Mike Johnson Enables Warrantless Spying on Americans. War Between Israel/US and Iran? PLUS: Lee Fang on Ukrainian Smear Campaign
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
House Enables Warrantless Spying (5:37)
War With Iran (39:23)
Interview with Lee Fang (59:15)
Outro (1:23:01)
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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.
That was a very elegant beginning to the show.
Tonight, the House of Representatives today renewed the FISA law, which empowers the NSA and the FBI in specific situations to spy on American citizens without any warrants.
The vote was 212 to 212, a tie.
The House Speaker, Mike Johnson, who spent years claiming, insisting that he opposes warrantless eavesdropping, he was on our show to talk about it two months before he became Speaker, did something that House Speakers infrequently do today.
He cast his own vote, a no vote, on the amendment that would have imposed a warrant requirement.
That is what ensured the tie, and under House rules, a tie is deemed a defeat.
The warrantless eavesdropping power is one that the U.S.
security state uses often against American citizens.
Despite how permissive these spying laws are, they have been caught, by their own admission, abusing these powers many times, meaning spying on Americans in the very limited ways that the law permits.
For that reason, there was bipartisan insistence in the months leading up to today's vote that the law could be renewed, the spying law, only if a requirement to first obtain warrants was included in the bill.
Yet, as always happens in Washington, always, the US security state got what it wanted.
It united with the Biden White House to do everything possible to ensure that no such warrant requirement was included.
They successfully enlisted the Democrats who normally serve the US security state, people like Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and Dan Goldman, to oppose any reforms.
But this would never have succeeded if not for Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson.
He was the key figure defeating this warrant requirement.
He's someone who, in just a few months before becoming Speaker, has completely transformed into a radically different person than what he was prior to becoming Speaker.
We'll examine the votes today in the House and the important history leading up to it, as well as its implications.
Then, last month, Israel undertook a very rare and extraordinary action, something which nations virtually never do.
They bombed a foreign embassy.
Specifically, they destroyed the Iranian consulate building in Damascus, Syria, which is considered under international law to be Iranian soil, so they basically bombed Iran.
And basically forced Iran to retaliate in serious ways.
There's no country on earth that wouldn't retaliate if a foreign country bombed its embassy.
Imagine what Israel would do if Iran had bombed an Israeli embassy.
Now, earlier today, both Joe Biden and the White House itself stated clearly that they would involve themselves in any conflict that might arise involving Israel and Iran.
In other words, a new major war in the Middle East seems very possibly to be emerging.
And because of the U.S.' 's intense loyalty to Israel, it very well may be a new Middle East war for the U.S.
as well.
The investigative journalist Li Fang has uncovered numerous documents showing how the Ukrainians and various U.S.-funded NGOs based in Kiev have been secretly working to smear the reputations of any American citizens who speak out against U.S.
financing of and support for their war.
The people they have smeared using U.S.
money, Ukrainian NGOs includes people like Professor John Mearsheimer, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Tucker Carlson, Senator Rand Paul, and myself.
Lee will be here just a little bit to talk about his reporting and what he found.
Before we get to all that, A few programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
For in the entire last year, it really did seem like the U.S.
security state was finally going to suffer a defeat.
And that is because members of both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party have been enraged by how many times the FBI and the NSA have been abusing their spying powers when using it against American citizens.
And what's so remarkable about that abuse is it's almost hard for the FBI and the NSA to abuse those powers or to operate outside the law, even if they want to, because the law imposes so few restraints on how they can spy.
And yet, even with those few constraints, even with how permissive this law is, they have been unable to stay within it.
They are constantly going outside of it.
And as a result, The FISA law, which has to be renewed every four or five years, depending on how many years it gets each time it's renewed, was coming up for renewal in April, which is this month, and there was widespread consensus that there was no way the House
was going to allow renewal of this spying law, this warrantless spying law, unless it included a requirement that before the FBI and NSA can listen in on the conversations of American citizens, they have to first go and get a warrant, one of the most basic foundational requirements and guarantees of the US Constitution.
And yet the vote came up today, and they tried to pass an amendment to this bill that would have imposed a warrant requirement, and the vote on the amendment was 212 to 212, which is a tie, which means the amendment was defeated.
And the only reason it was a tie is because Mike Johnson, as Republican House Speaker, did something he rarely does, which is actually cast his own vote on the bill.
Had he not done that, it would have passed 212 to 211.
212 to 211, but because he cast a vote, a no vote, it ended up being defeated.
There was also intense lobbying from the Biden White House, from the U.S.
security state, from Republican security hawks in the Congress who don't care at all about the civil liberties and the privacy rights of American citizens.
Now, the history that led up to this law and how we ended up as a country That permits warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens, even though we have a constitution that in the Fourth Amendment prohibits any search and seizure or surveillance without a warrant is absolutely vital.
But before we get to that, we want to just show you the shameful and quite shocking events that happened today in the House.
So I think the best summary of what happened came from Congressman Thomas Massey, the Republican of Kentucky, who was on our show just a couple months ago.
One of the leaders in the House for many years in defending the privacy rights of American citizens.
And this is what he wrote, quote, this is how the Constitution dies.
By a tie vote, the amendment to require a warrant to spy on Americans goes down in flames.
This is a sad day for America.
The Speaker doesn't always vote in the House, but he was the tiebreaker vote today.
He voted against warrants.
And here's the image that Massey posted, presumably because he took his own photo of it, in the House right as time expired.
You see the gay votes require warrants for spying, 212.
The nay votes, also 212.
And so they got exactly the amount of votes they needed.
And I have no doubt that a lot of people who voted yes did so because they knew it was going to fail.
That happens all the time in Congress.
They'll allow members of Congress to take a politically popular stand as long as they know that they don't need their vote.
So they had the exact number of votes that they needed to ensure that this warrant requirement failed and that the NSA and the FBI can continue to spy on American citizens, surveil American citizens, without having to go to any court beforehand and convince them that the spying is justified.
Jake Sherman, who is a longtime Washington reporter, said this from me and Brez reports, his colleague.
Jake Sullivan, who is the Biden National Security Advisor, and Merrick Garland, the Biden Attorney General, are calling members on the Hill on the warrant amendment The White House is working hard to defeat it.
And that's not surprising.
The Biden White House has been adamant.
From the start that they want a renewal of the spying law with no reforms of any kind.
It's not surprising that the Biden White House, the executive branch, the U.S.
security state want a new spying bill with no warrants.
What's surprising, I guess, is that the new Speaker of the House, who has spent years claiming to be opposed He actually gave an answer to a question from reporters about why it is that he so radically changed his view.
I don't think we have that video.
Maybe we can get it.
It was something I actually posted on social media, but it's a remarkable answer that he gave about, you know, they asked him, they said, "Mike Johnson, you're somebody who has spent many years insisting that you oppose warrantless e-dropping." And then you become a speaker and you suddenly decide that it's vital that this bill passed without a warrant requirement.
Why have you so completely changed your mind on this?
And it's not the only thing he's completely changed.
His mind, when we had him on our show, we talked about his opposition to further funding for the war in Ukraine.
He's been holding up that funding and now suddenly he has announced that he's doing everything possible to find a way to get $60 billion more through the House.
One of the most knowledgeable and devoted experts and privacy activists who works for the Brennan Center on Security and Privacy is Elizabeth Goyton.
And she posted a thread on Twitter today that gave a lot of insight into exactly what happened.
Here's what she said, quote, I'm sad and frankly baffled To report that the House voted today to reward the government's widespread abuses of Section 702 by massively expanding the government's powers to conduct warrantless surveillance.
The amendment to require the government to obtain a warrant to search 702 data for Americans Communication failed by an achingly close vote of 212 to 212, following some truly shameless misrepresentations about the amendment from Republican Congressman Mike Turner of Ohio, the White House, and others.
She went on, quote, that's bad enough, but the House also voted for the amendment many of us have been calling Patriot Act 2.0.
This will force ordinary American businesses that provide Wi-Fi to their customers to give the NSA access to their Wi-Fi equipment to conduct 702 surveillance, meaning surveillance without warrants of any kind.
So that gives you a sense for just how extreme what happened today is.
I think that there are a lot of Americans who respond to this news, and I hope there are a lot of Americans who respond to this news by saying, wait a minute, why does Congress need to impose a warrant requirement on the NSA and FBI to spy on American citizens, to listen to our conversations, to tap into our internet activity, But only if they first go to a court and get a warrant.
Isn't that foundational to the American system that the Fourth Amendment says that the government cannot spy on you or seize your papers or documents without first going to a court and getting a warrant, proving that probable cause exists to believe that you've done something wrong, that justifies their spying on you?
And if you read the Fourth Amendment, that's exactly what it says.
So the question becomes, how is it then that we have warrantless spying in the United States if the Congress, led by Mike Johnson and the Biden White House united yet again, was able to extend for another two years?
And I think it's important to understand the history.
I started writing about politics in October of 2005, within about a month.
In December of 2005, the New York Times published an article that caused a huge scandal at the time.
They actually won a Pulitzer Prize for it, revealing that shortly after 9-11, the Bush and Cheney administration had ordered the NSA to begin spying on the conversations of American citizens when speaking to foreign nationals without bothering to first go get a warrant.
And their argument was, well, as long as we can claim that our target are foreign nationals, if we're spying on foreign nationals and listening to their conversations, it had always been the case that if they then start talking to Americans, the NSA or the FBI had to hang up.
They can't listen to an American citizen's conversation without going to get a warrant.
And what Bush and Cheney ordered, in secret, Was that from now on, if you hear a foreign national speaking to an American citizen, just keep listening.
You no longer need a warrant to spy on the communications of American citizens.
And when the New York Times revealed this, maybe four to six weeks after I began writing about politics on my blog, it was a gigantic scandal.
There were people calling for Bush to be impeached.
The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for it.
And I spent the next year writing about almost nothing else because this was a shocking development to learn that our government had decided, after 220 years, that it had the right to spy on us without getting warrants.
And at the time, once the Congress actually got around to holding hearings about it, The Speaker of the House was Nancy Pelosi.
The Democrats had won a majority in 2006.
The New York Times published this article in 2005, late 2005.
And under Nancy Pelosi, what Congress decided to do in the face of these revelations, that George Bush and Dick Cheney were illegally spying on Americans without the warrants, not just required by the Constitution, but also required by the FISA law of 1978.
Was not to punish the executive branch for spying illegally on unconstitutional Americans, even though they were.
The solution was to pass a law that retroactively legalized that warrantless spying program called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.
That is the bill that just got renewed again.
It got renewed in 2012 by an overwhelming vote.
And then again in 2018, it got renewed for another six years.
And the bill came up today.
And this bill is the one that had retroactively legalized the Bush-Cheney warrantless spying program on Americans that was so controversial, even scandalous at the time that it was revealed.
And now has just become a standard part of the woodwork of how our country functions, that our government now has the right to spy on us as long as the people we're speaking to are foreign nationals.
And the abuse of this law has been abundant, and the evidence of it has been very clear.
Now, we do have the video, we do have the video where, I want you to really hear this.
Where Mike Johnson was asked, wait a minute, you've been saying for years that you think the government should be able to spy on Americans only with a warrant.
It's profoundly unconstitutionally said.
It's profoundly illegal.
And now you're speaker for like six seconds and you lead the way in defeating a requirement that the FBI and the NSA should have to get a warrant?
Why did you completely change?
Remember, Mike Johnson is a constitutional lawyer.
That's why I had him on my show.
We talked about the U.S.
security state, the censorship regime, the abuses of it.
He understood it very well.
He's a constitutional lawyer.
Mike Johnson is quite smart.
I walked away from that interview impressed by his intellect and his commitment to these principles.
Maybe it was naive on my part.
I had no idea he was going to become a speaker in two months and then suddenly change everything he had claimed he believed in, but that's what he did.
So he was asked today or yesterday by reporters, why do you suddenly support warrantless spying on Americans?
This is what he said.
I saw the abuses of the FBI, the terrible abuses over and over and over, the hundreds of thousands of abuses.
And then when I became Speaker, I went to the SCF and got the confidential briefing from sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of Section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security.
And it gave me a different perspective.
So I encourage all the members to go to the classified briefing and hear all that and see it so they can evaluate the situation for themselves.
And I think Some opinions have changed both ways, but that's part of the process.
You got to be fully informed.
Isn't it amazing how little effort it took to turn him out like that?
To take somebody who was a constitutional lawyer who ran on the platform of civil liberties, who was denouncing vehemently, Warrantless spying, and they call him down, and they say, Speaker, you get to go to the really high levels of secrecy.
The guys with all the medals on their chest are going to come in, and you're going to get to see some really sensitive documents.
Come down to where the powerful people are.
And he went there, and he had a single briefing.
And however long that meeting lasted, they convinced him to completely do a 180.
That's how Washington works.
Now, I know a lot of people think, no, actually what happens is the U.S.
security state blackmails people.
And we know for sure that the FBI blackmailed politicians throughout the entire 20th century.
J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for almost 60 years.
And it's well known he had dossiers on every politician in the United States.
That's how he stayed at the FBI for 60 years.
Everybody was petrified of J. Edgar Hoover.
But I'm not going to say that's what's happening here because I have no proof of that.
I have no evidence of that.
But I do want to say that don't underestimate how effective it is when they use all of the They induce people and seduce them into feeling important by allowing them into the bowels of the NSA and the FBI and showing them in these secret rooms.
It makes them feel so important and then they are so respectful of these people and the institutions.
And then they can just convince them of anything.
Speaker, if you require warrants before we can listen to Americans' conversations, We're going to be thwarted from stopping terrorist attacks and the blood will be on your hands.
And if you think that's an exaggeration, the New York Times learned of this warrantless spying program.
I said that they published the story in December of 2005.
But the journalist who published the story actually learned of this program in 2004 and they wanted to report on it.
But George Bush called the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, and the editor at the time, down to the Oval Office, and that's what he told him.
If you publicize the fact that we're spying on Americans without warrants, you will have blood on your hands.
And so they barred these journalists from revealing that.
George Bush ran for re-election in 2004 and won.
The New York Times knew that he was spying on Americans without warrants, and yet they held it a secret because of exactly this kind of process.
The only reason the New York Times ended up allowing those two reporters, Jim Risen and Eric Lickbaugh, to publish that story was because Jim Risen was so angry about being blocked That he wrote a book where he was going to do the story in his own book, and the New York Times didn't want to be scooped by their own reporter in a book.
And so they finally allowed them to report the story.
They got a Pulitzer for it.
They patted themselves on the back for their courage.
But that's what happens in Washington.
Barack Obama ran on a platform in 2008 in his campaign of uprooting most of the new war on terror policies.
And as soon as he got into the Oval Office, he got visits by generals and CIA agents.
And they told him, if you do any of this, we're going to make it known that terrorist attacks are your fault.
And he ended up not only protecting those programs he vowed to uproot throughout the campaign, but even strengthening all of them and extending them and making them worse.
Here, and by the way, that's the generous.
Interpretation for why Mike Johnson would have so radically changed his view.
That he got bullied and intimidated and hypnotized by the self-importance that comes from being taken into the secret chambers and told, no, now you're one of the really important ones.
It's one thing to be a backbencher in Congress and talk about the importance of warrants, but you're speaker now.
You're third in line to the presidency.
You have responsibilities much greater than you did previously.
Here is Dustin Amash, who served in Congress for many years as a Republican and then as an Independent.
Lots of people have different views of him, but one thing that you cannot take away is that he is one of the most consistent members of Congress ever to serve in terms of his principle devotion to civil liberties.
He's currently running for the Republican nomination for Senate in Michigan against Mike Rogers, who was the House Intelligence Chairman during the War on Terror and one of the most mindless hawks.
He's basically a copy of John Bolton.
And here's what Justin Amash said today, quote, the amendment vote on FISA 702 to require a warrant to search Americans' communications, which, by the way, is something the Constitution already requires.
Fails 212 to 212.
Republicans voted in favor of the warrant requirement.
128 Republicans voted yes.
86 voted no.
Whereas Democrats voted against.
Only 84 voted yes.
126 voted no.
So yet again, the Democrats are siding more with the U.S.
security state than the Republican Party is.
That's how radically realigned we are.
And then Justin Mach said, vote out every person who voted no.
Ryan Grimm, my former colleague at The Intercept, said the following, Joining Mike Johnson in rejecting the amendment that would require a warrant to search American 702 data were a handful of Democrats previously supportive of civil liberties, including Jamie Raskin, Joe Nguzzi, and Ted Lieu.
Jamie Raskin and Ted Lieu in particular have long branded themselves stalwart civil libertarians, great believers in the importance of privacy and the necessity to limit the power of the U.S.
security state.
But now they worship the U.S.
security state.
Jamie Raskin was one of the most extremist devotees of Russiagate.
Where, which came from the CIA and the FBI.
And so many Democrats now see the euro security state, not as a body or agency that needs to be checked, but as their allies that need to be empowered.
So you have these people who ran in their entire career branding themselves civil libertarians, who now voted just now to allow the FBI and the NSA to spy on Americans with no warrants.
Here's the roll call vote.
We're going to show you just a few of the samples of people in terms of how they voted.
There you see the Republicans.
There were 128 votes in favor of warrants before they could spy on Americans.
And 126 Democrats voted no.
It's almost a complete symmetry.
The Republicans, by about 40 votes, were in favor of a warrant requirement.
The Democrats, by about 40 votes, helped block it at the behest of the Biden White House.
There's that tie that you see, 212 to 212.
13 members decided not to vote.
And as a result, the amendment died.
members decided not to vote, and as a result, the amendment died.
Here are a few of the yes votes, people who voted in favor of the warrant requirement.
You see people like Matt Gaetz.
And of course, Donald Trump came out just two days ago and said, "Kill this FISA law." So you have Matt Gaetz voting in favor of the warrant requirement, Paul Gosar, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jerry Nadler, who Does a lot of terrible things, but in this case voted in favor of Americans' privacy rights, as did Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.
So you see this incredibly bipartisan, trans-ideological coalition.
That's why People thought, I didn't think, because I've never seen the U.S.
security state lose a vote in Washington, an important vote that they really wanted to win, but a lot of people thought that given the wide spectrum of people who understood that these spying powers were abusive and need limits, warrants in particular, it's everyone from Matt Gaetz and Paul Golder and Marjorie Taylor Greene to Jerry Nadler and Elian Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that there was a good chance that it would pass.
Here are a couple of more interesting yes votes.
Not really seeing any there that are super interesting.
Yeah, okay, you have Richie Torres and Rashida Tlaib who voted yes, and you have Nancy Mace as well, the Republican from South Carolina.
So those are a couple interesting ones.
And then here for the no votes, the people who tried to block the warrant requirements, you have Nancy Pelosi, unsurprisingly.
When we did the Snowden reporting, Justin Amash partnered with John Conyers, the longtime liberal Democrat from Michigan, to introduce NSA reform, and it really looked like it was going to pass in wake of the Snowden reporting.
The Obama White House did exactly what the Biden White House did.
They intervened, did everything to block it.
Nancy Pelosi led the way in blocking any reform.
And if you go to Google and type in Nancy Pelosi saved the NSA, you will find a 2013 article from Foreign Policy Magazine with that headline, Nancy Pelosi saves the NSA, because she was the one who led the way.
And ensuring there were no reforms, she was basically in the role that Mike Johnson was in today.
You see how bipartisan this constantly is.
Now, by the way, Dan Goldman, the billionaire heir from the Levi Strauss fortune who was on the Mueller team and was elected because of Manhattan liberals.
Also voted no.
He voted in favor of the U.S.
security state and against the idea of warrants.
I think we have a couple of more here that are worth pointing out in terms of no votes.
You have Joaquin Jeffries, who is the Democratic House leader, the minority leader, who voted no.
There you see Mike Johnson, so the two leaders of each party.
Both voted no.
And you have Jamie Raskin who also voted no.
So you just get a sense for exactly how bipartisan this is.
Now, the leader of the House Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal, was another Democrat, more on the left, who joined with Matt Gaetz.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan in voting no.
And I just want to give you a sense for what she said because it was a very similar speech to what all the people who wanted warrants actually said.
And you'll see here in this speech that even though Pramila Jayapal tends to be an ideological actor, there's nothing ideological in what she says here.
Let's play that.
We have a critical opportunity today to stand up for the civil liberties that are enshrined in our Constitution, while also safeguarding our national security.
Every single day, the FBI conducts an average of 500 warrantless searches of Americans' private communications, resulting in over 278,000 searches in one year alone.
The FBI has invaded the privacy of members of Congress, a state court judge who reported civil rights violations by a local police chief, Black Lives Matter protesters, and more.
We cannot pass this bill without additional protections like my amendment with Representative Biggs and Nadler and Jordan and Lofgren and Davidson to close the backdoor search loophole.
Some members have implied that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board does not support the amendment.
To counter that, let me share some quotes from Sharon Bradford Franklin in her personal capacity as chair of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the independent government agency tasked with ensuring the executive branch conducts national security work in a way that protects our civil liberties and our privacy.
Here are her quotes.
It is critical that in reauthorizing Section 702, Congress include a warrant requirement for U.S.
person queries.
Another quote, requiring a warrant for U.S.
person queries would neither end U.S.
queries nor undermine the overall value of Section 702.
Another quote, outside of the category of, quote, victim queries, the FBI has not been able to identify any cases in which a Section 702 U.S. person query provided unique value in advancing a criminal investigation.
In addition, the government has been unable to identify a single criminal prosecution that relied on evidence identified through a U.S. person query.
Another quote.
That is a speech that was almost identical to the ones given by conservatives, by moderate Republicans.
It was a non-ideological vote.
the government's concerns about slowing down the process for U.S. person queries.
So there you have it.
That is a speech that was almost identical to the ones given by conservatives, by moderate Republicans.
It was a non-ideological vote.
It was just a vote based on everyone's understanding of the Constitution from childhood that the U.S.
government can't spy on American citizens or listen to our calls or read what we're doing online without getting a warrant from a court.
It is so foundational.
And yet, what you have, as we so often have, is a unity of the establishment wings of both parties uniting in opposition.
Think about since Mike Johnson became Speaker.
How often he finds himself in lockstep with the Biden White House.
We always hear from the media, it's the most pervasive myth, oh, the two parties can't get along on anything, bipartisanship is dead, to try and give you the illusion that our democracy is so vibrant, that everything is just so out of each other's throat.
And if you look at what you could arguably say are the three most consequential issues since Mike Johnson became Speaker, the war in Ukraine, the war in Israel, and now this vote, On whether the U.S.
security state needs warrants to spy on us, Mike Johnson has been in complete lockstep with the Biden White House, in fact, doing the bidding of the Biden White House.
And he's the Republican Speaker of the House.
And that is, in reporting on surveillance and reporting on civil liberties and reporting on foreign policy and reporting on war, is what I have been seeing for the last 20 years.
The fact that these partisan differences on everything except culture war issues where they're real are basically theater.
Now let me just go back to this roll call vote because there are a lot of people in the chat who were asking Why certain names here are in italics and why certain names aren't?
The names in italics are Democrats.
So you see Hakeem Jeffries and Jamie Raskin in italics, but you have Mike Johnson that is not.
That's true for this entire list.
The Democrats are in italics.
The Republicans are not.
After these amendments were decided, and the amendment to require a warrant got defeated, then the question became, should the FISA bill be enacted?
And it was still theoretically possible to vote against renewal of the bill, even though, because there was no warrant requirement.
But obviously, if the warrant requirement failed, the bill was going to pass, and it did pass.
It passed by a vote of 273 voting yes.
But there were 147 votes in the House saying, I would rather have this law expire completely than have it passed and give the U.S.
security state yet another two years in order to spy on American citizens without warrants.
It is.
Here's the breakdown.
You see 88 Republicans who voted no.
On Final Passage and 59 Democrats so yet again Republicans are More in their caucus in defense of civil liberties than Democrats.
Democrats, yet again, are more in servitude to the U.S.
security state.
It's such an important instance and illustration of how the parties have realigned on so many critical questions, and yet there was a bipartisan consensus building that would have built in favor of a war requirement had Joe Biden and Mike Johnson not united to stop it.
And if there's anything more illustrative of how Washington works, then the leader of the Democratic Party, leader of the executive branch, joining hands with the Republican Speaker of the House and the Democratic leader in the House to block a bill that would have given American citizens basic constitutional protections, I can't think of what it would be.
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We have been extensively covering the Israeli war in Gaza from the start.
And one major reason for that is that it's not just an Israeli war, but it's an American war as well.
Just days after October 7th, Joe Biden flew to Tel Aviv and met with Prime Minister Netanyahu and vowed To do what America always does, which is provide Israel with all of the weapons it wants and needs from the American stockpile, and to finance Israel's war on top of the $4 billion that the United States gives to Israel every year.
The United States and the Israelis are tied at the hip for all sorts of political reasons that we've covered before, and as a result, anytime Israel starts a new war or gets involved in a new war or is attacked, it becomes an American war as well.
The United States already is involved in combat in the Middle East.
It has been attacking the Houthis in retaliation for the Houthis attack on commercial shipping, which in turn was retaliation for the destruction of Gaza by Israel.
The United States has repeatedly bombed Sites in Syria and Iraq that it claims are linked to Iran.
The United States immediately deployed significant military assets right after October 7th in order to deter escalation either with Hezbollah or with Iran.
So the United States has been deeply involved in this new Mideast war from the very beginning.
Just like we always are involved whenever Israel has a new war.
But what is happening now is an escalation of the exact kind that has been most concerning from the start, namely a direct military conflict between Israel on the one hand and Iran on the other.
And the proximate cause of that potential war is the fact that back on April 2nd, as this AP article reminds us, Israel decided to do something that countries almost never do.
They struck, bombed a consulate of another country.
They bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria.
And they killed two generals and five other officers.
Now, we reported at the time, when we reported on this, we described how extraordinary it is for a country to bomb another country's embassy.
Countries' embassies are considered sacred and inviolable.
That's the only way that you could have embassies in other countries.
And we talked about the fact that Julian Assange was inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, basically an apartment building, for eight years.
And while he was in there, he was publishing with WikiLeaks all kinds of leaks of classified documents that the United States government believed were damaging to United States security.
They knew exactly where Assange was.
All they had to do was just go get him.
Have the British police go get him.
And yet, because he had asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is considered Ecuadorian soil, and embassies are considered by all civilized countries to be places that you can't enter, the United States did not invade That embassy nor did the UK until Ecuador permitted it when they withdrew asylum.
An even more extreme case that we covered was in 1984 when the Libyan embassy in London was used by a shooter inside the Libyan embassy.
He was shooting at anti-Qaddafi protesters, wounding many of them, and he actually killed a British police officer.
That was a case where the Libyan embassy was actually used as a staging ground to shoot and kill people, including a British police officer, on the streets of London.
And there too, the British did not invade the consulate, the embassy, where the Libyans were.
In part, it was strategic because the Libyans immediately surrounded The British consulate in Libya to make sure that they basically have leverage but also because countries don't just go violate embassies but Israel decided That it could, just like it decides that it can do essentially anything because it has the world's richest and most powerful country standing behind it no matter what it does.
Here from the AP, quote, an Israeli airstrike that demolished Iran's consulate in Syria on Monday killed two Iranian generals and five officers, according to Iranian officials.
The strike appeared to signify an escalation of Israel's targeting of military officials from Iran.
Now, just let's use our common sense.
That embassy, that consulate in Syria is deemed to be Iranian soil.
If Israel goes and bombs it as they did, it is inevitable.
There's a 100% chance that Iran will retaliate in a significant way.
No country would allow their embassy to be bombed by a foreign country and do nothing.
Of course the Israelis understood that they were provoking a retaliatory response.
And that's exactly what is going to happen.
Intelligence has been beeping and blinking for two weeks now.
That the Iranians are preparing a very significant imminent attack, probably not against U.S.
targets, but against Israeli ones in the region.
And of course, that's the only thing Iran could do.
Their embassy was blown up and senior officials were killed when Israeli bombed it.
Here from the New York Times today, U.S.
targets unlikely to be on the list in possible Iranian attack, officials say.
Quote, in anticipation of the Iranian strike, several countries, including the United States, issued new guidelines to their citizens about travel and Israel and the surrounding region.
So yet again, it's now more dangerous for American citizens to travel in the world because of what Israel has done.
Quote, American intelligence analysts and officials said on Friday that they expect Iran to strike multiple targets inside Israel within the next few days in retaliation for an Israeli bombing in the Syrian capital on April 1st that killed several senior Iranian commanders.
The United States, Israel's preeminent ally, has military forces in several places across the Middle East, but Iran is not expected to target them in order to avoid a direct conflict with the United States, according to U.S.
and Iranian officials who spoke anonymously about intelligence gathered on the expected attacks, which they were not publicly authorized to discuss.
Any Iranian strike inside Israel would be a watershed moment In the decades of hostilities between the two nations.
I think Israel destroying an Iranian embassy was a pretty watershed moment as well.
But the New York Times says that would be the watershed moment when Iran retaliates.
It would be a severe escalation of hostilities between the two nations that would most likely open a volatile new chapter in the region.
Israel and Iran do not maintain any direct channels of communication, making the chances far greater that each side could misread the other's intentions.
An Iranian attack would heighten the risk of a wider conflict that could drag in multiple countries, including the United States.
So, in sum, There's a very good likelihood that we're about to have a new serious Middle East war that will drag the United States in.
In remarks to reporters on Friday, President Biden said that he expected a military attack against Israel, quote, sooner rather than later.
And when asked what his message was to Iran, he said, don't quote, we are devoted to the defense of Israel.
He added, we will support Israel.
We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed.
So he's making a statement that if The Iranians retaliate against Israel and that causes an open conflict.
The United States, using American combat troops and soldiers and service members, will involve itself in this new Mideast war in order to side with Israel.
Here is President Biden speaking today, just earlier today, on this question.
Mr. President, what is your message to Iran in this moment?
Are American personnel and assets at risk, Mr. President?
Mr. President, are American troops at risk as well?
Just to be clear, the question there was, are American troops at risk as well?
And here's what Biden said.
We are devoted to the defense of Israel.
We will support Israel.
We will help defend Israel.
And Iran will not succeed.
Thank you very much.
Well, I'm sure you're a direct U.S.
response, sir.
So, maybe you want the United States to be involved in a new Middle East war, maybe you don't, but clearly the string of events here is that the Israelis knew they were doing something that would almost require, that not almost would require, that would require a serious act of retaliation militarily by Iran.
No country could tolerate having their embassy deliberately blown up and do nothing.
Here at the press conference at the Pentagon today, the Pentagon spokesman gave an even clearer answer than Joe Biden did, which anyone who speaks basically gives a clearer answer than Joe Biden.
But just in case you thought that was just Biden muttering things impetuously, here was the much more prepared Pentagon press conference where the spokesman was asked about whether the U.S.
would get involved in this new war.
If Iran is to strike a target inside Israel, and you've talked a lot about the ironclad commitment to Israel, would the Pentagon be obliged to join in to respond?
Yeah, I'm not gonna get into hypotheticals.
Again, I've highlighted our ironclad commitment to Israel's security.
So when you say, I've highlighted our ironclad commitment to U.S.
security, that is pretty much of a clear answer as you can get.
So the question is, why is it?
And this is the question I asked in the very beginning when the U.S.
decided to finance and arm Ukraine in its war against Russia.
Why is it in the interest of the American people, American citizens, that's supposed to be the first priority of the U.S.
government when making decisions?
How would American citizens benefit from a new Middle East war triggered by the decision of the Israelis to bomb the Iranian embassy, the Iranian consulate in Damascus?
I understand it would benefit Israel, for sure.
But Israel's a foreign country.
It's not the same country as the United States.
It would definitely benefit Israelis.
Who would not want the United States, the richest, most powerful country, intervening in all of your wars on your side whenever you decide to bomb another country?
Maybe that's the reason why countries backed by the United States do so.
In fact, there's a lot of reporting That President Zelensky always knew he couldn't enter a new war with Russia because Ukraine has no chance of defeating Russia.
Russia is a much bigger country, has way more soldiers, has way more military might, and that's why he always wanted a diplomatic solution.
But at the start of the war, when he was entering diplomacy with Putin and with the Russians, Joe Biden dispatched Boris Johnson, this is now very well reported, and basically told Zelensky, we don't want you to engage in diplomacy.
And don't worry, we the West, NATO, the United States will provide you with all the weapons you need.
We will give you everything.
We will back you all the way until the end for as long as necessary.
And that's what then emboldened Zelensky to think that he could fight Russia.
Oh, well, I have the United States and NATO behind me.
It's going to be not just Ukraine, but all of these powerful countries giving me the most sophisticated military weaponry.
And that's when he decided maybe it was worth it to do.
So if you go and tell a country, don't worry, we're always going to defend you.
We're always going to go to war for you.
We're always going to give you everything you want.
We're going to pay for your wars.
What do you think the effect is going to be?
Obviously, it will be to embolden those countries to believe that they can more easily fight in wars.
On April 3rd, so a little over a week ago, we had on the foreign policy expert professor John Mearsheimer and it was just a day or two after the Israelis bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus and I asked him what he thought was likely to happen and listen to what he said.
What are the kinds of things that Iran could do or might do in order to retaliate?
Something it seems like they almost have to do.
And what are the possible implications of that for the United States?
Well, the fact is that the Iranians don't want a war with the United States.
They've been trying to avoid a war with the United States.
They've gone to great lengths to communicate to us that they don't want a war.
And of course, we don't want a war with them either.
When we first put those two aircraft carriers and the other naval ships into the Mediterranean Sea, It was not so much to protect Israel, I mean there was some of that at play, but it was mainly to make sure that the war didn't escalate and we didn't get dragged in.
We don't want to get dragged into any wars in the Middle East.
We're already fighting the Houthis, that's bad enough, but we don't want a war against Hezbollah and we certainly don't want a war against Iran.
And I think what's going on here, as I alluded to before, is I think the Israelis would like to get us into a war with Iran.
And I don't think the Israelis would mind it at all if they got into a war with Hezbollah.
And in fact, in the early months of the war, there was lots of evidence, at least in the newspapers, That the United States was telling the Israelis that they could not start a war with Hezbollah because there was evidence the Israelis actually wanted to go to war with Hezbollah.
They wanted to deal with that problem militarily.
As you well know, the Israelis believe in big stick diplomacy.
They believe that they can beat Other groups or other countries over the head with a big stick and get their way.
It hardly ever works, but that's their sort of modus operandi.
And I think they wanted to pick a fight for a number of months there with Hezbollah, not only to punish Hezbollah, But I think they also saw as an opportunity to do ethnic cleansing on the West Bank.
I think the Israeli view deep down is that the bigger the war is, the greater the opportunity for ethnic cleansing, not just in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well.
And as you know, that's their ultimate objective, to cleanse the Palestinians out of both of those two pieces of real estate.
There was a lot of reporting right after October 7th in the Israeli press worried that Netanyahu wanted a war with Hezbollah as well, that he wanted to expand the war, not just from Gaza, but also to go to the Israeli-Lebanese border and but also to go to the Israeli-Lebanese border and to fight a war with Hezbollah.
worried that Netanyahu wanted a war with Hezbollah as well, that he wanted to expand the war, not just from Gaza, but also to go to the Israeli-Lebanese border and to fight a war with Hezbollah.
And in fact, the forces of Hezbollah and the IDF have been exchanging low-level munitions and gunfire and missiles occasionally over the last six months, but it has not escalated into a major war, in part because, as Professor Mearsheimer said, but it has not escalated into a major war, in part because, as Professor Mearsheimer said, Iran
One of the things that I think is so important to realize is that when you're an American citizen and you spend most of your time listening to American media, it's so easy to become convinced that all these countries are pure evil and we're just pure good and we and our allies are innocent victims.
The evil Russians invaded poor little Ukraine with no provocation from the West, from the United States of any kind.
It was just Putin overnight turned into a Hitler and decided he wanted to go conquer countries.
And then we of course have the similar narrative about China even though China has not fought a war since 1979.
While the United States has fought more than you can count since then.
And then you have Iran as well that doesn't actually go around invading other countries.
It has militias in Iraq and Syria and Lebanon in its neighborhood.
All places the United States has Forces as well.
The difference is Iran is actually invited by the government of Syria to be there, whereas the Americans aren't.
But in general, Iran does not go around seeking wars.
But I know that's kind of shocking to hear because no, actually, we're supposed to believe that it's not Israel and the United States being antagonistic and aggressive and militaristic in the United States.
It's Iran.
And so often, You hear people saying, we need to end this posture of endless wars.
We have to stop going to wars for foreign interests.
The only wars we should fight are when countries are actually attacking our own country and threatening our homeland and our borders.
And yet every time the military industrial complex, the entity that wants a posture of endless war presents a new war to the American public, it's very easy to get the American public riled up with hatred and anger that the new country that we're supposed to go to war with is the epitome of all evil.
We've gone through before how many countries in the last 25 years were described as the new Hitler by major American media outlets and by leading American politicians as well.
It's a demonization campaign that works every time.
So here we have a new war that could very well have been started because of Israel's extraordinarily rare decision to bomb the Iranian embassy and now we're going to be told That we have to go to war in the Middle East yet again to defend Israel because Israel is the innocent victim and Iran is the aggressor.
And this is the narrative, the script.
That Americans are worked up into accepting in every new war that was the same thing that happened with the war in Ukraine, and it's the same thing that has happened in the war in Syria, and the war in Libya, and the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq, and the war in Vietnam, and the war in Central America.
So many wars, in fact most wars, are sold through that narrative.
And it's very important to see what actually happened here, how this actually started, whose interest it is to have this war, and especially how they can make sure that the United States is dragged into it, even though there's no country threatening Americans.
We may very well be in a position where we're about to send American soldiers to fight and die for a war that is so plainly not the United States' war to fight.
Lee Fong is, in my view, one of the nation's most intrepid investigative journalists.
He worked with me as my colleague for a long time at The Intercept where he produced some outstanding reporting and he now is at Substack.
We've had him on our show many times before whenever he has brand new investigations that just dig into All kinds of financial connections the way a real investigative journalist showed me as a new article out that is headlined, The United States Funds Ukraine Group Censoring Critics and Smearing Pro Peace Voices.
Can we put that headline on the screen?
It is at Lee Substack.
And here is Lee Fong.
We are delighted to have him.
Lee, it's great to see you.
Good evening.
Thanks for joining us.
Hey, good to see you, Glenn.
Yeah, so let me just first just give you the floor.
I read your article and I just go ahead and describe what the most important points are that people should know about the reporting you did.
Well, the U.S.
has provided billions of dollars of aid to the civilian side of Ukraine during this war and even before it, really ramping up after the 2014 revolution in which a pro-Western, pro-NATO government took power in Ukraine.
I took a look at how some of this money has been spent from a number of agencies.
The USAID, National Endowment for Democracy, State Department, and others have provided substantial funding to a network of think tanks Watchdogs and media outlets in Ukraine.
This network has provided political cover for many of the draconian moves by the Zelensky government that have actually curbed free speech, that have banned the political opposition.
And in one interesting kind of dynamic that I document in the piece, They produce a lot of English language content, and they really aggressively go after American critics of the war and American critics of NATO policy, claiming, really without evidence, that they are Russian agents or disinformation spreaders that are connected to Moscow somehow.
You're mentioned by these groups repeatedly.
NEIL KAPLAN: If there's a list of American Kremlin agents, I, of course, am going to be near the top of that list.
So go ahead and tell me who else is on there with me.
NEIL KAPLAN: Well, there are many.
Jeffrey Sachs, the renowned economist.
Russell Brand is there.
A lot of YouTubers and social media voices.
With the gray zone, Max Blumenthal.
A lot of folks who are journalists, academics.
Tucker Carlson, John Mearsheimer.
Yeah, that's right.
And what's interesting is that these are Ukrainian groups that were set up with U.S.
money that are heavily funded by American money.
In some cases, it seems like some of these groups are 100% funded by American foreign aid.
And they claim that they are fighting Russian malign influence, Russian disinformation, and that's why they're partnering with Facebook to help censor social media or, you know, working with Google and YouTube to block alleged Russian lies and misinformation.
Well, you know, in many cases these Groups are spreading their own forms of misinformation and disinformation.
They post many times in the last few months about Tucker Carlson, but their reports on Tucker Carlson are often filled with inaccurate information.
One recent report claimed that Tucker Carlson was a key spreader of the claim that That the 2020 election was mishandled, that the Dominion lawsuit exposed that Tucker Carlson was lying about the results of the election.
The actual reality is quite the opposite.
The Dominion lawsuit revealed that Tucker Carlson was one of the few Fox News voices that aired dissent against this kind of popular narrative in conservative media at the time from Sidney Powell and others that there was rigged voting machines, what have you.
In general, though, these are outlets that have provided journalistic cover to the Zelensky government.
Every time that the Zelensky government has blocked opposition media, passed laws that give the government power to ban media and otherwise accuse journalists of treason or accuse them of being tied to Russia, these outlets, these watchdog groups, these think tanks have produced reports and content validating and justifying the government's moves.
So, there have been a series of reports that have been officially issued by the Ukrainian government from the start of the war that accuse a wide variety of people of spreading Russian disinformation, and I've been on most of those lists, as have Professor Amir Sheimer, and Professor Sachs, and Tucker Carlson, and Rand Paul, anyone who's a prominent critic of the United States funding of the war in Ukraine.
On one hand, It's kind of enraging that my tax dollars and the tax dollars of every American citizen is being used to finance Ukraine and to finance that war.
We know a lot of that money is being embezzled and skimmed off the top, there's all kinds of corruption obviously there, but the money is also being used to finance the Ukrainian government And then they turn around, the Ukrainian government does, Ukrainian intelligence, and they do things like smear American journalists for questioning or criticizing US foreign policy, which is a basic foundational right of the American Republic, or they try and smear people as being disloyal.
Or there are reports that they have tried to get American journalists and American activists censored from the internet by handing lists of people they want silenced to the FBI.
And all of that is enraging, but at least that's being done in the name of the Ukrainian government.
Here, what you have instead are a bunch of entities that look like NGOs that claim what they're doing is just exposing the truth and fighting disinformation.
Why do you consider that On some level more pernicious and who are they working with in order to achieve this?
There are a number of groups that I named in the story.
Detector Media is a very prominent anti-disinfo watchdog media outlet in Ukraine.
Vox Ukraine produces these regular reports.
They've even produced kind of an online series, highly produced on supposed Russian disinformation agents, their Babel Institute of Mass Information, the Center for Democracy and Rule of Law, just a number of these organizations, some for-profit, some NGO, but they actively work together and in kind some NGO, but they actively work together and in kind of a collective voice,
Every time you see one of these touchstone moments, you know, in February 2021, before the war, when Zelensky decided to shut down three opposition television channels that were connected to his political opponents, he claimed were too friendly to Russia, that were agents of Russian disinformation.
He shut these media outlets down.
He faced widespread criticism around the world.
Even the United Nations issued a report claiming that freedom of speech and journalistic expression was under threat under Zelensky's government.
Well, where did his support come from to justify his moves against these constellation of groups?
They immediately produced reports.
And publications that said that Zelensky's government was in line with transitioning to EU norms and that what he's doing is actually protecting freedom of speech because he's helping drown out dangerous Russian disinformation.
The following year after the start of the 2022 war, the Russian invasion, Zelensky moved to ban his political opposition.
He removed 11 parties from the Ukrainian parliament that were, again, alleged Allegedly too pro-Russian.
Later in the year, in 2022, he passed a very controversial law, the on-media law, that gave Zelensky's government essentially the power to ban any media outlet, including online outlets, without any court order.
Now, the law was basically justified as an anti-hate speech, anti-disinformation law, but baked into it were extraordinary powers for the president.
Again, you had media and independent journalists from around the world, including some in Ukraine who are very critical of this law, but the USAID, U.S.
government-funded NGOs, media outlets, and anti-disinformation groups, staged press conferences, issued reports, and gave that important cover for the Zelensky government, saying that this was crucial for democracy, crucial for integration with the EU, crucial for fighting Russian disinformation. crucial for integration with the EU, crucial for fighting Russian So here's an example of something that you pointed to.
It's from one of these entities called Vox Ukraine from February of 2024.
And you can see they're branding themselves exactly the way that Western anti-disinformation operatives do.
They say, here's the network of Russian propaganda.
What connects Western, quote, experts?
Promoting narrative is beneficial to Russia.
And they sign off by saying, we're the Voxcheck team, the society Voxcheck.
So these are fact checkers.
These are people working against Russian disinformation.
The same exact branding that Western entities are doing, who are trying not only to smear critics of the US government, but also trying to use this kind of narrative to justify censorship online.
And here's their little wheel, their little, you know, it looks like Glenn Beck got a chalkboard from 2012 when he was on that Fox show and he would like draw all these connections.
So you have all these like random lines that are meant to look scientific.
And here, I don't know if we can enlarge this, but here you see at the top you have people like Tucker Carlson and John Mearsheimer, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand, Max Blumenthal, There's me in this weird right-wing corner, and I have a bunch of lines going inside of me and out to other people.
You have Douglas MacGregor, the general who has been on Tucker Carlson's show a lot, Jeffrey Sachs, the, as you said, renowned economist, Andrew Napolitano.
Essentially, you know, every time we've looked into these disinformation groups when they allege people are spreading Russian disinformation, and you look under the hood, what they really mean is kind of what they just said here, which are these are people who say things beneficial to Russia.
So that means that Essentially, if you're opposed to the U.S.
financing of the war in Ukraine, in some sense, obviously that's beneficial to Russia.
People who were opposed to the U.S.
invasion of Iraq, that was beneficial to Saddam Hussein.
It didn't make people propagandists of Saddam Hussein.
Just like being against the war in Ukraine and the U.S.
funding of it, it doesn't make you a Russian operative.
But how are they defining what constitutes Information and part of what your article talks about is the censorship effort.
What kind of censorship programs are being included in these activities?
One quick point about what you just said, you know, these kind of Glenn Beck chalkboard style, you know, connect the dots of all the evil voices of disinformation.
We see this in the domestic context as well, where, you know, a group that's working to censor dissenting voices, they claim that Pretty much.
They grouped together genuinely crazy people, people making extreme claims.
We saw this in the pandemic.
People who claimed that the vaccines were filled with microchips.
Groups that were attempting to censor social media would group them among civil liberty experts who are criticizing vaccine passports or vaccine mandates.
They'd say, oh, look, this is all one connected network of misinformation agents.
Or people who are anti-vax extremists, and they would just connect everybody, as you said, people who were clearly saying insane stuff, but grouping them in and linking them to people, raising questions about masks or school shutdowns or the efficacy of the vaccine, or as you raising questions about masks or school shutdowns or the efficacy of the vaccine, or as you said, the wisdom or justice of trying to fire Go ahead.
Yeah, it's the exact same strategy here to kind of nut pick and group people together.
But just broadly, there's a really interesting document that leaked from one of the contractors called the Zinc Network.
This is a group that's a British contractor funded by the US military, the State Department, British government that has gone in and set up and coordinated the group's dedicated to fighting disinformation, not just in Ukraine, they've created similar NGOs and watchdog groups all throughout Europe.
There are groups in Poland, Estonia, Georgia, just really all across the board, the countries bordering Russia or in Eastern Europe.
And what's fascinating about this leaked document is that they talk about what kind of disinformation they're fighting.
And one, they use very vague terms.
They say that anyone who's claiming that the West, that NATO is using Ukraine as a proxy to wage war against Russia, that's a form of disinformation, right?
Anyone who says that the Ukrainian government Is corrupt.
Well, that's what the Kremlin says.
So therefore you're advancing Russian disinformation.
I mean, incredibly broad claims that really kind of could be categorized for any kind of anyone criticizing NATO or the Ukrainian government is then automatically a Russian agent of disinformation.
Beyond that, they even describe how they define disinformation in this document.
They claim that it's not just untrue or intentional attempts to mislead or deceive, they say that factual information that is emotional, that is maybe inflammatory, but coincides with Russian aims or narratives, is Russian disinformation.
Meaning you could say you can report absolutely truthful information, absolutely accurate information, but if you do it in a way that is emotional, that might overlap with a critique that some Russian government official has made, then therefore you're Russian disinformation.
I mean, this is a kind of Orwellian attempt to categorize and subjugate broad forms of dissent across the West.
And, you know, again, just to look at these groups, I was spending a number of days writing the story, looking at these contractors.
Many of them were active in Afghanistan and Iraq after those wars.
They went in and helped set up Iraqi or Afghani newspapers and radio stations and social media, again, kind of parroting the government line.
But the big distinction here is that they were fairly separated from U.S.
policymakers and U.S.
discourse.
I mean, they weren't producing English-language content.
They weren't going in and working with Google and Facebook to censor dissent.
But they are here in Ukraine.
So these U.S.
government, U.S.
aid-directed efforts are trickling back to the domestic context and potentially affecting our own American foreign policy.
Yeah, I mean, you know, that is such a perfect replica of what is happening in the West.
You know, I've had a lot of people on, Matt Taibbi and others, who have talked about how they have essentially, you know, they have these categories, disinformation, misinformation, and these groups have now created a third category they call malinformation that essentially they define as being truthful information Deployed for some bad or misleading end.
So you can report, as you said, true facts about how the front line has only moved moderately in favor of Ukraine over the last 18 months, in favor of Russia rather.
And the Ukrainians have lost territory, even though they keep getting all these billions of dollars.
And the reasons why the Ukrainians are losing And that is truthful information, but because they say that it somehow serves the interests of the Kremlin, or is designed to create an overall picture that Ukraine can't win, which they consider false, then you get grouped in as disinformation or malinformation, even though what you're saying is completely accurate.
And often they try and censor on that basis.
Now, one of the things you showed me is an incredibly creepy video that appeared on YouTube.
And I have to say, I have seen over the last two years these purported dossiers about me, about, you know, the same group of people, Tucker Carlson, John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, just anybody who is questioning the wisdom of the war in Ukraine and the U.S.
financing of it, that you could tell are very well-funded.
They take all these facts from people's past and they coordinate it in a way, and it's ironic because it is pure disinformation.
So this video that you showed me, And even though it's in Ukrainian, you can hear a lot of what it's saying.
Tell me what this is.
Well, one of the groups that are heavily funded by USAID and NED is Vox Ukraine, as we mentioned earlier.
They don't just publish written fact checks.
They also have these highly produced YouTube videos that attempt to discredit critics of NATO policy.
So John Mearsheimer is one.
Here's one that I guess is about you.
Yeah, let's play a little bit of this.
Even though it's in Ukrainian, it gives you a sense, A, of how creepy it is, B, how well produced it is.
There's clearly a lot of money that has gone into this very professionalized video by this group in Ukraine that is basically trying to depict me as an ally of Nazis and a clear Russian spy.
But it's not just some guy on YouTube.
It is a very professionalized video.
So let's just play a little bit of this to get a sense for what it is.
Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize laureate, American journalist who wrote for such... Let's start again, sorry.
Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize laureate, American journalist who wrote for such authoritative publications as The Guardian and The New York Times.
But what does he do in our episode about pseudo-experts who spread narratives that sound like Russian?
Let's find out.
Before becoming a journalist, Greenwald studied law.
So a lot of it, I...
...quotes, things like from this New Republic article that was written back when the Snowden reporting started, that tried to depict me as some sort of Nazi-sympathizer by using the First Amendment work that I did as a lawyer, in order to represent the free speech that tried to depict me as some sort of Nazi-sympathizer by using the First Amendment work that I did as a lawyer, in order to represent the free speech rights groups of far-right groups ...Дянських свобод-екстремістів.
...Dia прикладu, Grinwald представляв інтереси...
...На думку видання New Republic, саме у своїй безоплатній роботі Grinwald відкрив свою справжню пристрасть - захист громадянських свобод-екстремістів.
...Dia прикладу, Grinwald представляв інтереси Меттю Хейла, голови Всесвітньої церкви-творця, який є прихильником переваги білої раси.
Grinwald захищав Хейла від звинувачень у підбурюванні думки.
...So the whole thing is like five minutes of just basically trying to tie me to...
...neo-nazis, which is very ironic...
from a advocate of the of Ukraine and then it focuses a lot I work with Edward Snowden and it basically the narrative there is that the work that Snowden
did with me was about taking secret documents and giving them to Russia or publishing them in order to help Russia and then Snowden ends up being protected by and given asylum in Russia.
So the whole narrative is basically to tie me to neo-Nazi groups, tie me to the Kremlin and these are highly produced videos that I guess you're able to find or detect that, maybe not this video in particular, but that these groups are being funded by parts of the US government?
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, this group is funded by USAID.
They partner with Facebook to remove alleged Russian disinformation from, you know, Instagram, Facebook and what have you.
But, you know, it's just one of a suite of similar highly produced programs.
You know, one of the sister organizations, Detector Media, partners with the largest broadcaster in Ukraine, which is also USAID funded.
They produce a very similar kind of show.
It's a sarcastic kind of like comedy show that mocks any critics of the Zelensky government as Russian agents, as traitors, as treasonous people.
And there's kind of a dark irony here because Russia is an authoritarian regime that's cracked down on free expression and media as well, and oftentimes using patriotic justifications or claims that there's foreign influence or they're just and oftentimes using patriotic justifications or claims that there's foreign influence or they're just fighting
But here in Ukraine, we're seeing almost an identical or at least a very parallel dynamic where you have these outlets that are parroting the military's point of view, parroting the politicians' and government's point of view, and cracking down on dissent and independent media with the justification and cracking down on dissent and independent media with the justification that they're stopping foreign influence, stopping information.
Yeah, and as I said, for me, the most offensive part about it is that Ukraine has the United States using Americans' taxpaying dollars to fund Ukraine to prop that country up.
We're going to then use American taxpayer dollars to rebuild it while BlackRock and JP Morgan profit off of that reconstruction.
And then in the meantime, Ukraine is sticking its hands into our country Essentially not only trying to destroy the reputation of journalists and others who question the war, but also infringing our core liberties by asking the FBI to censor, by labeling things that we're saying to be disinformation.
It's an incredibly severe case of foreign interference or intrusion into American politics of the kind that when Russia does it, it's treated as a national scandal.
The work that you do is always fantastic.
It is always real investigative journalism.
People can, and I hope will, find it at Lee Fung on Substack.
I guess you can just Google that, Lee Fung and Substack, and you will find Lee's work there.
I really recommend following it, subscribing if you can, because it's the kind of investigative journalism that we need so much more of.
Lee, thanks so much.
It's always great to see you.
I hope you have a great evening.
Thank you so much, Glenn.
Thank you for the kind words.
Absolutely.
Bye-bye.
So that concludes our show for the evening.
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