how often the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, this exact kind of corruption and abuse and waste has been discovered as well as serial lying to the public about the progress of the war.
So we will certainly continue to report every time there's a major new request by the Biden White House.
This is supposed to be the money of the American people who are being told that many of the programs on which they rely for basic assistance cannot sustain and endure because there's not enough money for it.
At the same time, the very people who tell them that want to send huge amounts of money to this foreign war zone that has no one in sight.
We'll continue to report not only on the demands by the Biden administration, but also the efforts so far unsuccessful by the Congress to ensure that the money that's being appropriated actually is being used for its claimed use and purpose.
So last night we did report on this, what I kind of find to be a rather significant discovery that emerged through court documents that Special Counsel Jack Smith, as part of his criminal investigation into former President Trump, served a subpoena on X, formerly known as Twitter, back in 2022, demanding the private communications of Donald Trump on that platform, apparently direct messages that he might have exchanged.
We don't know the specifics of what was sought or what was provided.
But what we do know is that Twitter tried resisting the subpoena.
And in particular, what they were objecting to was the fact that contained within the subpoena was an order to Twitter
Not to disclose to Donald Trump or to anybody else that this subpoena had been served and Twitter's argument was they have a First Amendment right to communicate with their users and to notify their users that they're being compelled to turn over data about the users to the government because there are certain objections such as executive privilege or attorney-client privilege or other legal objections that only the user has standing to raise.
And by denying the user the knowledge that their accounts are being penetrated in, investigated in, gathered and turned over to the government, they deny the user the ability to assert their legal rights.
And that's exactly what happened.
Jack Smith succeeded in convincing a court to constrain Twitter from advising Trump.
Trump had no idea that his private communications were obtained.
And he only discovered now when the rest of us did with the emergence of these court documents.
And this has become a growing abuse.
We talked last night about how the January 6th Committee did the same thing.
They issued subpoenas to various banks and telecom companies to obtain the private data about people who were found to have done nothing wrong other than obtain protest permits to protest in Washington over the 2020 election and the integrity of it.
So they targeted these people for exercising their First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
And then block them from learning about these subpoenas.
All along I questioned the constitutional authority of the January 6th Committee to convene those hearings because we have an executive branch in the Justice Department That is charged with conducted criminal investigations.
What really happened there is that Merrick Garland did not want to bring sedition charges or treason charges and the January 6th committee was an effort to run a parallel criminal investigation led by Liz Cheney in reality and Nancy Pelosi that was designed to put pressure on Merrick Garland to bring those charges which he finally did.
The only The only justification Congress has for investigating American citizens, and this was determined by Supreme Court cases during the McCarthy era that found that Congress had overstepped its bounds, McCarthyite committees that overstepped their bounds in investigating Americans for their political views, is number one, if the investigations are necessary for the enactment of new laws, so in support of congressional lawmaking authority.
So for example, if Congress wants to enact a new law about pollution, they have the right to compel corporate executives to testify before their committees and obtain documents so that they can better enact laws.
That is in support of their lawmaking ability.
That is a legitimate congressional investigatory basis, and that obviously was absent from the January 6th Committee.
They didn't even have a pretense.
of attempting to use the committee's investigation for lawmaking purposes.
And the only other valid justification that Congress has for investigating American citizens is as support for its oversight responsibilities of the executive branch.
There was a little bit more validity to that claim that they were convening the January 6th committee to exercise oversight over the Trump White House in connection with January 6th.
but the reality was that was not really at all They were very focused on what members of the American public were doing in connection with these protests.
The extent to which they talked about Trump was to condemn him.
But that investigation was never aimed at legitimate oversight.
It was aimed at running a parallel investigation.
And as part of that, they not only abused their power by convening, they abused their power by subpoenaing American citizens based on no facts other than they had protested legally.
And then also ordered these institutions from whom they were demanding information to keep secret the fact that they had done so, preventing these American citizens from also exercising their legal rights to object.
We had obtained some of those subpoenas that contain these secrecy clauses, which we published and reported on in 2021.
And all of this, again, comes from the legal framework that was created after the war on terror.
When they scared Americans into believing that the only way they could keep us safe was by instituting an authoritarian framework and claiming all sorts of domestic investigation powers that previously were considered radical and unthinkable in the name of stopping terrorism.
And one of those was that under the Patriot Act, the FBI had now the right to issue what are called national security letters where they don't have to issue subpoenas, they don't need judicial approval.
They could just send demands to private institutions and that only demand those institutions turn over data about American citizens to the FBI without a subpoena or without a court process.
But they're also entitled and often do put a gag order on those institutions just like Jack Smith prosecutors did on Twitter to prevent the people about whom they're gathering information from even learning.
that they're being investigated that way.
That's what makes all of this, I think, so disturbing.
Now, there's one part of what happened here that is almost humorous, if it weren't so revealing of all kinds of abuses of power.
And I think this hasn't yet got a lot of attention.
We know, for example, that the media in the post-Trump era has abdicated their journalistic function in the name of doing everything and anything to stop a Donald Trump.
They lied about the Hunter Biden laptop.
We don't need to go all through that, but we know that the corporate media has essentially repudiated and renounced any limits on what they're willing to do in the name of stopping Trump.
The US security state has done the same.
Big Tech has done the same.
They censored stories incriminating to Joe Biden in the run up to the 2020 election.
But one of the things that has gotten a lot less attention than it deserves is the extent to which the judiciary has also been contaminated by this obsessively anti-Trump fixation, or whether they're susceptible to pressures inside liberal culture.
From colleagues, from friends, from family members to ensure that they always rule against Trump.
If we're going to convict Donald Trump, we want it to be a fair trial.
Not because a judge is too scared to issue a ruling in his favor.
I talked often about how that's a big part of what happened at the Intercept was we did a lot of reporting against Hillary Clinton in the run up to the 2016 election, and the liberal editors of the Intercept who work in Manhattan, who live in Brooklyn, who have to function in liberal circles on the East Coast, spent years being accused of having helped Trump win, and they were determined Not to do that again in 2020 by allowing me, for example, to publish incriminating stories about Joe Biden.
And I watched them abdicate their judicial or their journalistic duties because they were fearful of being stigmatized and scorned.
Social scorn is a big driver for humans.
We crave social approval.
We're social animals.
We instinctively want to avoid stigmatizing and being excluded from decent society.
And the fact that judges are no different than anybody else, they live in Washington, this judge lives in Washington, the one supervising this process, makes her highly susceptible to that as well.
And one of the things that happened was the gag order that Jack Smith's prosecutors wanted had to be justified.
Why is it necessary to Conceal from Donald Trump the fact that this information is being sought.
Why can't you give him the opportunity to have his lawyers come into court and object to these requests?
They had to justify why it was dangerous to allow him to find out.
And because this is something the FBI frequently does, the Justice Department has kind of forms where they just stick in Various paragraphs that they always include to justify gag orders.
They have maybe 8 or 10 different arguments for why a gag order is appropriate.
One of them that they often use is that there's a high risk that the defendant would flee if they learn they're being investigated.
And the Justice Department included that paragraph, that foreign paragraph, in its brief to the judge arguing why The defendant in this case, the target of the investigation, Donald Trump, could not be notified.
And they claim that Trump was a high risk of fleeing, that he would leave the United States if he knew he was being investigated.
Even though everybody knew Donald Trump was being criminally investigated, they were talking about it openly.
He's surrounded by Secret Service.
He obviously hasn't left the country, despite having learned many times that he's being investigated.
It's such a preposterous argument that after the Justice Department submitted it and it went to appeal, they said, look, we withdraw that.
We didn't intend to include that.
That's how ridiculous it was.
But the judge in the case accepted that reasoning when imposing the gag order, even though the Justice Department ended up admitting that it's so ludicrous that they didn't even mean to include it, they said.
So here you see the Appellate court ruling that actually reversed some of the district court's rationale but upheld a lot of the rights of the prosecutor to obtain this information.
And there you see in the highlighted paragraph the following, quote, the district court also found reason to believe that the former president would, quote, flee from prosecution.
That was part of the district court's ruling.
The appellate court.
The government later acknowledged, however, that it had, quote, errantly included flight for prosecution as a predicate in its application.
They do say the district court did not rely on risk of flight in its ultimate analysis, but they did end up accepting that Trump was a risk to flee, even though the Justice Department ended up claiming that they actually ignored it.
There you see Michael Tracy's tweet on this, quote, amazing.
Jack Smith tried to impose a gag order on Twitter by arguing Trump was likely to, quote, flee from prosecution if it came out that his account had been seized.
DC District Court then affirmed The validity of this claim, later the claim was mysteriously retracted as errant.
That doesn't create a lot of confidence that this case is being judicially shepherded with objectivity or competence, does it?
The fact that a claim the Justice Department was too embarrassed to maintain on appeal was one the District Court ended up crediting?
That Donald Trump is a flight risk?
We've been through all the arguments about why these indictments are so dangerous, why they're legally dubious.
The best of the cases so far is the one in Mar-a-Lago about the documents, but that is preposterous.
The idea that people go to prison for recklessly maintaining classified documents when they leak it every day, including the people who go on TV acting indignant about what Trump did here, but that is the best of the case.
This latest indictment is a joke.
But if you're going to, as I said, allow these indictments to proceed, and if you're going to indict the person who was formerly president of the United States and then try and convict them, even when they're leading polls as the presidential frontrunner, you better make sure that process is clean.
This is a very bad start to providing that confidence.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
Because it's Thursday night, as we do every Tuesday and Thursday night, we will now move to our live aftershow on the Locals platform, which is part of Rumble that is for our subscribers.
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That will give you exclusive access to those live aftershows that are very interactive in nature, in fact, The report that we went over today from the Washington Post and the Inspector General's report came from a suggestion from one of our subscribers who participates in the interactive part of the After Show, as did that interview we did the other night with the director of Theaters of War, Roger Stahl.
That too came from one of our viewers.
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