INTERVIEW: Rand Paul on Endless Middle East Wars, the Border, & More. PLUS: Gonzalo Lira Sr.—Father of “Assassinated” American Journalist—Demands Biden Be Held Accountable
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7:00 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
In so many ways, it is accurate to say this.
Before there was Donald Trump, there was Ron Paul.
So many of the winning themes Trump invoked in his 2016 election campaign, especially his arguments that the U.S.
foreign policy community was deeply corrupted and that its doctrines of endless war and regime change wars were serving the interests of a handful elites at the expense of ordinary Americans, We're also the central themes of Ron Paul's GOP presidential runs in both 2018 and 2012, campaigns that shocked the establishment for how much support from the Republican voting base they attracted.
Paul's campaign was a preview of Trump's in so many ways, including how virtually the entire stage of establishment candidates viciously attacked Paul, while the party's large donors and lobbyists who filled the debate halls viciously viewed Paul.
Booed him!
Only for him to find large levels of support in the reddest parts of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Ron Paul's son, Rand Paul, was elected to the U.S.
Senate from Kentucky in 2011 and is now serving in his third term.
There is no doubt that Senator Paul is closer to his father's heterodox and anti-interventionist foreign policy views than almost anyone in the Congress.
He's the polar opposite of his fellow Kentucky Senator, Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell.
Senator Paul has been an outspoken opponent of Obama's regime change wars in Syria and Libya and Biden's war in Ukraine.
He has vehemently denounced the abuses of the U.S.
security state, tirelessly advocated for a pardon for Edward Snowden for exposing the NSA's illegal scheme of warrantless domestic spying.
Demand the right of dissent on the U.S.
government's pronouncement and policies on COVID, sometimes getting censored while doing so, and in general has sought to expose the domination by D.C.
of the deep state and the military-industrial complex.
Late last week, we sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Senator Paul about the ongoing wars in Ukraine, Gaza, and the Middle East.
The likelihood of further interference by the U.S.
security state in our domestic politics as we head toward the 2024 election.
The growing censorship regime of online political speech.
NYU neocons and their various cousins are so eager to drive the U.S.
to start a war with Iran.
At a time when the Congress is debating war policy and struggling more than they have in years to find a way to deliver billions more to keep various wars funded, and at a time when opponents of Biden's war policy in Ukraine have been utterly vindicated, Senator Paul is the ideal person to discuss the unfolding events in Washington and the changing political dynamics driving them, and we are excited to show you our conversation with him.
Then, one of the most under-covered outrages of the Biden presidency and its war in Ukraine was the way in which an American journalist and critic of President Zelensky, Gonzalo Lira, was twice arrested in Ukraine for the crime of criticizing their Ukrainian president.
His government, the American government, did nothing to help their citizen.
In July of 2023, Lira posted a video to social media imploring the Biden White House to help him, warning that he was about to be arrested again for criticizing Zelensky, and he said this time he would be killed in prison.
Just last month, Lira's prediction tragically came true.
In January, his family was notified by the U.S.
consulate.
The consulate said that the prison hospital in which Lira had been hospitalized advised the consulate that the generally healthy Lira, at the age of 55, had contracted pneumonia in prison and then died from it.
Lira's father, the Chilean economist Gonzalo Lira Sr., has been demanding answers ever since.
The U.S.
government refuses to speak to him or his family, and nobody has provided him with any information about how and why his son died in a Ukrainian prison.
He is also our guest tonight as well, where we will speak to him about all of the suspicion and sinister circumstances surrounding the death of his son in the Ukrainian prison, a death that he places the blame for squarely at the doorstep of the Biden White House.
Before beginning the episode, a few programming notes.
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Because I'm traveling the We won't have our after show on Tuesday and Thursday, but we will be back live on Monday, February 19th, and we'll then continue our Tuesday and Thursday shows.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
Senator Paul, it's great to see you.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us.
We appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, Glenn.
Absolutely.
So let's start in the Middle East, since there are a lot of wars and conflicts going on, even by U.S.
standards.
We are financing Israel's war in Gaza.
We are involved in bombing Yemen without congressional approval.
We're bombing multiple targets in Syria and Iraq that we say are affiliated with Iran.
If you look at polling data, Pretty much for the last decade, Americans overwhelmingly want to be done with Middle East wars.
Candidates who run for president always claim that that's their goal too.
And yet we seem to always find ourselves not in fewer and fewer wars in the Middle East, but more and more wars in the Middle East.
Why is that?
You know, even when there's a success like in ISIS and destroying ISIS, and we were a big part of that, we never come home.
And so recently when people said, well, what should we do?
They've attacked, you know, a hundred different places where we have troops in the Middle East.
And my response is, why do we need a hundred different places in the Middle East?
But I think they asked the wrong question.
They keep asking, what are we going to do to retaliate?
As if the retaliation ends it, it actually often begins a cycle of retaliation and then retaliation.
But the question we really have to ask, and this question I ask repeatedly, what good is 50 men and women in barracks in some remote part of Syria?
I think we're in 10 different places in Syria, but not more than 100 or 200 people in each place, and I keep asking the question, who goes to war with 200 people?
They're ineffectual, they're not militarily strategic to do anything, but they end up being a a target.
I mean, Iran can't attack us over here.
Iran's proxies can't attack us over here.
They can attack us when we're in close proximity to them.
And so it's of no value.
I think no military strategic value to be in all these small little locations all over the Middle East, but in the end, it ends up being sort of a tripwire to draw us into more and more conflict and And you ask, why are we still there?
Why does it never end?
I think because it's set up as a schoolyard debate, where if you shrink away from it, you're thought to be cowardly or you're thought to not be strong enough in pro-America if you're willing to remove troops.
And you saw what happened.
Trump tried to take 200 troops out of Syria, and the machinery, the military industrial complex machinery, went crazy on him to remove 200 troops.
And in the end, he backed away.
And I said at the time, 200 troops is of no value in the middle of Syria, other than being a target.
So this is something that obviously doesn't really break down along party lines.
You have a Democratic president, a Republican president, members of both parties in the Senate, with whom you serve in the House, seem to support these policies.
And what I want to get a sense of, there's obviously always been an idea that the U.S.
has to be in the Middle East because of access to oil, but these countries have made clear they're very willing to sell oil to the United States without us having to have military bases there.
Is the reason that we continue to deploy all these bases and put our troops in harm's way, is that because of an ideological belief in Washington that that's really something the United States should be doing?
Is there a profit motive that is driving this?
What is the reason that Washington continues to do this for decade after decade?
You know, I think the economic argument was stronger at one point in time.
Oh, we have to protect Saudi oil because we depend on Saudi oil.
None of that's really true anymore, and I don't think those arguments hold water as much.
But the argument, I think, is still the simplistic argument that we must make America, we must make the world like America, and we have the might to do it if we don't do it.
China will do it, or the Soviet Union will do it.
And these arguments date back even into the Cold War, so the strongest proponents of intervention overseas are people like Mitch McConnell and people like Chuck Schumer, who are older products of the Cold War and still thinking as if the Cold War still exists.
But, you know, the argument's not a new argument.
I can remember maybe 20, 30 years ago reading a book by Jonathan Quitney, who wrote a book, Endless Enemies, and it was just about all the people we supported.
During the Cold War, we would support you just because you were anti-Soviet.
So if you were anti-Soviet, but you were a dictator that killed your own people and didn't have elections, oh well, no big deal as long as you're pro-America and anti-Soviet.
That sort of argument is somewhat gone, but it's still the same sort of argument that we have to be there or China will be there or the Soviet Union will be there.
And also they think they're making the world better.
They think somehow the world's gonna be a better place.
But it turns out in the end, so many of the things we do have unintended consequences.
I mean, the unintended consequences, if you think Iran is a problem, Iran's more of a problem now that Saddam Hussein's gone since he was a counterbalance to Iran.
So most of the things they do, even in practical real-world circumstances, end up maybe having the opposite effect of what they think they intended. - So you mentioned Iran.
I began writing about politics in 2005 and that was the same year when a lot of neocons who were very much in favor of the war in Iraq, but a lot of people in Washington who weren't neocons were as well, and there started to be this push to do what we did in Iraq and then do it in Iran, there was this notorious quote that real men don't stop at Baghdad but go on to Tehran.
There was kind of this fixation on the part of certain factions in Washington to have the U.S. go to war with Iran and change its government.
Here we are 18, 19 years later, and just in the last month alone, we've heard people like Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley demanding that the U.S.
go and bomb Iran directly and bomb them hard.
There's a lot of support for that now in the wake of this attack on the base in Jordan.
What is behind the fixation in particular to have Washington go and start a war with Iran, which is, you know, three times the size of Iraq, a much more formidable military?
What is behind that?
I think they are naive in the sense that they think people or the pro-Western sensibilities and the pro-freedom sensibilities of the people of Tehran would be made more to our liking or more supportive of these causes or more supportive of being more like America once bombs are dropped on them.
I mean, does somebody propose there's ways of bombing Tehran without bombing any civilians?
This is sort of the problem that you have in Gaza as well.
Israel's mad, there was a terrorist massacre, and yet the more civilians and the more of the city that is destroyed, the more there inevitably leads to a longstanding problem.
I mean, the problem doesn't go away, it doesn't get better, the problem actually gets worse and worse and worse.
I remember being in Israel in 2013 and meeting with Netanyahu, and I suggested to him, I said, Or allow Gaza to build.
There's a lot of Arab money.
Allow them to build a port in Gaza.
And, you know, he said, we're worried about weapons.
And I said, well, why don't you have joint security, kind of like we had in Panama for a long time, where the U.S.
and Panama provided the security for the Panama Canal.
Why don't you have joint security for a 10-year period or something with the port and see if you can allow them to achieve prosperity in Gaza.
And Netanyahu's sort of droll response was, they have a port in Israel.
And it's like, well, I mean you can believe that, and you can say we're going to be safe by doing that, but you have perpetual enmity that never goes away, and then you have to live in perpetual danger as well.
But one thing I was struck by, well, Netanyahu wasn't very open to discussing any new ideas.
I found that the people I met there, and watching the news, that there was a much greater plurality of discussion, and a much greater give and take, and opinions were open over there, because One, they can't call you anti-Semitic if you're in Israel and you're Jewish and you disagree with the Likud party.
Over here, if you disagree with the Likud party, somehow you're anti-Semitic.
And that's a real problem to debate in our country, but the debate in Israel is actually much more open and full of vigor than the debate is in our country.
There's this CIA doctrine called blowback that has been around for decades that basically says one of the costs for having the United States go around the world bombing a lot of countries, using our military, financing other countries' wars, it seems so basic and yet if you point it out people get very angry, is that Eventually, the people in those countries who we bomb, who we enable other countries to bomb, where we impose dictatorships, are going to get angry at you and they're going to want to do violence back to you.
It's a natural human instinct.
It's part of the cost of all these deployments.
Your father talked a lot about that in the 2008-2012 presidential primaries, and he was mauled by sort of the Rudy Giuliani's and Mitt Romney's for suggesting that the U.S.
might be contributing to the reason we end up in so much wars.
This is a doctrine that seems so obvious, I think, to people who don't work in Washington, the idea that Of course there's prices to pay for the United States.
The more words we involve ourselves in, the angrier we make people at us.
Is this something that is genuinely recognized in Washington as an actual cause or cost of all of these words that we continue to be involved in one way or the other?
I would say not in Washington, but I would say that since my dad stood on the stage and stood up to Giuliani and stood up to many of the bullies on the stage at that time, the opinion of the party has changed, and partly because of Donald Trump.
Now, if he were here, he'd tell you he's a libertarian.
I don't think he really is a libertarian.
But he has some libertarian instincts, and some instincts that are less intervention.
He also has some instincts of not immediately reacting.
When the Iranians shot down one of our drones, Lindsey Graham and all the usual crowd wanted him to bomb Iran, bomb Tehran, and he didn't.
He actually waited quite a while before responding, and the response was commensurate.
So, I think the party has changed and I think it's actually much more popular for people to believe that we need to take care of things in our country before thinking we have to either lavish money on other countries or get involved in their wars.
And Trump helped actually popularize that, and it is much more popular in the party, and people are much more vocal.
And I would say among the Republican caucus in the Senate, there's 49.
There's 10 or 15 that on a good day can coalesce around some of those ideas.
Doesn't mean they're either where I am or where my father is, but there are fellow travelers in that More than there used to be.
But the majority here are neoconservative.
The majority here are old cold warriors still fighting the Cold War.
And the most of them have a very naive understanding, not a very realistic understanding.
They have a black and white understanding.
Putin bad.
Russia bad.
Take their money.
So we had this vote in our Foreign Relations Committee the other day.
They're voting to take all Russia's money.
And I said, well, you realize that the negotiation over whether you do or don't take might actually be a bargaining chip that could be used at the table by saying, you know what, if you'll come to the table, it's one of the things we'll do is we threaten to take your money, but we might not actually take your money if we can get you to negotiate.
So it could actually be a bargaining chip.
But once you take the money, it becomes almost impossible to give it back.
And a good example is Iran.
South Korea bought oil from Iran, and then the money got intercepted by the U.S.
And so recently, the Biden administration was going to release some of this money to Iran.
And everybody started, all the neoconservatives and all the people on the right, the Lindsey Graham, Tom Collins, saying, you're giving money to Iran.
No, you're releasing money you stole from Iran to begin with, but it becomes impossible.
And then once the attacks happen in, you know, the massacre of Israelis by Hamas, once that happens, then everybody said, well, you can't give them the money back, and we're back to sort of square one on this.
But I think as we look at this, someone's got to have an overall picture of what it means in the context of trying to get to a peaceful solution in Ukraine.
But I think Washington's still dominated by black and white thinking over Good and bad.
And I'll give you one more anecdote.
We were in a Foreign Relations Committee hearing and I made a comment and someone said, I don't care what Tehran thinks.
And I said, well, the problem with that is in diplomacy.
I may not agree with what Tehran thinks, but if I don't know what they think or try to conceive of how they're going to react to our policy, we're not going to have diplomacy.
You can't move forward if you don't care what other people think.
It doesn't mean they're right.
But they assume that if you at all care about the reaction of your adversary, that somehow you're for your adversary.
So it's very simplistic, juvenile kind of schoolyard thinking, but that's where most of the foreign policy is directed still in this town.
The only hope is, is I think that the populace is not in the same place as actual people in Washington.
Yeah, well speaking of that, and by the way, just before we get to this, you know, it was so ironic because it was Barack Obama who mocked Mitt Romney for saying that Russia was the gravest geopolitical threat to the United States.
And he said, oh, the Cold War is calling, the 1980s are calling that wants its foreign policy back.
And then four years later, it became almost prohibited in the Democratic Party to even question the idea that Russia is some grave existential enemy to the United States.
And every Democrat, of course, has voted repeatedly yes to finance Ukraine's war against Russia.
Let me ask you about what's being called this bipartisan bill, what's being called a border security bill that emerged out of these negotiations led by Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.
Obviously, there's a lot of debate about whether it really does anything meaningful to enhance border security or whether it even might make things worse, whether it's necessary.
Just to leave that aside for a second, the bill proposes spending of $120 billion, the vast majority of which would not be spent in the United States or on the American border, even though it's called the border security bill, but instead would be sent to other countries for financing the war.
$60 billion to Ukraine, $17 billion to Israel to destroy Gaza, and then $10 billion to help the Gazans deal with the consequences of the destruction of that strip that we're helping pay for the destruction of.
You said earlier that You think there's a lot of popular sentiment now in the Republican Party that just is tired of all this foreign spending and foreign wars and I think you're seeing that in the reaction to this bill.
What is your view of this bill insofar as the vast bulk of the money is to go to pay for the wars of other countries and not stay at home in the United States?
Well, Glenn, you haven't been listening carefully to Mitch McConnell.
He's explained to you the benefit of this.
We send the money overseas, then they buy our weapons, and he is really ecstatic that this is good for our weapons industry.
My response to that has been that I think that's reprehensible.
I think it's disgusting to talk about the ... Look, I'm all for profit for corporations, but I'm not for, you know ...
I'm not advocating for war anywhere, even if it's not Americans dying.
I'm not advocating for war because it increases the bottom line and the net profit of arms manufacturers.
But that literally is the argument that he makes, but it also is the argument that the State Department under Blinken has made as well.
We've had people come from the State Department, I think it's wrong.
Secretary of State about two months ago came before me and made the same argument.
And I just read it in the riot act and said, I mean, I think it's despicable that you would come here and say, oh, it's not so bad.
The money's not really going overseas.
Half of it's coming back to our arms manufacturers.
But they literally will make that argument, which they should be embarrassed to make.
But no, I think it's wrong.
We don't have any of the money.
You know, people don't realize this.
All of the taxes that Americans pay, pay for entitlements.
It could pay for whatever you decide for, but two-thirds of our spending is entitlements.
We have enough tax money to pay for that.
The remaining third, which would be the military and non-military discretionary, the budget that we vote on, which is about $1.5 trillion, is equal to the deficit.
So people have to know that we only have enough tax money to pay for the entitlements, or you could say for the discretionary.
But I think the entitlements, they're sort of, those programs are on autopilot, and we sort of, you know, short of reforming them, have to pay for them.
So really, everything else is borrowed.
And in addition to that, they come to us and say, we're going to spend $120 billion overseas, and none of it's going to be paid for.
None of it will be taken from existing spending.
None of it will be juggling priorities to say, well, instead of spending it here, we'll spend it here.
I had a chairman of a committee look at me the other day and say, we shouldn't have to decide.
I said, really?
I thought that was our job to decide.
I thought our job was to make priorities and say, this is more important than this.
It's funny, at every stage of government, in your local county or your city, when they go to pave roads, if your city brings in $10 million, they only have $10 million, and they have to decide which roads need to be paved that year, and they rank them in order of hierarchy.
If they don't have any money, they pave the next roads the next time they get money.
Only in Washington is it that there are never priorities made.
You never say, oh well, we won't spend it over here this year because Ukraine is so important.
I mean, if Ukraine were that important, they should take the $60 billion out of the $880 billion that the military is getting.
One of the things that I don't think has gotten nearly enough attention is, you know, on this issue of Ukraine, is the United States has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $110 billion in terms of fueling the war in Ukraine.
There's another request for another $60 billion, the largest authorization yet.
If it's approved, it looks like it won't be as of now at least.
But one of the things that you are trying to do in each time it came before the Senate Obviously you knew that the vast majority of the Congress was in favor of funding this war.
You were trying to say, at the very least, let's have the Inspector General that exists to do this be given oversight powers to trace the money, to make sure that it's actually going to its intended destination, its intended purpose.
We're now getting reports, and I'm sure it's the beginning and not the end, of how much embezzlement there actually is in Kiev by officials in the Ukrainian government who were long notorious for being corrupt before this war happened.
That a lot of this money is disappearing, it's being stolen, it's being embezzled.
I don't think there was ever an argument offered, other than the time Mitch McConnell insinuated that you were some sort of pro-Kremlin propagandist, for why they were opposed to having the Inspector General monitor this money.
What do you think was the real reason for their opposition to that?
What I proposed was a Special Inspector General.
This is what we have in Afghanistan.
It's called SIGAR, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan.
He's been doing it for about 10 years.
He's got a team of 100 economists, accountants.
He's found millions and billions of dollars misspent, and he points it out to them.
One reason they don't want him is he's a thorn in their side.
He's a thorn in the side of the war machine, and so he's pointed out all of these things.
He found a hotel that was an $80 million hotel, where they built the skeleton of the hotel, ran off with $60 million, and never finished the hotel.
I mean, there's all kinds of craziness that happens in war zones.
So he's there.
He has a budget.
I don't think he's got as much to do in Afghanistan.
I'd move him from Afghanistan to Ukraine, and I thought he was the perfect picket.
And because I'm fiscally conservative, I wasn't even going to give him any new money.
He's got a budget of like $20 million.
I was going to say just move over or put a new plaque in his office called Ukraine instead of Afghanistan.
They voted that down.
Somebody else said, well, you know, Biden wants to be able to do the pick.
What we'll do is vote on a special inspector general for Ukraine, but Biden gets to pick them, which wouldn't be as good a choice because who knows if he picks anybody good or not, but it's still a choice.
That was voted down.
And most of the people up here said, well, the Pentagon has an inspector general already.
He can do it or she can do it.
And I was like, Well, yeah, this is the Pentagon that can't be audited and says they're too big to be audited.
We're going to pick that person to be in charge of Ukraine now?
It's crazy.
But there is no good argument for them.
They've kept up with that argument, but it's not a valid argument, and I think they look bad for it.
And the only malfeasance that we've been finding is actually from journalists within Ukraine that have put this forward.
None of it's found, our inspector general's found none of it, but Ukraine has fired some people, they've caught people stealing, and they were notoriously corrupt, as is Russia, you know, with both countries having oligarchs and both countries having corruption.
And yet we send billions of dollars over there equal to Ukraine's GDP.
$110 billion is equal to their entire economy's production for a year.
And we send that over there without sufficient oversight.
And I think that is a terrible thing to do.
Civil liberties and the government's attempt to control the internet.
There have been two court rulings, and it's amazing how little media coverage this has gotten, that has concluded that the Biden administration has gravely violated the free speech clause by coercing Big Tech to remove dissent that the Biden administration did not want to be heard, did not want to be circulated.
The latest controversy is a call by some in the name of fears over China to try and ban TikTok, the social media app that is used by a third of Americans.
It is the most popular app for young Americans.
The last time they kind of riled up people's fears about TikTok and presented a bill to ban TikTok, it ended up vesting the government with far broader powers than just that.
What is your view of this effort to have the U.S.
government either ban TikTok or use the threat of banning TikTok to force TikTok to give them more control and influence over its censorship decisions?
You know, I'm against all government involvement with censoring speech, whether it's TikTok or Facebook or Snapchat or Twitter or any of these different organizations.
I don't always like what they say.
I mean, I don't like what Google did to me.
I don't like what YouTube's done to me.
I don't like them censoring my speech.
But all I can do is come on a program like yours and complain about it in a free country.
I would never use the apparatus of government to try to get even with people who don't like me or don't like my point of view.
But I am very disappointed that while it's the same as that there's no real progressive left on war, there's not much progressive left on the First Amendment.
Historically, the First Amendment was better defended by the left going back into the 50s and 60s.
The great cases were by the left.
In fact, one of the big cases was Brandenburg.
And Brandenburg was some KKK guy out of Ohio and he was saying awful things.
But interestingly, I read this not too long ago, he was defended by the ACLU and was just, you know, had been historically depicted as being more from the left.
But his young lawyers were Norton, Eleanor Norton, who's now the delegate from D.C., She was a young lawyer working, African-American.
And then the other lawyer was a guy named Allen, I think it was Allen Brown or John Brown, but he was Jewish.
So you have a Jewish person and an African-American defending this despicable person saying anti-Jewish, anti-black things, things you can't even, wouldn't even want to repeat anymore.
And yet they were doing the right thing defending speech, even reprehensible speech from a terrible person because the concept of speech is so important.
They interviewed Eleanor Norton recently on Trump and his speech on January 6th, where he says a lot of different things and people can argue what he was saying, but he at least did say peacefully and whatever.
But it's speech.
It's a politician's speech.
And they asked her about it and compared it to Brandenburg, she says, "Oh yeah, but he should be convicted because that obviously was inciting violence." And it's amazing how people have lost their all perception.
You know, where's the good liberal defending Trump's right to give a speech, even if you don't like him?
And where's the good progressive left on war?
But I'm against all of this.
There are people on the right that want to ban Holly, want to ban TikTok.
They also want to have commissions to determine what speech can be had.
There's people like Murphy on the left that are wanting to stop speech.
I think it's a terrible idea.
And we really are going to get, you know, we're already sort of tribal, we're each in our own corner.
What if we're each in our own corner and then we ban the other tribe from their speech?
I mean, it's a terrible, terrible world and it'll lead to more strife when we start banishing people in their speech.
So I think it's a bad idea and I'll do anything I can from my perspective to say, look, I may not love the tech companies, but we need to stay the hell out of banning, banning any kind of speech or breaking up tech companies because we don't like them.
Yeah, I can't express how much frustration I share with the disappearance of both free speech and anti-war sentiment in most of the American left and almost entirely from American liberalism.
It's remarkable to see.
Just one last question and then I'm going to just ask you about Edward Snowden joining Assange and then I'll let you go.
The 2022 Senate hearing, when the Homeland Security Secretary was there and was testifying about the government's attempts to influence the internet, and he justified it by saying we have to combat disinformation.
And you said to him, quote, do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is?
It's the US government.
What did you mean by that?
Well, some of the most famous instances of it, you know, are during war.
During the Vietnam War in particular, you know, the casualty counts, the, you know, a lot of the facts coming out of the war to try to make the war look less bad were manipulated by the government.
So I think there are a lot of instances of the government not being accurate.
You know, you think of it, it's sort of like election interference.
We say, oh, the Russians are interfering in the election.
Who's the biggest interferer in elections historically?
The U.S.
government.
I think over 115 times are documented where we've gotten involved with overthrowing governments or involved with their elections.
So, no, I think we do worry about the government.
I worry about misinformation coming from the government.
And the only way to counter that is to have a good open platform where we aren't restricting private information.
But it's really dangerous when you want to discern what is, and it's difficult.
I'm not saying it's easy to know what the truth is.
They say in the legal system, one of the most important things we have is the adversarial system.
So you come to me in court and I'm the judge and I've got to figure out the truth or I'm on the jury.
It's hard because you're going to say something and the person suing you is going to say something.
So you have to have an adversarial process where you have an advocate, you have a lawyer, they have a lawyer.
It's the same way in journalism.
There has to be both sides, in a full-throated way, present their case.
And everybody knows that there are some extreme sides that are all opinion, no facts, on right and left.
There are some in the middle.
But people have to be able to look and sort through that.
And I guess the ultimate elitist argument is that people aren't smart enough to figure that out.
And I reject that, and I think it's inconsistent with the ideas of the founding of our country and liberty in general.
to decide and have people decide for people.
And like I say, the truth is figuring this out by hearing both sides and hearing all of that, but you can't have truth if one side is suppressed.
And there's a real danger.
One of the biggest dangers we have coming up is having the government evolving in what is true, what is untrue, what is mal-information or misinformation or disinformation.
That's one of the biggest dangers I think.
Everybody's squawking about, "Oh, democracy's under attack." Well, yeah, if you attack speech, you really are going to attack the fundamentals of the Democratic Republic.
But the same people squawking about democracy dying on January 6th are out there saying, we need to restrict what, you know, people from the right are saying or what people are skeptical of whether or not you should vaccinate your four-year-old with COVID vaccine, which I think is absolutely wrong.
And that's my opinion.
I've got science to back it up.
But to prevent me from saying that, I think, is an abomination.
Yeah, you ask any lawyer and they will tell you if you're the only side there getting to speak to the jury and there's no one there to question or contradict you, you can convince a jury of anything, literally, because there's no adversarial check on what you're saying.
And imagine how true that is in the political context that there's no dissent allowed.
All right, last question.
You have been a stalwart advocate for both Edward Snowden, whose pardon you have called for and tried to encourage President Trump to grant, as well as Julian Assange, whose prosecution you've called to drop.
By all accounts, including reporting I've done and a lot of things I heard, Donald Trump was very close to pardoning Edward Snowden in those last days.
Not quite as close to pardoning Julian Assange, but still strongly considering it.
Why do you think he didn't, and do you think there's a chance that if he's re-elected, this time he will?
You know, I advocated privately for pardoning Edward Snowden and, uh, and or commuting sentence.
Actually, he doesn't have a sentence.
I don't know how you commute a sentence, but I have advocated with President Trump for that, and I won't go into all of his responses, but we, you know, we just weren't successful.
I would say that the people arguing against that, the Trump administration, are all people who President Trump's currently unhappy with and won't be in another administration if he's ever there.
And so I will advocate again.
I think Edward Snowden is really perhaps the most famous and consequential whistleblower of our time.
And even more so than Julian Assange.
I don't know the details of Julian Assange as much other than he was releasing things and I think could be considered a publisher or a part, a member of the, of journalism.
But with regard to Edward Snowden, he revealed that the constitution was being broken.
And the reason he revealed and that he revealed specifically and told us why.
And it was the idea that you could have a single warrant to a single company, Verizon or any other company.
I think what we released was Verizon, but you could then collect the personal information on millions and millions of Americans.
And that's the very definition of a general warrant that we outlawed when we passed the Fourth Amendment.
And it's something really that is a heroic thing that he did.
And I think it wasn't done.
Nobody, he didn't like release it to a country and wasn't paid as a spy.
He didn't get rich off of doing this.
In fact, he lost his country over it.
And so, no, I will advocate and we've sent letters and are willing to send letters to Biden as well.
But I'd say there's a chance under Trump presidency that he could be pardoned.
But there's there, you know, Trump has advisors from a lot of different walks of life.
So there are some that are close to Trump that are absolutely that, you know, said he ought to be killed or whatever.
In fact, Trump may have made comments like that at one time.
So I think is I think it's.
His opinion probably has evolved over time as he's seen the abuses of what the FBI did to him and what the government has done to him, that he's maybe more open to the idea that Edward Snowden was revealing the kind of thing that actually was abused, the kind of government power that was abused to go after Trump as well.
Yeah, I mean, I always try and tell people that they have no idea how conservative a whistleblower Edward Snowden is.
The obligations he imposed on us about what we could and couldn't publish were very rigid because he was very careful about what kinds of information he wanted us to report on, never endanger any innocent person, only reveal things that were actually unconstitutional or potentially illegal under relevant law, and it is amazing that The people who reveal lawbreaking are the ones who go to prison.
The people who do the lawbreaking or violate the Constitution never do.
Senator Paul, thank you so much.
It's been a great opportunity to speak with you and I really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us.
Thank you.
All right, have a good evening.
Mr. Weir, first of all, condolences on the death of your son.
I know this is something that is very difficult to have to navigate, but I also very much appreciate your taking the time to talk to us so we can bring some more journalistic attention to what has happened here.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
It's my pleasure being with you.
And my intention for this interview is that I wish The world would become aware of what happened to my son.
My son was assassinated.
Let's get into it.
Let's get into it step by step just so that people can kind of follow along because there's some people who don't know.
So I want to just kind of lay the foundation for everything.
I have seen, as I've been talking about this case and other people have been talking about this case, some of the most rabid supporters of Ukraine who peddle disinformation all the time actually calling to doubt whether or not your son even died in a Ukrainian prison.
Whether he's still in a Ukrainian prison, whether he's still alive.
How did you find out about the death of your son and what is it that you learned about the circumstances of his death when you were told that this has happened?
Well, the process was very simple.
Finally, my son arrived into a hospital on January the 4th because he had double pneumonia.
He had pneumothorax and he had a heavy case, an acute case of edema.
He could not breathe.
He would lose conscience if he spoke for more than two minutes.
And this is a small note that he wrote to his sister, my daughter.
Now, once he arrived in that hospital, the following week he died.
How did we know?
The director of this Ukrainian hospital in the city of Kharkiv, called the U.S.
Embassy and informed them that my son, Gonzalo, had died.
The official from the U.S.
Embassy called my daughter and told her about my son's death.
And this was on January the 12th.
And that's how I heard of my son's death in a hospital sent by the jailers that he had been for eight months incommunicado in the city of Carkeith.
My son did not have an attorney other than a court-appointed attorney that did not speak any English and my son's charges were
That he was a pro-Russian propagandist, because as a blogger-reporter, he had over 300 subscribers in the various websites that he had, and he told them the reasons for Russia invading Ukraine.
He explained the why.
And he ventured in his analysis that Ukraine would never win a war against Russia, no matter what help they received from the USA or the NATO countries.
Right, and just to be clear, your son was a citizen both of Chile and the United States, so he was an American citizen at the time that he was expressing these views.
If I may give you some details.
Gonzalo was born in Burbank in the city of Los Angeles in 1968 while I was doing my postgraduate work in economics.
He was born in the USA and he was brought up in the USA up until he was 11 years old.
At that time, we moved to Santiago, Chile.
where he finished his high school in Santiago to go back to the USA to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
After graduating from Dartmouth, he stayed in the USA.
He published a book called Counterparts, published by Putnam Editorial in New York.
And stayed in the USA for many years.
He was an American citizen, there is no doubt about it.
Now, while he came to Chile as a son of a Chilean, as an aside Glenn, at the beginning he was a wetback.
Because his papers, his tourist papers, you know, expired.
His and his daughter, his sister.
So we had to make all arrangements, you know, and obviously they gave them the Chilean nationality and that's why he had dual nationality.
Right.
So he was born in the United States.
Yeah.
So when and obviously anyone born in the United States receives automatic lifelong citizenship, an American passport and all of that and the full rights of all American citizens under the Constitution.
Now, he was 55 years old when he died, which obviously is very young, especially to die of pneumonia.
Usually a 55 year old man in generally good health will be able to combat pneumonia if it's treated properly with just the basic minimum treatment.
Did your son have any serious or chronic health problems before his problems in Ukraine with the law began?
My son Had a mild case of heart disease, the coronary arteries.
He never had a heart stroke, by the way.
When he was detained on May the 1st, Gonzalo was in totally normal health.
He was physically up.
He had never been sick in a hospital.
And Gonzalo again, let me repeat, he was in excellent health.
Now, he was a heavy smoker though, but he had no case of any severe illness.
Now when you were told by, or I'm sorry, when your daughter was told, when Gonzalo's brother, your daughter, was told by the U.S.
by the US Embassy that the hospital had told them that your son had died.
After that, at any point, did anyone provide anything in writing to you?
Did you ever learn any more information from the United States Consulate about the circumstances of his death?
No, none whatsoever.
As a matter of fact, if I may explain, since day one, when my son was detained, according to the embassy protocol around the world,
An official of the Embassy has to go and speak to the detained American citizen in a country overseas immediately, offering him legal assistance immediately, offering them communication with the family.
None of those things the U.S.
Embassy did.
Because my son was detained, Glenn, due to Biden's giving the green light.
I am not the first one to say it in these words.
Someone else said it before.
Senile Biden gave the green light to dictator Zelensky to detain my son.
And let me tell you why.
My son was detained the first time by the SBO, which is the local Gestapo.
In the year 22, on April the 5th through April the 22nd, that full week, he was detained.
Then released without any legal charge.
No charges on him.
But, of course, those savages stole all his electronic equipment, stole money from him, And he came back to an apartment that had been ransacked.
He recovered all of his equipment and continued with the same language, criticizing bloody, sinister dictator Zelensky and the way the war was being carried out, venturing on March 22nd, a week, a month after the invasion.
That Ukraine would never win a war against Russia.
That all of the economic sanctions would backfire in the USA, and it would hurt the economies of Europe, and it would hurt the economy of the USA.
If you see the economic numbers for Russia, they have been growing during the war.
Now, he continued the same language as I said before.
Criticizing the dictator Zelensky in Ukraine.
But hear me out on this one.
After a full year after being detained and released those seven days, Gonzalo for the first time put a video criticizing senile Biden, as he referred to President Biden, And stupid Kamala Harris, as she referred to the Vice President, because he said, I have never seen a woman so stupid as Kamala Harris.
He went on to criticize Biden on the 27th of April, the year 2023.
Four days later, Gonzalo is detained by machine gun soldiers In mass, at least 12 of them went to his apartment to break down practically the door of his apartment.
Right.
I think it's worth emphasizing there, by the way, that as an American citizen, obviously he has the absolute right to criticize the president and the vice president in as harsh of terms as he wants.
And there's plenty of other people saying what he said about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
But I remember, you know, as somebody who's been covering this war, watching his reports from Ukraine, his YouTube reports and others, and was amazed at the courage that it took after he was detained at the start of the war, seeing how dissidents were being treated in Ukraine, to continue to speak out so boldly, so forcefully.
Now, let me just, I want to, I'm sure you, I know you've seen this before, but for those people who haven't, he posted a video on July 31st, 2023.
And it's amazing because the criticisms that you have been explaining that he voiced, which I remember at the time, all basically turned out to be true.
That Ukraine had no chance to win, that it would end up harming the European and American economy while bolstering the Russian economy.
But here in July, The last day of July, 2023, he basically posted a video knowing that if he wasn't saved by the US government, if people didn't intervene to get him free and to get him out of that country, he knew exactly what would happen, which is that he would end up being killed in prison.
So let's just watch this video for those who haven't seen it.
Then I want to hear your reaction to it.
My case originally started as a free speech issue.
But because of the SBU and the inherent corruption of the SBU and the criminal justice system in Ukraine, I will definitely be sent to a prison labor camp where I will most certainly die.
And so I decided that the smart thing was take my chances in terms of getting across the border I should have warned you about that.
I know how hard that is when you're going through grief to see a video of the person you lost.
Believe me, I understand.
But I think it's very important for people to have heard because I just want to make sure that nobody thinks that the American government, the Biden administration wasn't aware of his case.
A lot of us were talking about it at the time.
This video circulated everywhere.
And so what I want to know from you is, was there any moment, obviously he's asking for help there, when his family, when you or anybody else asked the United States government to intervene in any way in order to help him?
And are you aware of any efforts?
I sent many letters to embassy officials, including Ambassador Brinton.
I explained to them the fact that my son was a U.S.
citizen and they had not done a thing to help him out.
They didn't even provide an attorney.
The defense attorney that Gonzalo had was appointed by the court, Glenn.
Can you believe that?
The court of Ukraine appointed the defense attorney, and hear me, who didn't speak any English.
How the hell could he communicate with my son?
They used a translator.
I had communication with this man, Victor Cercovni, through WhatsApp with the translator, you know, in the middle, which doesn't translate exactly, you know, how, you know, the intention or the meaning of the words.
I couldn't speak to the man.
Now, the U.S.
Embassy's behavior was unbelievable.
I mean, they wanted Gonzalo to die.
And I was always asking myself before falling asleep, was my son that important?
He had 300 and some subscribers.
He had hundreds of thousands of viewers.
But had he become that important that married to detain him?
I mean, It's outrageous.
What have I done so far since my poor son died?
I have placed in the Secretary of State Department the Freedom of Information Act.
I want to know all correspondence documents between Mr. Blinken, Victoria Nuland, and the Lady Ambassador Brink of the USA in Ukraine that transpired between January the 1st of the year 22 concerning my son Gonzalo.
I want to know all communication exchanges between that area and the government of Ukraine or any official of the Ukrainian government because what they did to my son is an assassination.
My son did not have any criminal charges.
My son used the power of freedom of speech.
I even marched in the year 1965, UC Berkeley, Mario Savio, free speech movement, the anti-war, the anti-Vietnam War.
I marched in those years, Glenn.
I was studying at that time in the USA.
I lived many years in the USA, and I cannot condone this terrible government that the USA has, that has no place in the White House.
We had never had a worse government than this one.
This man Biden is responsible for my son's assassination because The judgment, the trial, never came.
They arrested him.
He had been in jail for eight months without a trial.
And why?
I read in different places in Ukraine that many of the political opposition to Zelensky, they would be detained by the SBU, exactly as my son was detained.
And they would keep them in jail for months because what were they doing?
Their intention was to make them ill and have them die of natural causes.
That is what they did to my son, Gonzalo Lira, those criminal dictator that the USA is maintaining.
How much money Is Zelensky getting from the $115 billion that we have accounted so far?
How much has plowed into his pocket?
And how much is Hunter Biden getting?
You know, I think one of the important things to note here is that obviously the United States government has influence with most countries, probably more than any country it has the most influence in Ukraine, given the fact that the Ukrainians are completely dependent on the largesse of the American government to pay for their war, to prop them up.
We're going to pay for the reconstruction of Ukraine once this war is done and once we've helped destroy it.
And had the Biden administration even lifted a finger in defense of your son, he would have obviously been released from prison without having been convicted of a crime, and certainly they would not have been allowed to cause him to die in the way that he did.
Just to be clear, I think I asked this before, but I just want to be very clear about this.
Since the death of your son, and there's obviously been a lot of media attention, not as much as there deserves to be, but a good amount on the fact that this happened, has anyone from the Biden administration or anywhere in the U.S.
government reached out in any way None whatsoever.
None whatsoever.
to your family to communicate with you, to give you information, to give you condolences or consolation, something that the American government typically does for one of their own citizens ending up in a situation like this?
Have you heard from them in any way?
None whatsoever.
None whatsoever.
It was so.
All they did was to intervene in the shipping of my son's urn because he was cremated.
His former wife, Maria, who is an Ukrainian lady, and that's why he was living in Ukraine since the year 2016.
And he had two sons, 10-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy.
My two grandsons are living in Ukraine, and that's why my son was in Ukraine since the year 2016.
Well, the U.S.
Embassy hasn't done a thing other than they intervened in the shipping of his urn to Santiago, Chile, because I asked specifically that I do not want that urn to go to the USA.
Never to touch American soil after what the USA has done to my son.
The last question I have for you is... I'm sorry.
I know it's very emotional.
This is very new.
I mean, this is not like it happened a year ago or many months ago.
It's an extremely recent thing.
So I think everyone understands the fact that you are quite pained and emotional about it.
Obviously... Let me... Go ahead.
Let me, I'm sorry.
The urn, my son died on January the 11th.
Today is February the 9th.
It's almost a month now.
The urn is still in Kiev.
The urn was supposed, is supposed to be sent to the Chilean embassy in Poland, in Warsaw, because they do not have, the Chileans, an embassy in Ukraine.
They are supposed to fly that urn to the embassy in Warsaw, Poland, and from there to Santiago.
And it's been almost a month and my son's urn is still in Kiev.
I mean, I heard rumors, you know, that they didn't want to hand his body because Maria, his wife, she wanted another autopsy.
Which would definitely specify that he was tortured.
They cremated him.
They cremated him rendering that impossible.
That autopsy impossible, obviously.
Let me just ask the last question.
Sorry, we're running out of time, so I just want to make sure I ask this.
You described the FOIA request that you've submitted.
I don't know if you have legal counsel for that or not, but are you considering legal action as well against either the Ukrainian government or the American government?
And if so, do you have some kind of a defense fund or anything else where anybody who is angry about what has happened here and who wants to help can do so?
Fortunately, money is not a problem.
I will demand through the government of Ukraine.
I'm doing the preliminary stages of a full demand by doing the Freedom of Information Act.
I want to know exactly the information that transpired between the State Department and the government of Ukraine and the jailers of my son from January the 1st of the year 22 onwards.
I want to get that information first, because my son's death is going to be cleared up.
I want the world to know that they not only assassinated my son, they assassinated the First Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution, the freedom of information, the freedom of speech.
I have the right to give my opinion.
Well, my son was assassinated because he gave his opinion.
Yeah, I think the complete silence and inaction on the part of the US government, not just now, but When he was detained and when he was warning that he was going to die in prison if he wasn't saved is one of the most disgraceful things I've seen as part of a war that itself is completely disgraceful but I'm so happy though I know it's difficult at this time for you to be speaking out so vocally to ensure that your son's death that that will have some accountability.
We're obviously going to continue to Thank you Glenn once again for the opportunity you've given me.
I just wanted to clear one point.
you're taking the time to come on and talk to us about this.
Hopefully this will bring even more attention to what was done here.
Yeah, if you want to go ahead and say one last thing, feel free, and then we can conclude.
But go ahead.
Thank you.
Thank you, Glenn, once again, for the opportunity you've given me.
I just wanted to clear one point.
Gonzalo was detained May the 1st.
He became ill according to his own note, which is physically in internet, okay?
The note that he wrote to his sister.
He became ill mid October.
So, for almost five months that he was detained, he was in good health.
Finally, they succeeded.
From mid-October onward, they made him ill.
I just wanted to get that point clear.
He was in good health for the first five months of his detainment.
Yeah, and you can see in this video, obviously, it's not always easy to judge a person's health in a video from a distance, but he looks perfectly active and healthy.
His work output was always very prolific.
He obviously had a lot of energy, and so to just suddenly deteriorate that way and die, like I said, at 55 of pneumonia.
raises suspicions, to say the least, in the eyes of any reasonable person.
Mr. Weir, thank you one more time.
I'm sure we will be talking again, I hope so, as you continue to pursue justice for your son.
Thank you very much.
It's been my great pleasure seeing you once again, as I said before, Glenn.
