Elon Musk Goes to War with Brazil’s Censorship Regime. PLUS: 19 Republicans Defy Speaker Johnson to Kill Renewal of Domestic Spying Bill
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Internet Censorship in Brazil (8:04)
Spy Bill Rejected (36:21)
Outro (55:50)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
We were off the last few days, Thursday, Friday, Monday and Tuesday, simply because I was feeling a little bit under the weather.
Nothing serious, just some flu and cold-like symptoms.
I think I'm better tonight, so hopefully we'll get through the show and then resume our nightly schedule as always, as normal we do, starting tomorrow and then resuming from then on.
For tonight, A virtual war has erupted between Elon Musk and Axe on one side and virtually the entire Brazilian establishment and the Brazilian left with which they're united on the other.
As we have been reporting for two years now, the censorship regime that has been imposed in Brazil The world's fifth most populous country, all centralized in the hands of a single Supreme Court judge, is more extreme, more repressive, and more lawless than anywhere in the democratic world, and that's saying a lot given how much censorship has spread.
As just one indicator for how extreme the Brazilian censorship scheme is, this platform, Rumble, decided last year that they would rather block Brazilians from viewing its content, despite having built a large and growing Brazilian audience, rather than face massive fines and even criminal threats of prosecution, For failure to comply with the avalanche of censorship orders they were receiving virtually on a daily basis.
That message we showed you is what Brazilians, people in Brazil, now see when they try and access Rumble.
A message saying Rumble is not available in your country because of the censorship orders.
Now, Rumble announced that it would no longer serve as a weapon in the censorship regime and will block access for all Brazilians, at least for those who don't use VPNs.
Pending its judicial challenge of the censorship laws which it has now brought.
Now, last week the independent journalist Michael Schellenberger, working with two separate Brazilian journalists, released the Brazilian part of the Twitter files.
It documented how internal Twitter lawyers in Brazil were growing increasingly alarmed at the politically motivated censorship orders from the court that they were being drowned with routinely.
and they were worried about the consequences they personally might face from failure to comply.
We interviewed Schellenberger last week about his reporting.
He was in Brazil at the time, and he was interviewed by multiple media outlets in Brazil, usually in a very hostile manner, far more interested in attacking his character and methods than addressing the substance of his revelations.
Now, Elon Musk saw all of this.
Obviously, he pays attention to the Twitter files and responded to all of it over the weekend by launching a series of very vitriolic attacks on this one Supreme Court judge overseeing the censorship regime, calling him a tyrant and urging his impeachment and more Musk also vowed that X would prefer to disobey unjust censorship orders and even leave Brazil Then continued to be used as a weapon in service of this regime, the same decision that Rumble made with regard to Brazil last year.
That, in turn, provoked very aggressive threats from this judge.
He declared Musk to be a target of a pending criminal investigation involving fake news and disinformation.
He just inserted Musk into this pending criminal investigation as one of the targets now of the criminal probe.
He also ordered ex-employees in Brazil to be questioned by the federal police and explicitly threatened them in writing with arrest and prosecution if ex permits any banned voices to return to the platform.
All of this demonstrates the severity of the growing censorship regime not only in Brazil but throughout the democratic world.
Precisely because Brazil has been so extreme is why it's so relevant to Americans because it's being used as a laboratory to see how far control over the internet and online speech can go.
Obviously Europe and the United States have embarked on their own online censorship regime.
We have been reporting on that extensively to the point that it's now at the Supreme Court.
And what is being done in Brazil is a harbinger of what is coming to the West.
We will report on everything that happened here and explore its quite significant implications.
Then, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has long been a vocal and steadfast opponent of the U.S.
security state generally and its attempts to censor the internet and spy on Americans in particular.
Shortly before becoming Speaker, we interviewed him on his show and he was very clear about his views on these questions.
Yet since being elected Speaker, Mike Johnson has seemingly changed his views in quite radical ways on many key issues.
He was a longtime opponent of providing more USA to the war in Ukraine, yet now is working to ensure that Joe Biden's $60 billion request for Ukraine is approved in the House, even if that means relying on Democrats and Democratic protection to do so.
Earlier today, Speaker Johnson tried to bring to the floor a vote to renew the domestic spying powers of the NSA and the FBI.
And to do so without allowing even a single reform or safeguard or warrant requirement.
In other words, Speaker Johnson worked hard to give the Biden White House and the U.S.
Security State what they were demanding.
Full renewal of their domestic spying powers.
Spying on Americans.
Which was originally enacted during the Bush Administration in the name of the War on Terror and to renew it without any reforms or protections at all.
But Mike Johnson had a serious surprise today.
His own caucus delivered a major and quite unusual defeat to the House Speaker, with 19 members defecting and preventing the Speaker from bringing the bill to the floor.
It is likely that some domestic spying bill will eventually pass, though it's not guaranteed, and we'll explain what happened today in the Congress that dealt a serious blow to the effort, suddenly led by Speaker Johnson, to hand the FBI all the spying powers they want without a single reform.
We also will have various members of Congress on over the next week or so to talk about the war in Ukraine, to talk about the FISA law and related issues as well.
Before we get to all of that, We have a few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
It is hard to overstate what a major political scandal has engulfed Brazil over the last five days as a result of the weekend proclamations by Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, regarding the censorship regime in Brazil.
His very severe criticisms of the political officials in Brazil who have been imposing this censorship and his vow that he would no longer have Twitter serve as a weapon or an arm in this censorship regime.
It is a story that has dominated headlines in Brazil over the last five days.
The entire Brazilian media, and it's true in most countries, is completely opposed to big tech.
And it's entirely self-interested.
They feel that far too much of their profit has gone to big tech, advertising profit and the like, and they want back their share of the revenue and income that has been lost to big tech.
They want big tech limited and disabled and controlled in all sorts of ways.
But what they are really most interested in is ensuring that their control over information, which they have had for many decades, is returned to them because it is the internet that has allowed dissenting views from their narratives to circulate and to be heard in significant ways
obviously that is possible this ability to send from the corporate media to be able to make uh people here in very far ranging ways alternative views and the ones they want to impose All of that depends on free speech.
If the censorship rules limit what everyone can say to what the pieties of the established media are and the establishment sectors that they serve, obviously the internet will just be an extension of the corporate media.
It will actually be an arm fortifying it and that's why corporate media in almost every democratic country in the Western world is so vehemently supportive of efforts to impose a censorship regime on the internet.
That is absolutely true for the established media in Brazil.
It is true for the establishment factions in Brazil that currently govern that country.
And it's absolutely true the Brazilian left, which all are united in vehement support of the censorship regime.
And therefore they decided to view Elon Musk's attack on this judge and on censorship regime as almost like a criminal invasion of their country.
And all kinds of criminal threats have been issued in return.
So let me show you what has been happening here, in large part because it's so important for understanding, as I said, the likelihood that systems of this kind will be coming to Brazil.
Now, first of all, as a reminder, in January of 2023, We were able to get our hands on one of the censorship orders that is regularly issued by the single judge of the Supreme Court, Alexander de Moraes.
This censorship regime has no basis in law.
They actually tried to pass several months ago a law that would democratically enact this censorship regime to formally define the powers and the responsibilities of Big Tech, but they could not get them votes democratically in Congress to pass it.
So they just allowed the judiciary to invent these rules that allow this judge in particular to single-handedly determine what is permitted to be said on the internet and what is not.
When they issue these orders to the platforms, they say, we want this member of Congress banned, we want this journalist banned, we want this activist banned.
And They provide no due process.
They provide no explanation in the order sent to the platforms.
These orders are never sent to the individuals who are being censored.
There's no judicial process to contest the order.
If you do try and contest it, you just go right to the judge who just issued it, and obviously you have no chance of being heard.
It's not just censorship.
It's censorship with no due process in the most Kafkaesque way.
There's not even a legal framework for it.
And we were able to get our hands on one of the orders, and amazingly, within the order, when they send these orders to major tech platforms and social media companies, They require in the order that the social media companies maintain the secrecy of the judicial order.
So they're not even allowed to inform their users that they received an order, let alone disclose to the public or to the users what the content of the order is.
They just have to ban the individuals named in the order, and if they don't do so within two hours of receipt of that order, They will face daily fines in the amount of $20,000 for every account they fail to ban.
And the order we were able to get a hold of, and we did this show in January of 2023 on it, and we went through the order and showed it, was striking not only for that, but also because the people who were banned included democratically elected members of the Senate and the House in Brazil, including A politician who's quite young, 25 years old, who built a major platform on social media.
His name was Nicolas Ferreira.
And he was not only elected democratically to the Congress, but he had the largest vote total of any candidate in Brazil for Congress.
Over a million Brazilians voted for him in this state.
It was a record-breaking vote in all of Brazilian history for a candidate of that state, and he got more votes than any other candidate in 2022 running for Congress, and yet this judge, because he's a supporter of the right, the congressman who was censored, ordered him banned from every platform, just silenced, booted off the internet.
With no explanation, no notice, no due process, and many others, including senators who were elected, journalists, activists, basically people who expressed views with which this judge disagrees.
That is how severe it was.
Now what prompted Elon Musk's anger, as I said, was the revelations of the Brazil part of the Twitter files.
We had one of the journalists, Michael Schellenberger, on last week to go over a lot of those revelations where Brazilian Twitter employees were expressing grave concerns about the pressures being put on them, the obviously political nature of these censorship orders, their repeated failures to get them lifted.
And Elon Musk unleashed a series of tweets, one after the next, over all of Saturday and all over Sunday, escalating in tone as is his want.
And we're going to show you just one of them.
He said on April 6, quote, we are lifting all restrictions.
The judge has applied massive fines, threatened to arrest our employees, and cut off access to X in Brazil.
As a result, we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there, but principles matter more than profit.
He then continued to attack this judge very personally, calling him a tyrant and a despot, saying how is it possible that he's allowed to destroy basic freedoms in Brazil?
He should be impeached.
And the reaction to what Elon Musk said was extremely severe.
This judge, as I said, made Elon Musk part of a criminal investigation.
Here from AP on April 8, 2024, there you see the headline, Elon Musk will be investigated over fake news and obstruction in Brazil.
After a Supreme Court order, quote, a crusading Brazilian Supreme Court justice has included Elon Musk as a target in an ongoing investigation, a criminal investigation over the dissemination of fake news, and has opened a separate investigation to the US business executive for alleged obstruction.
In his decision, Justice Alexandre de Marais noted that Musk on Saturday began waging a public, quote, disinformation campaign.
regarding the top court's actions, meaning he criticized that judge.
And quote, that Musk continued the following day, most notably with comments that his social media company, X, would cease to comply with the court's order to block certain accounts.
Musk will be investigated for alleged intentional criminal instrumentalization of X as part of an investigation into a network of people known as digital militias who allegedly spread defamatory fake news and threats against Supreme Court justices, according to the text of the decision.
The new investigation will look into whether Musk engaged in obstruction, criminal organization, and incitement.
Brazil's political right has long characterized Dimarais as overstepping his bounds to clamp down on free speech and engage in political persecution.
And it's not only the Brazilian right, but judicial experts and legal advocates and organizations of jurists have also done so.
AP goes on, quote, the justice in March of 2022 ordered the shutdown, the shutdown.
of the messaging app Telegram nationwide on the grounds that the platform repeatedly ignored requests from Brazilian authorities, including a police request to block profiles and provide information linked to the blogger Alon Dos Santos, an ally of Bolsonaro's acute of spreading falsehoods.
Dos Santos's account is one of those blocked on X in Brazil.
Now this should all sound familiar to you if you're American because this framework of trying to censor online speech on the grounds that it's disinformation is obviously something that the U.S.
government has repeatedly done, pressuring and coercing big tech companies to remove People and to remove content, dissent from the government's position, all based on this new concept of disinformation that was invented after 2016 in order to justify or to prettify what is nothing more than rank vulgar censorship.
And the fact that this judge, I'll just give you one example.
There's a Brazilian left-wing political party that is a pretty small party, but they are a self-proclaimed communist party, and they're usually pretty heterodox.
They're not part of the left-wing Brazilian establishment.
They are very vehement supporters of President Lula da Silva, but they have a very principled belief in and defense of free speech.
They are vehemently opposed to any kind of censorship, pointing out totally correctly Now, one of the first things the Brazilian military dictatorship did after it overthrew the democratically elected government in 1964 was begin to censor dissidents to their rule.
That's what all fascist governments do, all dictatorships do.
That's the hallmark of them.
One of them is to prevent free speech and to impose censorship.
And so this political party mocked this judge, called him a skinhead in a robe because he is bald, And for that, for criticizing Alexander Dimarais, this judge banned that party from all platforms.
They were banned for months until he deemed them suitable to return.
Any criticism of this judge that offends him Will result in punishment.
No trial, no due process, nothing of any kind.
And that's what they've done now to Elon Musk.
X's global government affairs team on April 6th, when Musk unleashed his criticisms, said this, quote, X Corp has been forced by court decisions to block certain popular accounts in Brazil.
We have informed those accounts that we have taken this action.
We do not know the reason these blocking orders have been issued.
We do not know which posts are alleged to violate the law.
We are prohibited from saying which court or judge issued the order or on what grounds.
We are prohibited from saying which accounts are impacted.
We are threatened with daily fines if we fail to comply.
We believe that such orders are not in accordance with the Marcos Civil da Internet law, which is the law that was enacted to govern the internet and that bans censorship, except under very constrained and rare circumstances, and also is not in compliance with the Brazilian federal constitution, and we challenge the orders legally where possible.
The people of Brazil, regardless of their political beliefs, are entitled to free speech, due process, and transparency from their own authorities.
Now needless to say, Google, which operates YouTube, and Google and Facebook, which operates Instagram and Facebook, but also the WhatsApp chat platform that is by far the most popular chat platform in many countries, including Brazil, have always just meekly complied with every censorship order they got from Brazil, and Elon Musk decided he had enough.
Here's what he said on Monday night, last night, on X Spaces, with the platform where people can gather and speak and be heard, regarding what he's doing in Brazil.
What about things like the latest developments in Brazil and so on?
Yeah, so we kept getting these demands from this Judge Alexander.
That's his name on Twitter, Alexander.
Now, just note there that Elon Musk also continues to call his platform Twitter, despite having changed the name to X almost a year ago now.
And there would be to suspend accounts immediately.
We're given typically two hours to suspend an account or face massive fines.
And the final straw is we were being given demands to suspend sitting members of the Parliament and major journalists.
And moreover, we could not tell them that this was at the behest of Alexander Morales.
We had to pretend that it was due to our rules of service.
And that was the final straw, and we said no.
Now, after Elon Musk said that we can't disclose that we received this order, that we can't explain to our users that we're forced to ban why we're banning them, the Brazilian media basically called Elon Musk a liar.
They said there's no proof that the court tells X you're not allowed to tell people that you received a court order because they didn't realize That a year ago, in January 2023, we obtained one of the orders.
In fact, one of the most severe ones, as I just explained.
And right in that order, it does in fact say you are required to maintain the secrecy of this order.
So they send out a censorship order and then tell the platforms you're not allowed to show the contents of this platform.
Now, obviously there's a question of why it is that Twitter, which is not based in Brazil, and could easily just close any office in Brazil and remove employees.
They don't need employees in Brazil.
They could just make themselves available to the entire world, including Brazil, why they are forced to comply with judicial orders from a Brazilian court.
This is something that China has been doing for many years.
They say if you, Google, want to be available in our country, you have to block all of these search terms and all of these results from being shown and all kinds of other censorship that they impose on Big Tech, including Google and Facebook.
And Google and Facebook always have complied in order to have access to the Chinese market and people vehemently condemned Big Tech for agreeing to become a censorship arm of the Chinese state.
So why should Twitter have to become a censorship arm of the Brazilian censorship regime?
And how is it that Elon Musk can be made a criminal defendant in a country that he's not operating in?
He simply says he would prefer to close Twitter in Brazil than to continue to comply with unjust censorship orders.
Now again, after this happened, after Elon Musk said these things, the retaliation from this judge was out of control and very illustrative of how he functions.
It was completely unsurprising to me that he did it, and yet I think people who aren't familiar with it should take note of how extreme, how quickly this system can become so extreme.
Brazil is a democratic country.
They had a democratic country until 1964 when the CIA worked with Brazilian generals to overthrow the left-liberal, center-left government that Brazilians had democratically elected because they weren't taking orders from Washington.
And so there was a coup and they drove the president out of the country and they opposed a military dictatorship that ruled for the next 21 years.
And Brazil redemocratized in 1985, had its first presidential election in 1989, and since then Brazil is more or less a democratic country.
Obviously imperfect, like most are, but it has a constitution that is modeled on Western democracies, including a very robust guarantee of free speech, a prohibition on any form of censorship, and very quickly, in the name of stopping the Bolsonaro movement,
The Brazilian establishment united with the Brazilian left to decide and announce the threat posed to Brazil is so grave, the threat from the Bolsonaro movement, is so grave that Normal legal rights and liberties cannot be honored, given the dangers that are faced.
Now, exactly the same thing is being said in the United States to justify the erosion of legal rights as well, which is that the dangers of the Trump movement are so severe to American democracy that we have to escalate the attacks and the erosion of basic legal rights and constitutional liberties, including free speech online.
That is always, always, anytime the state wants to erode individual liberties, in every case, nobody ever comes out and admits, oh, we want to suppress dissent.
It's always, the argument always is, this speech is too dangerous to public safety and public security to allow it to be heard.
That you go to China, you go to Saudi Arabia, And you ask them, why are you censoring this way?
They say, we don't censor legitimate political speech.
We censor criminal speech, speech that poses a threat to the public order.
That's the justification in every repressive country for every attack on individual liberties during the war on terror.
We were always hearing that the threat of Al Qaeda is so great that we can't allow normal rights of due process, we have to imprison people without due process, we can't afford to give them trials.
This is always in every case where the state repression happens, that is always the mentality.
And that is the mentality pervading the United States and Europe, the same mentality that is pervading Brazil.
Now note that the reason Jair Bolsonaro was president of Brazil for four years from 2018 to 2022.
It's the same reason Donald Trump was president of the United States from 2016 to 2020, namely that they were democratically elected by the people of this country.
And if in 2024, in November of this year, Donald Trump returns to the White House, it will be because, as polls are showing, a majority of American voters want him to be president again.
And yet somehow the argument is we have to erode basic civil liberties to protect democracy from the possible return to power through democratic means of a president we dislike.
And that's exactly what Brazil is doing as well.
They're saying there's a threat that our country faces of a coup or an attack on democratic values and therefore we have to attack democratic values first.
It's like we have to burn down the village to save it.
We have to destroy democracy to save democracy.
Here's an excellent Brazilian journalist, Samuel Poncher, who works for the news site Metropolis, who yesterday reported the following, quote, when denying ex-Brazil's request for legal measures to be sent to the company's international office, Alexandre de Moraes highlights that employees of the social network in Brazil are subject to, quote, possible criminal liability.
Criminal.
And in the same order that he issued, he also explicitly threatened these employees of X that they will have to be interrogated by the federal police.
And when he's saying you may be subject to possible criminal liability, what he's saying is you will be arrested and imprisoned if X, even in any case, permits the return of somebody we have ordered banned.
Now, one of the ways that you can know that what is going on in Brazil is so extreme, but as I said, it's extreme, but it happened very quickly.
And it absolutely can happen the same way in the United States or any Western European country.
There are laws in Western European countries being enacted to provide a similar censorship regime based on the same rationale there is, of course, in the United States.
Two federal courts that have now said that the Biden administration gravely violated the First Amendment by threatening and coercing big tech to remove dissent.
From social media platforms, even the New York Times.
Generally a supporter of big tech censorship.
They agitate for big tech censorship all the time.
They have reporters who do nothing other than say, oh look, Facebook is allowing this content that is against their rules.
And they call Facebook and they say, we're going to publish a story about how you're allowing these kinds of people to be on your platform.
And obviously that's just activism for censorship masquerading as journalism.
But they're usually on the side of the censorship regime.
And they obviously hate Jair Bolsonaro as much as they hate Donald Trump.
And yet, This judge in Brazil has gone to such extremes that even the New York Times, just weeks before the 2022 presidential election in Brazil, when Bolsonaro was running for re-election against Lula da Silva, and Lula ended up winning by a very small margin, published an article warning of the dangers of this judge.
Quote in the headline, to defend democracy is Brazil's top court going too far.
Brazil's Supreme Court has acted as the primary check on President Jair Bolsonaro's power.
Now many are worried the court is posing its own threat.
Mr. Moraes has jailed five people without a trial for posts on social media that he said attacked Brazil's institutions.
He has also ordered social networks to remove thousands of posts and videos with little room for appeal.
And this year, 10 of the court's 11 justices sentenced a congressman to nearly nine years in prison for making what they said were threats against them in a live stream.
In many cases, Mr. Marais has acted unilaterally, emboldened by new powers the court granted itself in 2019 that allow it to, in effect, Act as investigator, prosecutor, and judge all at once in some cases.
And it's not just that they're acting as investigator, judge, and the police in one case.
Oftentimes, he himself is also the victim.
He claims that these posts are an attack on his honor, on the integrity, on his honor as a public official.
So he's the victim of the alleged crime, he initiates an investigation, he leads the police investigation against it, and then he serves as the judge.
It is a principle in every court system throughout the democratic world that a judge cannot act in their own case, in their own interest, and yet he does it constantly.
Quote, political leaders on the left and much of the Brazilian press and public have largely supported Mr. Moraes' actions as necessary measures to counter this singular threat posed by Mr. Bolsonaro.
Now, again, look at the kind of game playing the New York Times does there with the truth.
They're saying most of the Brazilian public supports this in order to combat the threat posed by Bolsonaro, but Bolsonaro is a political candidate Who won with almost 60% of the vote, 60% of the Brazilian people in 2018 voted to make him their president.
He didn't seize power in a coup, he was elected democratically.
And then in 2022 when he ran for re-election, Lula barely got 51% of the vote, just under 51%, to Bolsonaro's 49%.
just under 51% to Bolsonaro's 49%.
It was a point and a half separating the two of them.
So at least half the country supports Jair Bolsonaro and polls actually show a huge loss of faith and trust in the Brazilian court system
And as we said, there are many reasons to care about the emergence of this kind of censorship regime in Brazil, including the fact that it can serve as a laboratory and is serving as a laboratory for Europe and the United States to see how far they can actually go as well and what works and what doesn't work.
And that's one of the reasons Elon Musk finally proclaimed his unwillingness to comply any longer with the censorship regime.
Now, you can make a lot of criticism of Elon Musk, and the Brazilian media has been doing it endlessly, pointing out that he has business in China and rarely stands up to the Chinese government the way he's standing up to the Brazilian government, that he has business with Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia and very rarely denounces the attacks of on free speech in Saudi Arabia, but everybody knows China and Saudi Arabia are undemocratic.
Those countries don't pretend to be part of the democratic world.
Brazil does.
He's also denounced the United States censorship regime at great length as well.
It's not like he's confining it to Brazil.
And then there's also just this sort of sense in Brazil that Why should a foreign billionaire be able to demand the impeachment of our judge and to attack our political institutions?
And that's because anyone has free speech to attack political officials in any other country.
Brazilians constantly attack American political officials, American policy, American institutions, and they have every right to do so.
But it's especially necessary here because the Brazilian government is demanding that Twitter serve as an arm of their censorship regime by doing their dirty work for them.
Last year, Rumble decided it had enough.
It wasn't willing to continue to do that.
And now Elon Musk is saying that he has had enough as well.
Now we'll see whether Elon Musk follows through in the wake of these threats and begins to reinstate accounts that have been banned, as he alluded to the fact that he would do.
I think he's concerned about the safety of his employees in Brazil, given that they have now been explicitly threatened with arrest and criminal prosecution.
And I think he wants to protect them first, but we'll see how this plays out.
But whatever else is true, bringing attention to how extreme the censorship regime in Brazil has become in a democratic country very quickly and overnight based on the same rationale that we're hearing in Europe and the United States, even if you don't care about Brazil, is a very important warning for how quickly the already grave censorship regime in our country can spiral out of control.
Two months before he became House Speaker in the wake of the coup against Speaker Kevin McCarthy and then that protracted fight over who was going to be House Speaker, we interviewed Congressman Johnson Who is now the House Speaker, in order to question him about a variety of things.
It was on the day when the FBI director, Christopher Wray, had appeared before a committee on which then-Congressman Johnson served.
And he was quite eloquent in his denunciations of the U.S.
security state in general, its attempt to control the Internet in particular.
We asked him about that.
We asked him about spying powers on the part of the government.
He said he believes that those powers had been abused.
He talked about the FBI and the abuse of FBI power.
He talked about his opposition to the war in Ukraine.
Views that he steadfastly said he held and that his voting record suggested he held.
In 2018, he voted against the renewal of FISA, which is the bill that Allows the FBI and the NSA to spy on Americans without warrants.
And he also talked about his opposition to funding the war in Ukraine.
And then he became Speaker.
And a lot of things changed.
He's now working, as we'll show you, to ensure that Joe Biden gets what he wants and with another $60 billion to Ukraine.
But he also, for inexplicable reasons, has become Someone who is now dedicated to ensuring that this FISA spying bill, which was last renewed in 2018, which is now up for renewal again.
If it's not renewed again, it will expire.
And what many members of Congress on the left and the right are saying is that these spying powers are too broad.
They're too limitless.
Nobody wants to do away with the FBI or NSA's Authority to spy.
That's what those agencies exist to do.
That's an important part of criminal investigations or foreign intelligence.
The problem is that the NSA was supposed to be an agency that spied on non-Americans, on foreign adversaries.
And yet, increasingly, what happened, and it was very predictable at the time when this law was enacted in 2008 under the Bush administration, and allowed warrantless eavesdropping, is that they began spying on Americans en masse, without having first to go to a court and get a warrant.
And this requirement, embedded in the Constitution, is one of the fundamental Rights guaranteed in the Constitution that the government cannot spy on you, cannot listen to your confrontations, cannot take your papers, cannot seize your property, without first going to a court and convincing a court that they are probable cause that you actually did something wrong.
That they have a reason, a legitimate reason, to spy on you.
The government's not supposed to be spying on American citizens.
And yet they do it all the time under this bill that was first enacted in the name of the War on Terror.
And it has been repeatedly renewed without a single reform, including just a requirement of warrants.
And so finally, when it was up this year, many people on the right, many Republicans in Congress, many on the left, many Democrats said that they will not renew FISA unless it has serious reforms, serious protections for Americans.
And yet, Mike Johnson, who originally said that he agreed that there needed to be reforms before Pfizer was renewed, earlier today attempted to bring to the floor a vote that would have allowed Congress to simply pass Pfizer with no reforms.
And because it was a rules vote, technically, it's very rare that members of any caucus, the House Republican Caucus or the House Democrat Caucus, defy their leaders and defect on a rules vote.
And yet, 19 Republicans joined with all Democrats to vote no on bringing this bill to the floor.
And as a result, it was not brought to the floor, and now it could expire without renewal.
Now, one potential reason this happened Is because Donald Trump, who has not commented on this until today, went to True Social this morning and posted this.
Quote, Kill Pfizer.
It was illegally used against me and many others.
They spied on my campaign.
G-J-T-T.
Now, I actually almost went on Twitter yesterday to complain that Trump hasn't yet manifested or spoken about this bill, and obviously he should given his personal experience.
But then I decided not to because I knew there was a chance that he might today and didn't want to seem like he was being pressured and so I was glad to see that tweak because obviously that's important in giving these Republicans the space and the license to abandon Mike Johnson as Speaker and vote no.
Here from the New York Times today, its report on what happened.
After Trump broadsides, surveillance bill collapses in the House.
Quote, right-wing lawmakers blocked a move by Speaker Johnson to extend a key foreign intelligence surveillance tool.
Look at the New York Times.
The New York Times was part of the Snowden reporting.
My colleague Laura Poitras published several articles with the New York Times that reported on the abuses of the spying system.
And yet, look at how the New York Times, because Trump and GOP lawmakers are opposed to this extension, and Joe Biden is in favor of it, look at how they herald this bill to make you think that it's some crucial bill vital to our national security that these big bad right-wing lawmakers and Trump are blocking.
Quote, right-wing lawmakers blocked a move by Speaker Johnson to extend a key foreign intelligence surveillance tool.
After former President Donald J. Trump urged lawmakers to, quote, kill the law underlying it.
In an upset on the House floor, the measure, which would extend a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act known as Section 702, failed what is normally a routine procedural vote.
On a vote of 228 to 193, 19 House Republicans, most aligned with the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, joined Democrats in opposing its consideration.
Do you see how, as well?
They didn't know it until the third paragraph in passing that Democrats also voted no on this, nor did they say that while this bill is called a bill of foreign intelligence gathering, it is often the power that is used to spy on American citizens without warrants.
What they do is they say, oh, our target is not an American citizen.
Our target is a foreign national.
But they can easily spy on many conversations of Americans without warrants by simply declaring foreign targets that they know are speaking often to Americans.
A lot of Americans speak to people in Canada, people in Mexico, people in Europe.
And so all the NSA or the FBI has to do is say, those are our targets.
And then they get to listen in on multiple conversations of American citizens without the warrants required by the Constitution.
Those are the reforms that are being sought.
Quote, such defections were once considered unthinkable, but have become increasingly common as the hard right has rebelled against GOP leaders.
Quote, we will regroup and reformulate another plan, Mr. Johnson said after the vote.
Quote, we cannot allow Section 2 of FISA to expire.
It's too important to national security.
I think most of the members understand that.
Nobody, Mike Johnson, thinks that this bill should expire.
The argument is that it should not be renewed without added protections to American citizens.
And had Speaker Johnson been willing to allow votes on these amendments to reform the bill, to limit it, to require warrants, Then the bill could have passed easily and we wouldn't be facing the possibility that it will expire without renewables because Speaker Johnson sided with the National Security Hawks and the Republican Party, the people who always want to give the U.S.
security state everything it wants, the part of the party that wants to fund the war in Ukraine, and decided to do their bidding and the bidding of the NSA and the FBI and the Biden White House.
Members of his caucus rebelled.
The New York Times goes on, quote, Under Section 702, the government is empowered to collect, without warrants, the messages of non-citizens abroad, even when those targeted are communicating with Americans.
As a result, the government sometimes collects Americans' private messages without a warrant.
Exactly.
They often do.
While there are limits on how these messages can be searched for and used, the FBI has repeatedly violated those limits in recent years.
Including improperly querying for information about Black Lives Matter protesters and people suspected of participating in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
That's pretty significant abuse.
To be spying on domestic political movements without warrants.
That's why you cannot possibly renew this bill without reforms and protections for the privacy rights of American citizens guaranteed by the Constitution.
Quote, Mr. Trump's attack on the measure underscored his lingering grievances about the Russia investigation and his disdain for national security agencies he often disparages as an evil deep state.
And this has resonated with his hard right allies on Capitol Hill who see blocking the extension of the law as a way to inflict pain on the intelligence community they regard as an enemy.
Now, the reason that Donald Trump is actually suspicious of the spying powers of the FBI and the NSA is because, as we know, they spied on Donald Trump's campaign in 2016.
People associated with the Trump campaign, like Carter Page, and they did so by filing false affidavits with the FISA court.
To the point where an FBI lawyer actually had to plead guilty to submitting false documents to the FISA court to get permission to spy on Carter Page and people associated with the Trump campaign.
And they've abused this repeatedly.
Now, ordinarily, the New York Times would be objecting to the abuse of domestic spying powers by the U.S.
security state, but the realignment that has happened We're Democrats are fully on the side of the U.S.
security state and there are no votes today.
We're simply procedural.
They were opposing Mike Johnson's attempt to bring the bill to the floor.
We'll see how they vote on the actual merits if it's rebroad.
But that is the realignment that the establishment institutions of American liberalism, like the New York Times, are now fully on the side of the U.S.
security state along with the Democratic Party.
And maybe five years ago, they would have described this vote in a much more positive and praiseworthy way.
They're now depicting it as some evil subversion, almost treason against our honorable intelligence officials that will jeopardize their benevolent and sincere desire just to keep us safe, even though they just got done saying that the FBI has repeatedly abused these powers for illegitimate domestic political ends.
Here are the 19 Republicans from the Hill who voted to block the spying powers.
They actually voted against Speaker Johnson's attempt to bring it to the floor.
There you see the names.
Andy Briggs of Arizona, Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Michael Cloud of Texas, Eli Crane of Arizona, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Bob Good of Virginia, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Clay Higgins of Louisiana.
Ana Paulina Luna of Florida, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Corey Mills of Florida, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Chip Roy of Texas, and Greg Stube of Florida.
Now, there are many House Republicans, such as Jim Jordan and others, who actually oppose renewal of FISA without reform, but they weren't willing to Defy Speaker Johnson on this rules vote.
Remember, this was just a rules vote to bring it to the floor.
And it's very rare to have defections because usually each party unites in support of their leadership on rules votes.
But that would have allowed a vote on this FISA bill and renewing the FISA bill with no reforms.
And there was a significant chance, although it's hard to say for sure, that it would have passed.
So these 19 House Republicans did not want to take that risk of allowing this bill to come to the fore because the U.S.
security state in Washington generally gets what they want.
Here's Elizabeth Gautin of the Brennan Center for Justice, one of the most informed experts on all matters concerning domestic spying, and she had an outstanding explanation for what happened.
It's obviously not simple, and this is what she said.
Quote, Speaker Johnson has caved to the House Intelligence Committee's Bush League tactics and will block votes on a key reform when Section 702 authorization goes to the House floor this week.
This was her thread from yesterday before the vote actually happened, but she was explaining what Speaker Johnson did.
Quote, the base bill that the House will consider, the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, RISA, contains no meaningful reforms.
In fact, the bill would actually weaken the FISA Court's oversight of surveillance.
In February, members of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committee had reached a deal with Johnson.
Under which he planned to bring RISA to the fore and allow each committee to offer three amendments.
The amendment would end the government's practice of evading constitutional and statutory privacy protections by purchasing American sensitive information from data brokers rather than obtaining the warrant court order subpoena otherwise required by law.
Remember we reported on how the Director of National Intelligence admitted U.S.
security state agencies are buying mass data on American citizens that they would be constitutionally prohibited from collecting on their own.
And one of the reforms that members of both parties want is to ban them from being able to buy data on the private market about Americans.
She went on, quote, Speaker Johnson has showed his true colors.
His desire to appease House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner outweighs any sense of responsibility he might have to the American people and he is ready and willing to betray their trust.
In the New York Times today, notice that Speaker Johnson has changed his views on many positions he once claimed to have before becoming Speaker.
Here you see the headline, As Speaker, Johnson Advances What He Once Opposed, Enraging the Right.
Now that he is the leader, the Louisiana Republican has found himself bowing to government realities that are now his problem.
Quote, Johnson repeatedly voted down efforts to send aid to Ukraine before he became Speaker.
Citing insufficient oversight of where the money would go, he opposed the stopgap funding bill that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy put on the House floor in an effort to avert a government shutdown.
He supported a sweeping overhaul favored by Libertarians to the law that undergirds a warrantless surveillance program that is reviled by right-wing lawmakers who distrust federal law enforcement.
But now that he is Speaker Johnson, he has changed his tune considerably, much to the chagrin and outrage of the right-wing lawmakers with whom he once found common cause.
After months of refusing to bring up a bill to send a fresh infusion of aid to Ukraine, Mr. Johnson is now searching for a way to advance it, having privately pledged that the Congress would, quote, do our job, meaning financing a foreign war.
That's the job of Congress.
Despite a vow in the fall never to pass another stopgap funding bill to keep the government open, he put forward several to allow more time to negotiate funding agreements with Democrats that were opposed by many of his members.
And on Wednesday, the Speaker tried and failed to put to a vote a bill making more modest changes to the surveillance program over the objections of hard-right lawmakers and activists who have sought to place strict limits on it.
Now one of the things going on here is that because there's such a small margin that Republicans have in their majority, if they just a few defect and refuse to support Mike Johnson as Speaker, he can be deposed.
That's what happened with Kevin McCarthy.
But the Democrats have told Mike Johnson that if he gets their number one priority passed, which is not anything to help the American people, but instead to finance the war in Ukraine, As the Guardian reports, the Democrats will protect Mike Johnson, House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries suggests.
In other words, if Mike Johnson gets that $60 billion pass that he had always said he opposed, Democratic leadership in Congress is telling Mike Johnson, we'll vote for you as Speaker and keep you as Speaker even if your right-wing members try and depose you.
Quote, the Democratic leadership in Congress has suggested it would protect the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson if he boxes far-right colleagues and brings a stalled $60 billion Ukraine military aid package to a vote, as a new poll shows public support for Ukraine is now fractured down party political lines.
And Hakim Jeffries, it goes on to say, said there's a good number of Democrats who would vote to save the Republican Speaker as long as he gets aid to Ukraine.
Do you see the top priority of the Democratic Party and the game that Mike Johnson is willing to play to keep himself in power and serving the Biden White House's agenda by financing a foreign war that before becoming Speaker, Mike Johnson has vowed vehemently he opposed?
And now he does the same thing on A spying bill that he said could not be passed without reforms and now he's working to ensure its passage without allowing any reforms at all.
It's a very good glimpse into the dirty, filthy game of how Washington is played, but actually it's good news.
What happened today, the 19 Republicans were willing to defect and defy him and vote no on bringing this bill to the floor and enraged he was, according to reports, and threatened House members who voted no by saying you will suffer serious consequences.
We will certainly continue to follow this story since warrantless spying on Americans is obviously a very important story and one of the central causes of our journalism here.
That concludes our show for this evening.
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